Milfuegos

Reflexões sobre o que ocorre na Síria - Reflections on What is Really Happening in Syria

2012-01-16T11:57:00.000-05:00

Por Lejeune Mirhan*

Não se passa um dia, pelo menos nos últimos meses, que a imprensa brasileira – que bebe na fonte das grandes agências internacionais de notícias – deixa de publicar até uma ou duas páginas sobre a República Árabe Síria. Chamando insistentemente o seu presidente, Dr. Bashar Al Assad de “ditador” e mostrando imagens completamente distorcidas da realidade. As fotos não condizem com as reportagens. O texto briga com a informação. Por isso. Publicamos aqui um conjunto de reflexões, a partir de diversas fontes de estudos e pesquisas disponíveis na Internet e artigos de jornais que reputamos mais confiáveis.

A verdade sobre a Síria

1. Historicamente, é o 2º mais importante país do OM, ainda que não seja rico em petróleo e gás. Chegou a estabelecer uma República Árabe Unida com o Egito sob o comando de Nasser. Possui amplas relações políticas e econômicas com o vizinho Líbano, a quem hoje se aproximaram ainda mais desde janeiro com o governo de Nagib Mikat.

2. É governado pelo Dr. Bashar El Assad, médico oftalmologista com formação em Londres, que sucedeu na presidência ao seu pai, Hafez El Assad. Esta desde 2000 no poder. Pertence ao Partido Socialista Árabe Sírio – Baath. Governa em coalizão de frente ampla, incluindo o PC Sírio e o PC Sírio Unificado, além de organizações socialistas e de caráter antiimperialista.

3. Em Damasco, sua capital, estão as sedes de todos os partidos políticos de caráter antiimperialistas, árabes, em especial as organizações palestinas da resistência. Isso vem irritando há anos os EUA e Israel, que acusam a Síria de dar guarida a “grupos terroristas”. Ai estão incluídos o Hamas, a FPLP, a FDLP e a Jihad Islâmica.

4. Dos países árabes na atualidade, depois da tomada de controle do Iraque pelos EUA é o país que mais apoia a luta do povo palestino na busca da edificação de seu estado nacional. Acaba por estabelecer, em função disso, boas relações com a FPLP, a FDLP, o PC Palestino (hoje Partido do Povo palestino), com o Hamas e a Jihad Islâmica, além, claro, do Fatah, o maior agrupamento palestino na resistência.

5. É praticamente, ao lado do Egito, do Iraque e da Líbia (estes últimos ocupados), o país mais laico do OM. Ainda que a sua população seja majoritariamente muçulmana, o estado é separado da religião, as mulheres não usam veu e possuem amplas liberdades políticas.

6. Insufladas do exterior, em especial pela Arábia Saudita e Turquia e por baixo dos panos até por Israel, protestos começaram a ocorrer na esteira da revolução árabe. Apoiados pela mídia ocidental antiislâmica e pró-estadunidense e sionista, a impressão que se passa é que o povo quer a “imediata derrubada do regime do ditador Assad” (sic). Imagens nunca veiculadas pelos canais internacionais e brasileiros que os retransmitem mostram e disponíveis amplamente na Internet, no entanto, milhões de sírios em total apoio ao governo da Síria.

7. O que se vê hoje na Síria são dois grupos da chamada oposição. Uma delas, a “oposição externa” e outra que chamamos de “oposição interna”. A externa, tem sede em Londres e Istambul, formada por pessoas que vivem fora do país há décadas e totalmente comprometidas com a derrubada do governo e prontas para servirem aos interesses estrangeiros. Recebem suporte político e financeiro dos EUA. Hilary recentemente encontrou-se com vários deles, que tem amplo espaço na mídia internacional, inclusive a brasileira que já entrevistou vários desses “líderes”. Pregam abertamente uma decisão da ONU que faça com a Síria o que foi feito com a Líbia: “bombardeio humanitário”. Recebem armas contrabandeadas na fronteira, apoiados pela Arábia Saudita e Turquia, algumas inclusive desviadas do arsenal líbio, sem qualquer controle.

8. A oposição interna dialogo e participa do chamado Diálogo Nacional Síria. Convocado pelo governo, já deu grandes passos no sentido da democratização do país, convocação de eleições livres em maio, suspensão do controle da imprensa e legalização de todos os partidos políticos. Tanto a oposição quanto o governo, não aceitam ingerência alguma nos interesses e nos destinos da nação Síria.

9. Assad segue tendo amplo apoio das classes médias urbanas, dos setores empresariais, das minorias religiosas que temem ser esmagadas pelos integrantes da Irmandade Muçulmana mais conservadora e sectária. Há um bloco informal, não declarado, de três países hoje no OM que jogam pelo avanço das transformações no mundo árabe e no avanço da luta e da resistência antiimperialista: a Síria, o Líbano e o Irã (que é persa). Soma-se a isso mais recentemente o Iraque, que com um governo xiita, vai se afastando da órbita estadunidense e aproximando-se desse bloco informal.

10. A Liga Árabe, ou o que restou dela, foi tomada de assalto pelo países membros do CCG, Conselho de Cooperação do Golfo, que é integrado por oito petromonarquias feudais, lideradas hoje pela Arábia Saudita e pelo Qatar (a rede Al Jazeera, que cumpriu num primeiro momento importante papel em apoio à luta dos tunisianos e egípcios, hoje trama abertamente pela derrubada de Assad e apoia os militares no Egito, buscando frear o avanço da Revolução Árabe). Por isso, com votos contrários apenas da própria Síria, Iraque e Líbano, a República Árabe Síria foi suspensa da organização.

11. Rússia e China vem bloqueando no CS da ONU todas as tentativas dos EUA, França e Inglaterra de votarem tanto sanções quanto autorizarem “ataques humanitários para proteger civis” (sic).

12. A única fonte que a mídia ocidental tem dos números de mortos, da “contagem de corpos” na Síria é uma ONG “humanitária” que tem sede em Londres e de propriedade de um dos membros do Conselho Nacional Sírio, a chamada oposição externa. Sabe-se, por fontes do próprio governo, que mais da metade dos mortos foram de policiais e membros das forças armadas que são atacados por mercenários e terroristas, que, inclusive, disparam aleatoriamente na multidão. Mais recentemente soube-se que muitos dos nomes desta “ONGs” estão vivos e foram obtidos em lista telefônica londrina!

13. A Rússia deslocou uma das suas frotas navais para a costa síria e vem testando seus sistemas antimísseis exatamente no porto de Tartus, importante cidade costeira mediterrânea, comercial e industrial do país (alguns desses armamentos incluem mísseis S-300, diversos destacamentos de tanques de guerra, 15 caças SU-33, mísseis P-700 com foguetes hipersônicos, sistemas de mísseis antiaéreos com 192 foguetes e muitos helicópteros). A Rússia e a China integram a APEC, organização de cooperação econômica na Ásia, inclusive que vem tomando feições militares, para um equilíbrio com as forças da OTAN, já que o antigo Pacto de Varsóvia foi desfeito há vinte anos.

14. Os BRICS, apesar de certo vacilo que vem sendo cometido pela diplomacia brasileira sob comando do ministro Patriota, vem obstaculizando toda e qualquer sanção contra a Síria. É como se dissessem “tirem as mãos da Síria” ou “esqueçam qualquer tipo de intervenção externa na Síria”. Pelo menos, até o presente momento, essa vem sendo a essência das decisões conjunto desse bloco dos cinco maiores países em desenvolvimento.

15. A Síria é a “bola da vez” do imperialismo. Este sabe que a queda do governo do Partido Baath e seus aliados progressistas altera profundamente a correlação de forças no OM. Isso, já vem desde o Bush filho em 2005. Agora viram oportunidades mais concretas, apoiados por traidores que pedem ajuda estrangeira para atacar seu próprio país. Se existe o que se vem chamando de “Eixo da Guerra”, composto pelos EUA, França, Inglaterra, Itália, Canadá e Alemanha, no Oriente Médio temos o “Eixo da Resistência” ao imperialismo, composto pelo Irã, Síria, Líbano e agora o Iraque, com apoio dos palestinos.

16. A queda de Assad, altera completamente a correlação de forças na região, em especial no governo do Líbano. Os partidos que integram a coligação pró-EUA e simpática à Israel, chamada “14 de Março”, comandada pelo ex-primeiro Ministro Saad Hariri estão organizando em Beirute diversas manifestações contra o governo sírio para desestabilizar o governo de Mikat, integrado pelo Hezbolláh, pelos cristão patrióticos do MPL do general Michel Aoun, do AMAL de Nabi Berry e pelos comunistas do PC Libanês, que tem mais de 80 anos e é dos mais respeitados em todo o mundo árabe. Cair o atual governo libanês é frear ainda mais a revolução árabe.

17. O que vemos hoje na Síria é um processo de luta política onde os dois lados estão armados. A oposição que se autointitula Exército Livre da Síria (sic) integrado por mercenários, baderneiros e terroristas contratados e pagos pela Arábia Saudita, que montaram um acampamento na fronteira com a Turquia, recebe grandes carregamentos de armamentos contrabandeados. A orientação para esses terroristas é inclusive atirar indiscriminadamente na multidão, matando cidadãos sírios para jogar a culpa no governo.

18. Não poderíamos deixar de lamentar que um brasileiro honrado, o Dr. Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro, nosso colega sociólogo, que inclusive nos prestigiou na passeata em apoio ao Estado da Palestina no dia 20 de setembro de 2011 em SP fazendo inclusive o uso da palavra, tenha se prestado a emitir um relatório em nome da ONU divulgado amplamente e reverberado por toda a mídia internacional. Sem ter pisado em solo sírio, sem ter ouvido nenhuma fonte do lado do governo, ouvindo as tais ONGs “humanitárias” financiadas por Washington, desancou a atacar indiscriminadamente o governo sírio. Sabe-se inclusive que foi auxiliado por uma colaboradora da CIA, a Srª Karen Koning Abuzaid, membro do Conselho Diretor do Midle East Policy Council cujo presidente, Frank Anderson que trabalhou por 26 anos na Agência e foi diretor para o OM da CIA (Hora do Povo de 2 a 6 de dezembro de 2011, página 6, por Nathaniel Braia);

19. Já não há mais dúvidas. Há uma imensa falsificação nos números de mortos divulgados como se fossem todos eles assassinados pelo governo. Os dados mais confiáveis indicam que de cada dois mortos no conflito no momento, pelo menos um vem do lado das forças do exército e da polícia síria;

20. Bandidos armados que agem abertamente em diversas cidades sírias vêm sendo apresentadas pela mídia ocidental como sendo “desertores do exército sírio”, que passou a adotar o nome de “Exército Livre da Síria” (sic), que atua na fronteira da Turquia com o beneplácito desse país e que é coordenado por um coronel estadunidense;

21. Nenhuma das gigantescas manifestações realizadas por diversas vezes em todas as grandes cidades sírias – fartamente documentado na Internet nos sites de vídeos – são mostradas pelas redes internacionais de TVs ocidentais. Até mesmo a TV outrora apoiadora dos primeiros levantes árabes – controlado pelo Emir do Qatar – a Al Jazeera as mostra. As redes preferem imagens de péssima qualidade feitas por celulares de opositores que mostram pouquíssimas pessoas nas manifestações contra o governo.

Algumas conclusões

É preciso deixar claro que a defesa de qualquer tipo de intervenção estrangeira na Síria hoje – proposta inclusive por alguns ditos “esquerdistas” de várias matizes – implica em aceitar tacitamente um ataque, bombardeio de potências estrangeiras nesse país árabe.

Que não tenhamos dúvidas. Atacar hoje a Síria esta relacionado diretamente com o enfraquecimento da luta do povo palestino. Hoje esse país árabe é o que mais firmemente defende essa causa. Não só a defende na teoria. Abriga os escritórios políticos dos principais grupos políticos que tem mais dificuldades em atuar tanto na Cisjordânia como no restante da Palestina ocupada, em especial o Hamas, a FPLP, a FDLP e a Jihad Islâmica. Não bastasse isso, a Síria apoia com firmeza a resistência libanesa, materializada no Partido de Deus (Hezbolláh em árabe), que forma hoje o governo libanês.

Não se pode perder de vista e momento algum que, tecnicamente falando, a Síria esta em guerra com Israel, desde a tomada de suas terras localizadas nas Colinas do Golã em 1967.

Saúdo a firmeza do presidente Bashar no sentido de compreender este especial momento delicado que a Síria e o mundo árabe vivem. Do diálogo que tem empreendido com as forças sírias interessadas na construção e no avanço da democracia, das reformas do Estado sírio, nas amplas liberdades de comunicação, partidária e de imprensa. Mas que rechaçam toda e qualquer intervenção externa que ameace a soberania síria.

É praticamente impossível fazermos qualquer previsão sobre o futuro mais imediato. Os argumentos que aqui apresentamos, fruto de muitas pesquisas e análises, são os que entendemos como os mais ajustados para a realidade. Esperemos que o povo e o governo da Síria, de forma altiva e soberana encontrem os seus caminhos que voltem a valorizar a Nação Árabe e seu legado para a humanidade.

Fontes Pesquisadas e Citadas

Alain Gresh, do Le Monde Diplomatique, edição Brasileira de dezembro de 2011, “Terremoto Geopolítico no Oriente Médio”, páginas 28 e 29;

Federação Geral dos Sindicatos da Síria – GFTU – Documento de 30/11/2011;

“Intervenção estrangeira na Síria: que ninguém se engane”, de Ibrahim Al Amin, do jornal Al Akhbar, Beirute;

“A guerra contra a síria”, de David Orra, de 1º de janeiro de 2012 (sem indicação de site);

“A realidade sempre mal contada na mídia sobre a Síria”, de Aisling Byrne, do Asian Times On Line, de 4 de janeiro de 2012;

Anotações e reflexões do coletivo de tradutores da vila Vudu.

* Lejeune Mirhan é sociólogo, professor e escritor

Happy New Year. Here's what to look forward to.

2012-01-03T18:17:00.001-05:00

JANUARY 22: Congress passes a law requiring that all persons arrested in anti-war demonstrations be sterilized. House Speaker John Boehner declares it is "God's will". House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi says she supports the law but that she has some reservation because there's no provision for a right of appeal.

FEBRUARY 15: Ron Paul assassinated by man named Oswald Harvey.

FEBRUARY 18: Oswald Harvey, while in solitary confinement and guarded round the clock by 1200 policemen and the entire 3rd Army Brigade, is killed by man named Ruby Jackson.

FEBRUARY 26: Ruby Jackson suddenly dies in prison of a rare Asian disease heretofore unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

MARCH 6: US President Hopey Changey announces new draconian sanctions against Iran, Syria, North Korea, Pakistan, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba, declaring that they all possess weapons of mass destruction, are an imminent threat to the United States, have close ties to al Qaeda and the Taliban, are aiding Islamic terrorists in Somalia, were involved in 9-11, played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attack on Pearl Harbor, do not believe in God or American Exceptionalism, and are all "really bad guys".

APRIL 1: Military forces overthrow Evo Morales in Bolivia. US State Department decries the loss of democracy.

APRIL 2: US recognizes the new Bolivian military junta, sells it 100 jet fighters and 200 tanks.

APRIL 3: Revolution breaks out in Bolivia endangering the military junta; 40,000 American marines are sent to La Paz to quell the uprising.

APRIL 8: Dick Cheney announces from his hospital bed that the United States has finally discovered caches of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq — "So all those doubters can now just go 'F' themselves." The former vice-president, however, refuses to provide any details of the find because, he says, to do so might reveal intelligence sources or methods.

APRIL 10: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, General Electric, General Motors, AT&T, Ford, and IBM merge to form "Free Enterprise, Inc."

APRIL 16: Free Enterprise, Inc. seeks to purchase Guatemala and Haiti. Citigroup refuses to sell.

APRIL 18: Free Enterprise, Inc. purchases Citigroup.

MAY 5: The Democratic Party changes its name to the Republican Lite Party, and announces the opening of a joint bank account with the Republicans so that corporate lobbyists need make out only one check. In celebration of the change the new party calls for eliminating the sales tax on yachts.

MAY 11: China claims to have shot down an American spy plane over the center of China. State Department categorically denies the story.

MAY 12: State Department admits that an American plane may have "inadvertently" strayed 2,000 miles into China, but denies that it was a spy plane.

MAY 13: State Department admits that the plane may have been a spy plane but denies that it was piloted by a US government employee.

MAY 14: State Department admits that the pilot was a civilian employee of a Defense Department contractor but denies that China exists.

JUNE 11: Homeland Security announces plan to collect the DNA at birth of every child born in the United States.

JULY 1: The air in Los Angeles reaches so bad a pollution level that the rich begin to hire undocumented workers to breathe for them.

AUGUST 6: The Justice Department announces that six people have been arrested in New York in connection with a plan to bomb the United Nations, the Empire State Building, the Times Square subway station, Madison Square Garden, and Lincoln Center.

AUGUST 7: Charges are dropped against four of "The New York Six" when it is determined that they are FBI agents.

AUGUST 16: At a major demonstration in Washington, the Tea Party demands an end to all government expenditures. They also warn Congress not to touch Social Security or Medicare.

AUGUST 26: Texas executes a 16-year-old girl for having an abortion and a 12-year-old boy for possession of marijuana.

SEPTEMBER 3: The Labor Department announces that Labor Day will become a celebration of America's gratitude to its corporations, a day dedicated to the memory of J.P. Morgan and Pinkerton strike breakers killed in the line of duty.

SEPTEMBER 12: The draft is reinstated for males and females, ages 16 to 45. Those who are missing a limb or are blind can apply for non-combat roles.

SEPTEMBER 14: Riots breaks out in 24 American cities in protest of the new draft. 200,000 American troops are brought home from Afghanistan, Iraq, and 25 other countries to put down the riots.

SEPTEMBER 28: The Tea Party calls for giving embryos the vote.

OCTOBER 19: Cops the world over form a new association, Policemen's International Governing Society. PIGS announces that its first goal will be to mount a campaign against the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty, in those countries where the quaint notion still dwells.

NOVEMBER 8: The turnout for the US presidential election is 9.6%. The voting ballots are all imprinted: "From one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote." The winner is "None of the above".

NOVEMBER 11: US prison population reaches 2.5 million. It is determined that at least 70 percent of the prisoners would not have been incarcerated a century ago, for the acts they committed were then not criminal violations.

DECEMBER 3: Supreme Court rules that police may search anyone if they have reasonable grounds for believing that the person has pockets.

DECEMBER 16: The Occupy Movement sets up a tent on the White House lawn. An hour later a missile fired from a drone leaves but a thin wisp of smoke.
–
William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org
Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.
To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with "add" in the subject line. I'd like your name and city in the message, but that's optional. I ask for your city only in case I'll be speaking in your area.
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Items of interest from a journal William Blum has kept for 40 years, part VI

2012-01-03T18:11:00.000-05:00

If the US really believed in 2002-3 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction why did they send in more than 100,000 troops, who were certain to be annihilated?
In a letter released August 17, 2006, 21 former generals and high ranking national security officials called on President George W. Bush to reverse course and embrace a new area of negotiation with Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. The group told reporters Bush's "hard line" policies had undermined national security and made America less safe.
Throughout most of the 20th century, the Catholic Church in Latin America taught its flocks of the poor that there was no need to do battle with the ruling elite because the poor would get their just rewards in the afterlife.
The US overthrew the Sandinistas in Nicaragua because the Sandinistas "intended to create a country where there was only a colony before." — Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer
"[George W.] Bush said last week that part of the purpose of the Indonesia trip 'is to make sure that the people who are suspicious of our country understand our motives are pure'." (Washington Post, October 22, 2003)
"Wars may be aberrant experiences in the lives of most human individuals, but some nations are serial aggressors. American society is unique in having been formed almost wholly by processes of aggression against external and internal Others." — The Black Commentator, June 8, 2006
President Obama should accompany the military people when they inform parents that their child has died in the latest of America's never-ending wars. And maybe ask George W. to come along as well.
During the Vietnam War some University of Michigan students created a brouhaha when they threatened to napalm a puppy dog on the steps of a campus building. The uproar of indignation at their cruelty was heard nationwide. Of course, when the time came they didn't do it, having successfully made the point that people cared more about napalming a dog than they did about napalming people.
"It's a lie and an illusion that we have an inefficient government. This government is only inefficient if you think its job is, as stated in the Constitution, 'to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.' These objectives are beyond our government's talents only because they are beyond its intentions." — Michael Ventura
"Get some new lawyers" - US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook when he told her he was informed that the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (which Albright championed) was illegal under international law.
The two countries of the world, along with the United States, which have the greatest national obsession with baseball are two of the main targets of US foreign policy: Venezuela and Cuba.
The Cuban Five case: This is the first case in American history of alleged spying and espionage without a single page from a secret document. The government never presented any evidence of a stolen official document or any attempt to steal an official document. This is the first spy case without secrets from the government. (Read more)
"If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a 'suspected terrorist' is inside, the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is 'inevitable'. So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians." — Howard Zinn
"The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously Saturday to impose limited sanctions on North Korea for its recent missile tests, and demanded that the reclusive communist nation suspend its ballistic missile program." (Associated Press, July 15, 2006) ... Internet commentator: "Test some missiles that land harmlessly in the ocean? Unanimous condemnation. Fire some missiles at targets on land, kill hundreds of people, and destroy hundreds of civilian targets including power plants, airports, roads, bridges, TV stations, etc., all in violation of the Geneva Convention? Hey, no problem."
For some nine years, American B-52 bombers relentlessly dropped tons of ordnance on a southeast Asian country (Vietnam) that still cultivated rice fields using draft animals.
"The messianism of American foreign policy is a remarkable thing. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice speaks it seems like Khrushchev reporting to the party congress: 'The whole world is marching triumphantly toward democracy but some rogue states prefer to stay aside from that road, etc. etc'." — Natalia Narochnitskaya, vice chairman of the international affairs committee in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia's parliament. (Washington Post, April 3, 2006)
Washington ... Propagandistan
The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish a home, rolled over Rachel Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same US media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. — Norman Solomon
American sovereignty hasn't faced a legitimate foreign threat to its existence since the British in 1812.
There are two major patterns in foreign policy: the rule of force or the rule of law. On February 8, 1819 the US decided, after a very long debate in the House, to reject the rule of law in foreign policy. The vote was 100 to 70 against requiring the Congress to approve illegal invasions of other countries or peoples. This pertained to the "Seminole War", actually the invasion of Florida. Since then every president has had the right to "defend America", code words for the use of force against whomever he chooses. — Kelly Gelgering

Iraq. Began with big lies. Ending with big lies. Never forget.

2012-01-03T18:05:00.000-05:00

"Most people don't understand what they have been part of here," said Command Sgt. Major Ron Kelley as he and other American troops prepared to leave Iraq in mid-December. "We have done a great thing as a nation. We freed a people and gave their country back to them."

"It is pretty exciting," said another young American soldier in Iraq. "We are going down in the history books, you might say." (Washington Post, December 18, 2011)

Ah yes, the history books, the multi-volume leather-bound set of "The Greatest Destructions of One Country by Another." The newest volume can relate, with numerous graphic photos, how the modern, educated, advanced nation of Iraq was reduced to a quasi failed state; how the Americans, beginning in 1991, bombed for 12 years, with one dubious excuse or another; then invaded, then occupied, overthrew the government, tortured without inhibition, killed wantonly, ... how the people of that unhappy land lost everything — their homes, their schools, their electricity, their clean water, their environment, their neighborhoods, their mosques, their archaeology, their jobs, their careers, their professionals, their state-run enterprises, their physical health, their mental health, their health care, their welfare state, their women's rights, their religious tolerance, their safety, their security, their children, their parents, their past, their present, their future, their lives ... More than half the population either dead, wounded, traumatized, in prison, internally displaced, or in foreign exile ... The air, soil, water, blood, and genes drenched with depleted uranium ... the most awful birth defects ... unexploded cluster bombs lying anywhere in wait for children to pick them up ... a river of blood running alongside the Euphrates and Tigris ... through a country that may never be put back together again.

"It is a common refrain among war-weary Iraqis that things were better before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003," reported the Washington Post on May 5, 2007.

No matter ... drum roll, please ... Stand tall American GI hero! And don't even think of ever apologizing or paying any reparations. Iraq is forced by Washington to continue paying reparations to Kuwait for Iraq's invasion in 1990 (an invasion instigated in no small measure by the United States). And — deep breath here! — Vietnam has been compensating the United States. Since 1997 Hanoi has been paying off about $145 million in debts left by the defeated South Vietnamese government for American food and infrastructure aid. Thus, Hanoi is reimbursing the United States for part of the cost of the war waged against it. (William Blum, Rogue State, p.304) How much will the United States pay the people of Iraq?

On December 14, at the Fort Bragg, North Carolina military base, Barack Obama stood before an audience of soldiers to speak about the Iraq war. It was a moment in which the president of the United States found it within his heart and soul — as well as within his oft-praised (supposed) intellect — to proclaim:

This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making. And today, we remember everything that you did to make it possible. ... Years from now, your legacy will endure. In the names of your fallen comrades etched on headstones at Arlington, and the quiet memorials across our country. In the whispered words of admiration as you march in parades, and in the freedom of our children and grandchildren. ... So God bless you all, God bless your families, and God bless the United States of America. ... You have earned your place in history because you sacrificed so much for people you have never met.

Does Mr. Obama, the Peace Laureate, believe the words that come out of his mouth?
Barack H. Obama believes only in being the President of the United States. It is the only strong belief the man holds.

Bio-assassination weaponry used on Kim Jong Il

2012-01-03T18:01:00.000-05:00

Bio-assassination weaponry used on Kim Jong Il

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said he was thinking aloud when he speculated that diagnoses of cancer affecting Latin America's most notable progressive leaders may have been the result of a U.S. plot through technological means. State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the wife of neocon and Zionist foreign policy adviser Robert Kagan, immediately called Chavez's remarks "horrific and reprehensible."

However, the State Department may or may not be aware of what has been gleaned by WMR from Japanese intelligence sources in Pyongyang: that North Korea's late leader Kim Jong Il, who we previously reported was assassinated by rebellious military officers, met his demise from the use of a sophisticated bio-weapon. Kim Jong Il, whose only medical problems were periodic blackouts and the early onset of dementia, did not die from a heart attack, according to Japanese military intelligence sources. North Korean official news reports claimed that the late Dear Leader died from a heart attack aboard a train outside of Pyongyang. Neither of these reports was correct.

Kim Jong Il, while not in perfect health, was on a strict diet, exercised regularly, and was frequently examined by doctors.

However, the military coup plotters arranged for Kim Jong Il to be administered a series of doses of toxins. The toxins ultimately built up in Kim Jong Il's vital organs, causing renal failure and heart stoppage. The plot by North Korean military officers resulted from a major split over a secret deal made by some North Korean officials with Israel. The secret compact was for North Korea to stop missile shipments to Syria, Iran, and Egypt in return for Israel supplying low-grade enriched weapons-grade uranium to the North Koreans.

It is not certain what Chavez based his fears on, however, Cuba enjoys close relations with North Korea. Chavez cited a warning he once received from former Cuban President Fidel Castro, who, himself contracted a mysterious and almost fatal stomach disorder after visiting Argentina, that he should "take care. These people have developed technology . . . Take care of what you eat, what they give you to eat . . . a little needle and they inject you with I don't know what." Chavez went on to say, "It would not be strange if they developed the technology to induce cancer and nobody knew about it until now."

Progressive Latin American leaders, including Chavez, have recently been diagnosed with cancer. The latest to fall victim to cancer is Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who recently won re-election in a landslide. Others contracting cancer include Paraguay's President Fernando de Lugo, Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, and former Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva. Chavez said other Latin American leaders should exercise caution, including Bolivia's Evo Morales. Former Argentinian President Nestor Kirchner, Fernandez de Kirchner's husband, died from a sudden heart attack before running again for the presidency. Fidel Castro contracted an almost fatal stomach disease after meeting with Nestor Kirchner and Chavez in Argentina.

Castro's warning to Chavez about being stuck with a fatal needle comes from someone who was on the receiving end of such assassination plots. Tulane Medical School researcher Dr. Alton Ochsner, a friend of such notorious Latin American right-wing leaders as Juan Peron, Panama's Tomas Gabriel Duque, and Nicaragua's Anastasio Somoza, was known to be conducting CIA-sponsored research to develop weaponized cancers from monkey viruses. The prime target for such a weapon was Castro.

When it comes to U.S. bio-assassination weaponry, Chavez had the best source of information in Castro. Nuland and her neocon associates in the Obama administration and corporate media would rather ridicule the messenger, in this case Chavez, than in recognizing the fact that the United States is one of the few countries in history to conduct medical research for the purpose of assassinating perceived foreign and domestic threats including Castro; Congo's Patrice Lumumba; Iraq's Abdul Karim Qassem, Yugoslavia's former President Slobodan Milosevic; Jack Ruby, the slayer of Lee Harvey Oswald; and, quite possibly, U.S. ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson who died of a sudden heart attack in 1965 on a street in London located near the U.S. embassy.

NATO dreams of civil war in Syria

2011-12-15T01:04:00.001-05:00

THE ROVING EYE

NATO dreams of civil war in Syria

By Pepe Escobar

Every grain of sand in the Syrian desert now knows there won't be a "responsibility to protect"-enabled North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) “humanitarian” intervention to provoke regime change in Damascus. A protracted war like in Libya is not feasible - even though those faultless democratic practitioners, the House of Saud, have offered to pay for it, lavishly.

Yet the fog of near war remains impenetrable. What is NATO really up to in Syria?

It was already established (see The shadow war in Syria Asia Times Online, December 2, 2011) that NATO had set up a command and control center in Turkey's southern Hatay province - where British commandos and French intelligence are training the dodgy Free Syria Army (FSA). The target: to foment a civil war engulfing northern Syria.

Now comes the confirmation, via the website of former United States Federal Bureau of Investigation whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, that a pincer movement may be in effect, involving Jordan. [1]

Edmonds quotes local sources according to whom "hundreds of soldiers who speak languages other than Arabic" have been "moving back and forth ... between the King Hussein air base in al-Mafraq" and "Jordanian villages adjacent to the Syrian border".

Edmonds sustains none of this is being reported by US media because of a gag order from above that in theory expired this Tuesday. And don't try asking King Abdullah of Jordan about it.

The base at al-Mafraq is virtually across the border from Dar'a. A lot of action has been going on in Dar'a recently - an epicenter of the anti-President Bashar al-Assad movement. As far as the Syrian news agency Sana is concerned, security forces have been routinely killed by "terrorist gangs". As far as the "rebels" are concerned, these are patriotic army defectors attacking military supply lines.

Let's hit plan B

By adopting this pincer movement, NATO in Syria is now actively diversifying into an Iraq-in-the-1990s strategy; to submit Syria to a prolonged state of siege before eventually going for the kill.

Yet as much as NATO would pray to Allah for the contrary, Syria is not Libya. It's much smaller and compact, but more populated and with a real, battle-tested army. On top of being immensely estranged from each other by the current eurodrama, the Brits and former colonial power France have calculated they have everything to lose economically if they engage in the folly of a conventional war.

As for the Syrian opposition stalwarts - the Syrian National Council (SNC) - they are a joke. Most are Muslim Brotherhood, with a sprinkling of Kurds. The leader, Burhan Ghalioun, is an opportunist Paris exile with zero credibility (for the average Syrian) although in a recent Wall Street Journal interview he made all the right noises to appease the Israel lobby (no more ties with Iran, no more support to Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza).

The FSA claims 15,000 army defectors. But it's infected with mercenaries and what scores of Syrian civilians describe as armed gangs. The SNC, in thesis, is anti-guerrilla. But that's exactly what the FSA is actively practicing, attacking Syrian soldiers and Ba'ath party offices.

The SNC key tactic for now is to sell Western public opinion the Libya-style "potential" nightmare of an imminent massacre in Homs. Not many are buying it - apart from the usual, strident, corporate media suspects. Although both are based in Istanbul, the SNC and the FSA can't seem to get their act together; they look like a lethal version of The Three Stooges.

Then there is the Arab League, which is now controlled by The Eight Stooges; the six GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council, aka Gulf Counter-revolution Club) monarchies plus "invited" GCC members Morocco and Jordan. The stooges are subcontractors of NATO's Greater Middle East on (humanitarian) steroids. Nobody, though, is asking where were the stooges were when Beirut and southern Lebanon were destroyed in 2006, and when Gaza was destroyed in 2008 - in both instances by Israel. The stooges don't dare question the divine rights of the US/Israel axis.

NATO's tactics in Syria have been crystal clear for a while now. France, under neo-Napoleonic liberator of Libya President Nicolas Sarkozy, concentrates on turbo-charging escalation. A the same time, Paris is trying to position the rise and rise of the Muslim Brotherhood all across the Arab world as a strategic Western interest - as in curbing Iranian influence.

Then there's the ongoing economic blockade - impossible without cooperation from Iraq (it won't happen), Lebanon (it won't happen) and Jordan (it could, but to Jordan's detriment).

But NATO's wet dream is really to push Turkey to do the dirty work. Irretrievably broke as they are, NATO countries - including the US - simply cannot launch yet another Middle East war that would send oil prices through the roof.

What NATO cannot fathom is the possibility of a sectarian Sunni-Shi'ite war re-exploding in Iraq. In this case, the only safe haven would be Iraqi Kurdistan. And that would strengthen Kurdish unity - from Iraq to Syria, from Turkey to Iran. Turkey in this case would have more pertinent fish to fry than to get embroiled in a war in Syria.

Turkey's double game

Still, the great imponderable in this complex chessboard is Turkey - as in what precisely happened to their much-lauded foreign policy of "zero problems with our neighbors", devised by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Faced with Riyadh's impotence, and Cairo in turmoil, Ankara seems to have monopolized the mantle of Sunni leadership - or guardian of Sunni orthodoxy facing those Shi'ite heretics, mostly from Iran (but also Iraq, Alawis in Syria and Hezbollah).

At the same time, to please NATO and the US, Ankara allows the deployment of missile defense in its territory - which is directed not only against Iran but most of all against Russia. Not to mention Ankara harbors the secret - forbidden - desire to "solve" the Kurdish question for good by establishing an autonomous zone in Syrian territory.

And Ankara also wants to make money; winners in Libya were British and French oil interests, while losers were the Italians and the Turks. But so far Turkey is also losing, especially in Hatay province near the Syrian border, as a free-trade agreement between both countries has been canceled.

To the West's despair, the Assad regime is far from being strangled. To counteract the hefty package of Arab League/Turkish sanctions, the regime has accelerated trade with China - by bartering and bypassing the international financial system.

No wonder Washington is taking the long-haul approach. It has deployed back to Damascus its ambassador Robert Ford - a former assistant to the sinister former destabilizer of Nicaragua John Negroponte when he was ambassador in Baghdad, and a current enthusiast of the House of Saud counter-revolution.

Ford will have plenty of time to exchange e-mails with a Syrian opposition totally in bed with former colonial power France. Talk about a stooge festival; this one is bound to carve its own niche in the annals of Middle East infamy.

Note

1. The report is here. An interview with Syrian journalist Nizar Nayouf is here.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

That rocky road to Damascus By Pepe Escobar

2011-11-28T18:28:00.003-05:00

THE ROVING EYE

That rocky road to Damascus

By Pepe Escobar

The trillion-dollar question in the "Arab Winter" is who will blink first in the West's screenplay of slouching towards Tehran via Damascus.

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran's undisputed key ally in the Arab world - while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia's one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system - one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot - in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

From Moscow's - as well as Tehran's - perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.

Yet key lateral moves by the West are already on. Diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times Online that the former Libyan "rebels" - now trying to come up with a credible government - have already given the go-ahead for NATO to build a sprawling military base in Cyrenaica.

NATO has no final say in such matters. This is decided by the boss - the Pentagon - interested in emboldening Africom in coordination with NATO. As many as 20,000 boots are expected to be deployed on the ground in Libya - at least 12,000 of them Europeans. They will be responsible for Libya's "internal security", but also be on alert for possible, further military campaigns targeted at - who else - Syria and Iran.

Bring those Shi'ites down

As much as the latest "coalition of the willing" - which by the way repeats the Libya model - is against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, it also represents a Christian/Sunni war against Shi'ites, be they the Alawite minority in Syria or the Shi'ite majorities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

This is part and parcel of the "strategic opportunity" identified by the powerful Israel lobby in Washington; if we strike against the Damascus-Tehran link, we deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That, ideologues believe, can now be sold to world public opinion under the cover of the former Arab Spring - now "Arab Winter" after a metamorphosis, before "Arab Summer", into the Arab counter-revolution).

As Tehran sees it, what's really going on regarding Syria is a "humanitarian" cover for a complex anti-Shi'ite and anti-Iran operation.

The road map is already clear. A fractious, unrepresentative Syrian National Council - Libya-style - is already in place. Same for a heavily armed Sunni "insurgency" crisscrossing the borders in Lebanon and Turkey. Sanctions are already essentially hurting the Syrian middle class. A relentless, international campaign of vilification of the Assad regime has been deployed. And psy ops abound, with the aim of seducing sections of the Syrian army to defect (it's not working).

A report [1] by a Qatar-based researcher for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) even comes close to admitting that the self-described "Free Syria Army" is basically a bunch of hardcore Islamists, plus a few genuine army defectors, but mostly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood bought, paid for and weaponized by the US, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. There's nothing "pro-democracy" about this lot - as incessantly sold by Western corporate and Saudi-owned media.

As for the National Council, based in Washington and London and sprinkled with the usual dodgy exiles, its program calls for governing Syria alongside the same military that has been - a la the Egyptian military junta - shooting civilian protesters. Makes one think that the only sensible solution would be for the people in Syria to topple the police state Assad regime, while being vehemently against the dodgy Syrian National Council.

This year's model (dictator)

Then there's the usually misguided and misinformed West, which believes that the Arab League - now no more than a puppet of US foreign policy - is siding with the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. Angry Arab blogger As'ad Abu Khalil is correct when he says that after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, "the League is now an extension of the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]".

The GCC is in fact the Gulf Counter-revolution Club. Their favorite sport is to privilege "model" dictators - starting with themselves, but also including Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen and the little kings of Jordan and Morocco, who will be annexed to the GCC because they wish they were in the Persian Gulf (geography dictates they aren't). On the other hand, the GCC abhors "bad" dictators - the snuffed-out Muammar Gaddafi and Assad, who not by accident are from secular republics.

The House of Saud, Jordan and rising Qatar are more than comfortable doing the US's and Israel's bidding. The House of Saud - the GCC's top dog - invaded Bahrain with 1,500 troops to smash pro-democracy protests very much like the ones in Egypt and Syria. The House of Saud helped the ruling, Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in 70% Shi'ite Bahrain to conduct widespread torture; Bahrainis confirm that everyone tortured was forced to confess direct links with "evil" Tehran.

In Egypt, the House of Saud supported Mubarak even after he was deposed. Now it supports - with over US$4 billion so far - a military junta that basically wants to keep power, unchecked, over a "democratic" facade.

The House of Saud couldn't possibly coexist with a successful, democratic Egypt. Anyone believing the House of Saud's claim to defend human rights and democracy in the Middle East should check into an asylum.

The Arab League - also a House of Saud extension - gave a green card to NATO to bomb a member state. It suspended Syria on November 12 - as it had done with Libya on February 22 - because, unlike in Libya, US and European designs in the United Nations Security Council were duly vetoed by Russia and China.

Welcome to a "new" Arab League where if you don't prostrate in front of the GCC altar, you're condemned to regime change.

Worshipping the GCC can't compare to worshipping the Pentagon and NATO. Jordan and Morocco are members of NATO's Mediterranean dialogue, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are members of NATO's Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. In addition, Jordan and the UAE are the only Arabic Troop Contributing Nations for NATO in Afghanistan.

Ivo Daalder, the Obama administration's ambassador to NATO, has already ordered Libya to enter the Mediterranean Dialogue, alongside Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania and Israel. And early this month he told the Atlantic Council what's needed for an attack on Syria; an "urgent necessity" (such as giving the impression Assad is going to raze Homs to the ground); "regional support" (that will come in a flash from the GCC/Arab League); and a UN mandate (it won't happen, as Russia and China had made it clear).

So one may expect exactly that from the "coalition of the willing"; some black ops blamed on the Assad regime; immediate support from GCC/Arab League; and probably unilateral action, because via the UN is a no-no.

The Greater Middle East dream

No wonder some sound minds in Damascus, watching the tea leaves, decided to take some action. Damascus did send secret couriers to sound out Washington's mood. The price to be left alone; to cut all ties with Tehran, for good. The Assad regime was left wondering what would they get in return.

The Alawites, roughly 12% of the population and members of the ruling elite, won't desert the Assad regime. Christians and Druze expect only the worst from a possible, hardcore, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated new order. Same for a crucial neighbor, the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

Russia knows that if the current Libyan model is reproduced in Syria - and with Lebanon already under a de facto NATO blockade - the Mediterranean will indeed become that dream, a NATO lake, which is code for total US control.

Moscow also sees that in the US-conceived Greater Middle East - and talk about "great", spanning from Mauritania to Kazakhstan - the only countries that are not linked with NATO through myriad "partnerships" are, apart from Syria: Lebanon, Eritrea, Sudan and Iran.

As for the Pentagon, the name of the game is "repositioning". As in if you leave Iraq you go somewhere else in the "arc of instability", preferably the Gulf. There are 40,000 US troops already in the Gulf - 23,000 of them in Kuwait. A secret army for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency is being trained by former Blackwater, "repositioned" as Xe, in the UAE. A NATO of the Gulf is being born. NATOGCC, anyone?

When the US neo-conservatives ruled the universe - that was only a few years ago - the motto was "Real men go to Tehran". An update is in order. Call it "Real men go to Tehran via Damascus only if they have the balls to stare down Moscow".

Note

1. See Revolutionary road: Among the Syrian opposition.

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Full-Spectrum Dominance and the Regime-Change Project by Richard K. Moore

2011-11-27T21:18:00.002-05:00

"Give me control over a nation's currency, and I care not who makes the laws."

– Baron Mayor Amschel Rothschild

Pax Americana & Bretton Woods: a regime-change precedent

For more nearly five centuries, ever since European expansionism began c. 1492, the world order could be described as competitive imperialism: European powers competing over colonial and economic territories. The various wars between European powers were one expression of this competition. Wars would arise periodically, when one power felt it could expand its imperial realms at the expense of another.

A radically different world order was established after Word War 2, based on the Bretton Woods institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank, ...), the dissolution of separate European empires, and Pax Americana. This new world system can be described as collective imperialism, with the Pentagon acting as imperial enforcer in the 'Free World' on behalf of Western capital generally. This new global regime opened the way for the greatest growth period in history, while at the same time removing the motivation for wars among European powers.

This paradigm shift in systems did not just happen: it was the outcome of a project. The new postwar paradigm was designed and planned in a series of meetings, by a handful of people selected from the Council on Foreign Relations, at the invitation of President Roosevelt. The CFR is a policy research & development organization, in service to the central banking cabal: the postwar world order was designed specifically to serve the interests of those central bankers.

The new regime came with a PR mythology: imperialism was dying; the nations of the world were being liberated; democracy was spreading; economic development would raise everyone's standard of living.

The reality was different: imperialism was being pursued more efficiently and systematically; nations were freed of colonial rule, but were still subject to destabilization and intervention if they didn't cooperate with Western corporate interests; democracy was the exception rather than the rule in the newly independent nations; widespread economic exploitation and poverty continued, much as under colonialism.

This postwar growth era became a victim of its own success in pursuing economic development. It was so effective, and so global in its reach, that it finally began to run into hard environmental constraints. By the 1970s it became clear that the postwar growth machine was running out of steam. Not that growth couldn't continue for some time, but the overall return on investments was beginning to decline.

Cycles of boom and bust have always occurred in the history of capitalism. The banking cabal makes money from investments and loans during a growth phase, they engage in looting and short-selling as the growth declines, and they extend their hard-asset ownership portfolios at bargain prices during the bust phase. The postwar growth cycle peaked in the 1970s, neoliberal looting began in the 1980s, and we're now well into the bust phase, with hard assets being grabbed at bargain prices via IMF-mandated privatization.

Always before the bust was temporary. There were always 'new worlds to conquer', some way to launch a new and grander growth cycle. This time, with hard environmental limits being encountered, a new and grander growth cycle just isn't possible.

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." – David Rockefeller

The post-capitalist regime-change project

No one has been more aware of this final end to the growth-cycle paradigm than the banking cabal. David Rockefeller himself was the principal founder of the Club of Rome, which published its Limits to Growth already in 1972. Ever since then, and even before, plans and preparations have been in the works for a successor global regime, not based on growth, but still under the thumb of the bankster cabal.

As described in the first article of this series, 'The Elite Plan for a New World Social Order', the new global system is to be based on a centralized world government, managed by already-established bureaucracies, including the UN, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC).

These bureaucracies will be accountable to the cabal, with no real kind of democratic input. The new order can be characterized as the whole world becoming the private fiefdom of the banking cabal clique, who become the equivalent of an extended global royal family. It's essentially a return to a pre-Enlightenment ancien régime.

As with the postwar regime, the new regime will have a PR mythology, quite different from the reality. We already have many clues about the nature of the new mythology, and the first article outlines what that mythology will probably be like.

As described in the second article of this series, 'The Great Carbon Credit Deception', the new economic paradigm will be based on centrally-micromanaged resource allocations, and this is beginning already with carbon credits. On our finite planet, a resource-based economy makes a great deal of sense, but not one that is centrally managed for the purpose of controlling the people of the world.

The general destruction wreaked by World War 2 'cleared the building site' so that the new postwar world order could be constructed. The cabal is now systematically clearing the building site once again, to enable the construction of the post-capitalist world order.

"Of course there is a class war, but it's my class, the rich class, that is waging the war, and we're winning." – Warren Buffett

Full-Spectrum Dominance

As Warren Buffett quips, we are in a class war – and the regime-change project is the cabal's war plan to win a total and lasting victory over the rest of humanity. It is important that those of us in the 99% under-class realize we're under systematic attack. And it's important that we realize that the core principle of modern warfare is full-spectrum dominance: pro-active control over every domain of engagement. We need to be aware of the many ways in which we're being attacked.

We've seen the principle of full-spectrum dominance in Iraq for example, where first the air-defenses are taken out, then the communications infrastructure, then transport, and so on, each domain of engagement being dominated in its turn. In such military engagements, domestic public opinion is also a domain of engagement, and dominance there has been pursued via embedded journalism, media propaganda, and lies by officials.

In the regime-change project – the class war – there are many domains of engagement over which dominance must be achieved and maintained.

Russia and China

Russia and China are a very special case. They are cooperating closely in pursuing their national interests in opposition to the cabal's plans, while at the same time gaining as much advantage as possible from the existing global marketplace. They are seeking a stable multi-polar world order, and have formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the BRICS alliance. Because of their size, wealth, and military clout, Russia and China pose the only serious geopolitical obstacle to the establishment of the cabal's centralized global regime. Full-spectrum dominance is being pursued against Russia and China in several different domains.

One of these is the domain of destabilization, particularly in the case of Russia. Russia took a major hit , for example, with the breakup of the Soviet Union – which was facilitated, according to Brzezinski, by the CIA-sponsored war between the Soviets and Afghanistan, which fatally over-stretched the Soviet economy and brought Yeltsin to power, an agent of the West, who did all he could to destroy what was left of the Russian economy. Subsequently we've had the CIA-sponsored 'Colored Revolutions', aimed at aligning Russia's neighbors with the West.

In the military domain the US has been encircling Asia with military bases and anti-missile systems, while meanwhile developing and deploying space-based and other hi-tech weapons systems. All of this adds up to a first-strike capacity, enabling the US to initiate a hi-tech assault while inhibiting an effective response.

China, in order to support its growing economy, needs access to oil and other resources. To ensure that access, China has been making investments and long-term trade deals, particularly in Africa. In response the US has set up AFRICOM, with the mission of nullifying those investments and trade deals via regime-change projects, as we've seen recently in Libya. Such actions represent direct attacks on Chinese strategic interests.

The AFRICOM initiatives and the encirclement programs are preliminary acts of war, and Russia and China are well aware of this. Russia and China will either need to yield sovereignty over their national destiny, or else military force will be used to neutralize them as competing powers.

This is how the building site is being cleared for regime change, one way or the other, in the case of Russia and China.

The Third World

As John Perkins explains in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, the Third World has long been under attack by an aggressive campaign of debt entrapment. As a condition of receiving IMF refinancing packages, nations must submit to restructuring agreements, which open up the nation's assets to privatization, and essentially bring the nations under direct cabal management, via the IMF.

In those cases where this approach does not succeed, regime-change projects are being pursued, as we've seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, and most recently Libya. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea are on the list for future regime-change initiatives, whenever the Pentagon judges the timing to be right.

Various pretexts are being used in order to achieve acceptance of these regime-change projects in the domain of Western public opinion. With Iraq, we had phony claims about weapons of mass destruction; with Libya, we had phony reports that Gaddafi was bombing civilians; with Iran, we have phony reports that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability. And always with such regime-change projects, the claim of 'humanitarian intervention' is used.

This is how the building site is being cleared for regime change, in the case of the Third World.

Western nations

Western governments were long ago corrupted and seduced into joining the neoliberal globalization bandwagon, which has systematically undermined the vitality of Western economies, and whose 'free-trade' laws have taken away regulatory sovereignty. In this way the West's manufacturing capacity has been decimated, and Western nations have become dependent on the global economy for their very survival.

Meanwhile, the cabal has used the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group to indoctrinate Western leaders into the cabal agenda. We've gotten to the point, as with Sarkosy and Merkel, where candidates are selected at Bilderberger meetings, and then promoted into power by well-funded political campaigns.

All of this set the stage for the orchestrated economic collapse of September 2008. Instead of doing the sensible thing, which would have been to put the failed banks into receivership ala Iceland, the indoctrinated leaders accepted the absurd doctrine of 'too big to fail', and committed themselves to bailing out the banks. While the public was told the collapse was only a liquidity crisis, insiders knew that in fact the whole banking system was insolvent. There was no way the nations could afford those bailouts.

Thus the insolvency of the banks was transformed into the insolvency of Western treasuries. Once this was achieved, the cabal began incrementally bringing Western nations under the direct management of cabal agents, first Ireland, and more recently Greece, Italy and Spain. By means of the bailout scam the economic-hitman strategy crossed the Rubicon from the Third World to the West, bringing with it draconian austerity and wholesale privatization.

Germany has been the most resistant to these destabilization programs, retaining a strong economy and a robust manufacturing sector, and enjoying a highly profitable export trade. At the same time, German banks are heavily invested in the failed banks and in the bonds of the bankrupt European nations, and as the global economy continues to collapse, Germany will be gradually but inevitably pulled down with the rest of Europe.

The US seems to be standing outside this scenario, with the dollar continuing as a de facto global reserve currency. But in fact the US is totally bankrupt, with astronomical budget and trade deficits. In order to keep operating, the Federal Reserve is simply printing money, and it is getting by with it because of the dollar's reserve currency status. The rug can be pulled out from under the US economy any time the cabal so chooses.

In this regard, it is important to understand exactly how the the collapse of 2008 was brought about. The vulnerabilities, in terms of over-extended banks and toxic-derivative holdings, had been present for some time. But the vulnerabilities were hidden because the banks were permitted to pretend on their books that the toxic assets were sound assets. Rockefeller's Bank of International Settlements in Basel Switzerland then pulled the plug: it announced the 'mark-to-market' rule – the toxic assets must be put on the books at their actual market value. Thus the whole house of cards came down all at once.

Similarly, there is now another house of cards that can be brought down at any time. There are $600 trillion of paper wealth tied up in derivatives and credit-default swaps. Whenever the cabal chooses, the plug can be pulled. It is only necessary to tighten the rules, and force banks and investors to start settling their derivative accounts. When this happens, there is nowhere that those $600 trillion can be found, as the world's total annual GDP is only $65 trillion. The final and total collapse of the global economy will come all at once, bringing the US down with it.

This is how the building site is being cleared for regime change, in the case of the Western nations.

Western public opinion

Although the cabal is quite willing to use whatever force is necessary to achieve its objectives, up to and including orchestrating major wars, it never relies exclusively on force. A way is always sought to bring Western public opinion into alignment with those objectives. Thus military interventions are portrayed as 'humanitarian', bailouts are portrayed as 'unfortunately necessary', and austerity is portrayed as a 'path to growth recovery'. Such false portrayals are sold to the public by propaganda from the cabal-controlled mass media, and by the lies of government officials.

Such measures have succeeded, for the most part, in getting Western populations to grudgingly accept the orchestrated collapse process. However, as the impact of the collapse is beginning to affect more and more people directly, public opinion is becoming increasingly angry and frustrated with the state of affairs. Media propaganda and official lies are failing to neutralize this growing anger. One is tempted to conclude that the cabal is losing its touch, that it is failing in this case to successfully manage public opinion.

Such a conclusion, however, would be mistaken. We need to keep in mind that the agenda of the cabal is quite different this time around. In the past, the cabal, by means of media propaganda and government lies, was always seeking to maintain support for the system they control: capitalism and Western governments. This time around, the agenda of the cabal is to discard capitalism and national governments, and replace them with the new centralized, non-growth system. Public anger and frustration feeds directly into this agenda – provided it is channeled appropriately.

The formula is an old one, known as 'problem, reaction, solution'. That's how the Federal Reserve was brought into existence back in 1913. First cabal-agent JP Morgan manufactured the problem (a run on the banks), then the cabal waited for the expected reaction (a public outcry that 'something be done'), and finally they offered their 'solution' (the cabal-owned Federal Reserve). By the time people started realizing that the solution was worse than the problem, it was too late.

With the regime-change project, the manufactured 'problem' includes not just the economic crisis itself, but also the fact that banks are responsible for the crisis, and governments are failing to do anything to alleviate the crisis. The desired 'reaction' is not just that people cry out for 'something be done' about the collapse, but that they also cry out for something be done about corrupt and incompetent governments, and that something be done about the power of banks and corporations. That is to say, the desired reaction is that people cry out for regime change.

In order to achieve this desired reaction, the cabal is employing sophisticated mind-control techniques – called psy-ops in the trade – involving the Internet and grassroots movements. The first clear example I saw of this was 'Zeitgeist', a viral YouTube video that was soon followed by the 'Zeitgeist Addendum', and a Zeitgeist Movement. At first I too was taken in by Zeitgeist, because the initial video gives one of the smoothest and most comprehensive descriptions of the evils of our age that I had ever seen. It is very professionally presented, and it pulls no punches about false-flag operations, the power of the banks, and the corruption of governments. I thought to myself, “Wow, this is a wake-up call that can really make a difference".

However my illusions were soon shattered, when the Addendum came out. While Zeitgeist is an example of 'stating the problem', the Addendum is an example of 'appropriately channeling' the resulting reaction. The Addendum is based on Jasque Fresco's Venus Project, which envisions a sci-fi technocratic future, with shiny meg-lev trains, futuristic cities that operate like beehives, and where the entire globe is organized into a monoculture with society's decisions to be made by a centralized group of elitist engineering technocrats. Indeed, Fresco suggests that global decisions should eventually be made by computers.

The Addendum doesn't mention the Soviet-style attitude-adjustment centers that would be needed to deal with those who couldn't stomach such a regimented society. Nor does it say anything about how the technocrats would be selected, or how their priorities would be determined. It's an unrealistic and frightening vision, but many of those who were captured by the initial Zeitgeist video have been successfully channeled into embracing that vision.

Subsequently the Zeitgeist Movement has distanced itself from the Venus Project, however the Zeitgeist Mission Statement continues along the same lines:

This "Resource-Based Economic Model" is about taking a direct technical approach to social management as opposed to a Monetary or even Political one. It is about updating the workings of society to the most advanced and proven methods Science has to offer, leaving behind the damaging consequences and limiting inhibitions which are generated by our current system of monetary exchange, profits, corporations and other structural and motivational components.

The Zeitgeist Movement is alive and well, with chapters in all 50 US states, and in 48 nations around the world. We see here a perfect example of the 'problem, reaction, solution' paradigm in action. Those who have bought into the Movement are eager to abandon the current system, and they can be expected to readily accept the cabal's new world order – as long as it is sold to them with appropriate propaganda spin.

A more recent Internet psy-op is the 'Anonymous Movement'. This is designed to appeal to those with more anarchistic tendencies, who would be unlikely resonate with visions of a regimented beehive future. As with the Zeitgeist Movement, Anonymous is based on a total rejection of the existing system:

"ANONYMOUS declares war on the system! JOIN THE RESISTANCE!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET4Ki5Tr_CQ&feature=related

Anonymous describes itself as a leaderless, spontaneous, unorganized, grassroots movement. How anyone can believe this is beyond me, given the professional quality of the videos, the consistency of the style and content of the videos, and the sophisticated branding techniques, such as the 'V for Vendetta' masks. The words in the videos are spoken by computer software, giving the impression that the authors are successfully hiding their identities from the authorities. One needs to be incredibly naive to think the authors couldn't be tracked down, and the videos taken down, if the authorities actually felt threatened by Anonymous.

The credibility of Anonymous is somewhat enhanced by various successful hacker attacks that have been attributed to it. But again, only the naive could believe the authorities couldn't put a stop to this, if the perpetrators really were grassroots activists trying to take down the system. In fact, the hacker attacks, as well as Anonymous itself, are undoubtedly false-flag operations of the Pentagon's new Cyber Warfare division, carrying out its part in the class war against we the people.

Apart from propagating an anti-system message, and channeling the attention of some number of naive people, it is not clear what the real purpose of Anonymous is. My best guess at this point is that a really outrageous and unpopular hacker attack will come along, Anonymous will claim credit, and that will be used as an excuse to seriously crack down on the use of the Internet by genuine activists. The Internet would then be politically sterilized, giving Internet psy-ops a clear field.

Let us now turn our attention to the rapidly growing Occupy Movement, which has captured the imagination and energy of activists, and a great many ordinary citizens, around the world. The home page of the Zeitgeist Movement, as of this writing, prominently displays support for the Occupy Movement. As with Zeitgeist and Anonymous, Occupy is based on a radical critique of the existing system, as we can read on the Occupy Together website:

Global civil society is being threatened by a system based on power and not on human values. Day after day it represses basic freedoms and consistently favors the greed of the few over the needs of the many. This power finances wars, food and pharmaceutical monopolies, it sponsors dictatorial regimes across the globe, destroying environments, manipulating and censoring information flow and transparency.

The movement was inspired by the Arab Spring movements, particularly Egypt's Tahir Square Movement. Occupy burst on the scene all at once in mid September, following a call to action from Adbusters magazine, which has ties to George Soros. It rapidly became the dominant global protest movement. According to the Occupy Together website, the movement now has a visible presence in over 2,000 towns and cities worldwide.

The movement manifests as encampments, as in Tahir Square, where people stand around holding signs demanding an end to this and that abuse by the system. The movement has a specific decision-making process, based on General Assemblies, using an awkward consensus process. This pattern was established at the original Wall Street encampment, by a leadership clique that knew exactly how they wanted things to operate, and the pattern has been faithfully adopted by subsequent encampments as the movement grew.

The main agenda of the movement seems to be managing its own encampments. It has no specific manifesto of demands, no vision of any particular system to replace the current one, and no strategy for actually bringing about change. In essence, it amounts to a global Tahir Square gathering – a mass of people waiting around for someone to announce a regime change. As in Egypt, the people will get a regime change, and as in Egypt, it won't be a regime they will be happy with.

This is how the building site is being cleared for regime change, in the case of the Western public opinion.

Managing the Transition

Just as the old world system is being systematically dismantled, so is the transition process to the new regime being systematically managed. Indeed, with the globalist bureaucracies established and operating, the carbon-credit system launched, the IMF managing many of the world's national economies, and top Western leaders indoctrinated by the cabal's forums (Bilderberger Group, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations), the transition process is already well underway.

The UN will of course need to be 'reformed' as part of the transition. The General Assembly is far too democratic to suit the purposes of the cabal, and the Security Council is plagued by that pesky veto process. Already the US is pushing for reform, seeking for power to be centralized in the UN's Secretary General. With Russia and China out of the picture, it will be easy for the cabal to push through whatever reforms they deem appropriate, so as to enable the cabal to dictate policy, free of constraint.

The US has long been under the control of the cabal, with the cabal-owned Federal Reserve managing monetary policy, and the political system totally corrupted. JFK made a valiant attempt to restore genuine sovereignty, and after eliminating him the cabal tightened its grip still further. The US, and particularly the Pentagon and the CIA, have served as essential tools of the cabal as they have been pursuing their plans for global domination.

The EU was a cabal project from the very beginning, and its founding charter, the Maastricht Treaty, was drawn up by cabal-controlled finance ministers, not heads of state. The purpose of the EU has been to help manage the transition of Europe into the new world system, by incrementally undermining national sovereignty and bringing Europe under the bureaucratic control of the cabal-dominated Brussels regime.

As the economic collapse dramatically worsens, civil unrest will dramatically increase. Harsh suppression of Western populations will be necessary in order to get through the transition process. The various false-flag 'terrorist' events, such as 9/11 and the London tube bombings, have provided the excuse to implement the police-state infrastructures that will enable the necessary suppression. The same false-flag events have also provided excuses for the various military interventions that have been necessary in order to 'clear the building site' in the third world.

Is another future possible?

Time is running very short, if we the people hope to do anything to change this course of events. Our collective activist energy has certainly been aroused, as evidenced by the Arab Spring uprisings, the Occupy Movement, and the various protests we've seen in Europe. But we will need to find new ways of organizing our energies if we want to be effective. It is the responsibility of us in the West to create a different future, if there is to be one. For as long as the West, with its dominant military power, is under the control of the cabal, there is little hope the rest of the world can make a difference.

The purpose of this series of articles has been to help us understand the magnitude of the task that faces us, if we do want a different future. In particular, we need to understand that protesting, regardless of the scale, is not going to help. Those in power don't care and aren't listening. And whatever we do, it must be based on non-violence, as the authorities are very well prepared to suppress any kind of violent uprising.

It is beyond the scope of this article to go much further with suggestions for overcoming cabal power. If these articles have enhanced your understanding of the problems, I hope they also encourage you to think afresh of how we might pursue overcoming them.

My own thinking has led me to the conclusion that our organizing, and our vision for the future, both need to be based on localism and inclusiveness. Globalism and mass media are the natural province of elites. Community and face-to-face communication are the natural province of we the people. Let me leave you with the thought that we are all in this together: left and right are illusions foisted on us to keep us divided.

Richard K Moore, an expatriate from Silicon Valley, retired and moved to Ireland in 1994 to begin his ‘real work’ – trying to understand how the world works, and how we can make it better. Many years of researching and writing culminated in his widely acclaimed bookEscaping the Matrix: How We the People Can Change the World (The Cyberjournal Project, 2005). His cyberjournal email list has been going since 1994 (cyberjournal.org). The book’s website is http://escapingthematrix.org, and his website is http://cyberjournal.org. Richard can be contacted via email atrkm@quaylargo.com.

Richard K. Moore is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Richard K. Moore

Exposed: The Farce of US press 'freedom' By Pepe Escobar

2011-11-21T19:41:00.002-05:00

THE ROVING EYE

Exposed: US press 'freedom'

By Pepe Escobar

Last week, independent journalist Sam Husseini went to a news conference by Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia at Washington’s National Press Club - where Husseini is a member.

Then he did something that is alien to United States corporate media culture. He behaved as an actual journalist and asked a tough, pertinent, no-holds-barred question. Here it is, as relayed by Husseini's blog:

I want to know what legitimacy your regime has, sir. You come before us, representative of one of the most autocratic, misogynistic regimes on the face of the earth. Human Rights Watch and other reports of torture, detention of activists, you squelched the democratic uprising in Bahrain, you tried to overturn the democratic uprising in Egypt and indeed you continue to oppress your own people. What legitimacy does your regime have - other than billions of dollars and weapons? [1]

Prince Turki, former Saudi intelligence supremo, former pal of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, former Saudi ambassador to the US, reacted by changing the subject. [2]

Were this to happen in the Middle East, Husseini would have been duly kidnapped by Saudi intel, tortured and snuffed out. Ask the remains of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. For much less - saying out loud in an Arab League meeting that King Abdullah was a traitor, because he was encouraging the George W Bush administration to invade Iraq - the House of Saud did everything in its power, for years, to make sure Gaddafi was taken out.

Turki exhibits all the trademark democratic credentials of the House of Saud. He refers to the push for democracy in the Arab world as "Arab Troubles".

After the Turki shoot

According to Husseini, on the same day of the news conference he received "a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club 'due to your conduct at a news conference'. The letter, signed by the executive director of the club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting 'boisterous and unseemly conduct or language'."

Husseini, communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, which showcases critical journalism from all over the world, is a calm, thoughtful man with impeccable credentials. The accusation is not only bogus - it is downright pathetic.

Was this a one-off? Obviously not. Flashback to January 2009, at the same National Press Club, during a news conference by then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. When Livni was asked a tough question - once again by Husseini - the mike was cut, and the conference abruptly terminated. My cameraman, Sebastian Pituscan, was there with me. [3]

So this is how the much-lauded "freedom of the press" myth in the US actually works. If you perform the job of an actual journalist, telling truth to power, forget about attending press conferences at the White House, Pentagon or State Department. You won't even be admitted in the building.

If you are an official from a "valuable ally" - such as the House of Saud or the regime in Israeli - you are assured a tough question-free pulpit anywhere you choose, especially if you're fluent in English.

But if you are an official from a "rogue" regime, the maximum you can aspire is to be humiliated in public, as it happened to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University in New York. Especially if you don't speak English, and most of what you say is lost in translation.

On the other hand, if you are a travelling US corporate media hack, you can get away with murder.

Example. During the Asian financial crisis, in 1997 and 1998, I went to countless press conferences where parachuted US hacks intimidated Asian leaders as if they were a bunch of hooligans (the hacks, not the leaders). Perky chicks emerging from some two-bit journalism school in the flyover states treated then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as if he was a child rapist, because he had established capital controls.

Mahathir turned out to be right - as Malaysia overcame the crisis much earlier than those, such as Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, that surrendered to the International Monetary Fund's dreadful "adjustments".

In 1989, Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square were hailed by US media as heroes standing up to tyranny. In 2011, American students protesting all across the country against financial tyranny are "lazy", "bastards", both, or downright criminalized.

United States corporate media could not possibly admit that repression in Tahrir Square by Egyptian riot police is exactly the same as repression in New York, Oakland, Portland or Boston by American riot police.

Still there's no word from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization about setting up a "humanitarian" no-fly zone over selected Occupy sites in US cities. They are still consulting with the House of Saud.

Notes

1. See the blog here.

2. Video of the exchange is here.

3. The exchange is here.

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Do the bomb Iran shuffle By Pepe Escobar

2011-11-11T10:29:00.002-05:00

THE ROVING EYE

Do the bomb Iran shuffle

By Pepe Escobar

Get ready for a flurry of fuzzy satellite ''intelligence'' of generic warehouses all across Iran frantically described as segments of a nuclear bomb assembly line (Remember a famous ''secret nuclear facility'' in Syria not long ago? It was a textile factory.)

Get ready for a flurry of crude diagrams depicting suspect devices, or the containers that hide them, all capable of reaching Europe in 45 minutes.

Get ready for a flurry of ''experts'' on Fox, CNN and the BBC endlessly dissecting all this extended black ops dressed up as ''evidence''. For instance, former UN weapons inspector David Albright, now at the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), has already pulled his return of the living dead stunt, displaying his ''bomb Iran'' credentials complete with diagrams and satellite intel.

Forget Iraq - it's sooo 2003. Hit the new groove; hyping overdrive for the war on Iran.

Turning Japanese

First of all, ditch common sense.

If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, it would be diverting uranium for it. The report released by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) this week - as politicized as it may be - flatly denies it.

If Iran were developing a nuclear weapon, UN inspectors working for the IAEA would have been thrown out of the country.

Iraq did not have a nuclear weapons program in 2002. And yet it was shocked and awed. The same rationale applies to Iran.

What Tehran may have conducted - if the compromised intel used in the IAEA report is to be believed - is a bunch of experiments and computer simulations. Everybody does it - for instance countries which have renounced the bomb, such as Brazil and South Africa.

What the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - in charge of the civilian nuclear program - certainly wants is a deterrent.

That is, the possibility of building up a nuclear bomb in case they face an unequivocally established threat of regime change, provoked, most likely, by a US attack and invasion.

Doubts swirl about the competence - or the impartiality - of the new IAEA head, the meek Japanese Yukya Amano. The best answer is in this WikiLeaks cable.

As for the origin of most of the IAEA's self-described ''credible'' intel, even the New York Times was forced to report that ''some of that information came from the United States, Israel and Europe.'' Gareth Porter offers the definitive debunking of the report.

Moreover, expect major pressure on the CIA to renege the crucial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which established - irrefutably - that Tehran had ditched a nuclear weapons program way back in 2003.

All this dovetails with the dogs of war already barking.

European minions may be incompetent enough to win a war in Libya (they did it only when the Pentagon took over satellite intelligence).

They may be incompetent enough to manage Europe's financial disaster. But France, Germany and the UK have already started barking - calling for further stringent sanctions on Iran.

In the US, Democrats and Republicans alike are calling not only for sanctions; in the case of wacko Republicans, which of course, is an oxymoron, they're calling for a new version of Shock and Awe.

It's never enough to repeat how things work in Washington. The Banjamin Netanyahu government in Israel tells the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee what to do, and the AIPAC orders the US Congress what to do.

That's how the House Foreign Affairs Committee is considering a bipartisan bill that is essentially a declaration of war.

According to the bill, neither President Barack Obama, nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, nor in fact any US diplomat can engage in any kind of diplomacy with Iran - unless Obama convinces the ''appropriate congressional committees'' that not talking would mean an ''extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States''.

''Appropriate congressional committees'' happens to define exactly the House Foreign Affairs Committee, which gets its martial marching orders from Bibi in Israel via AIPAC in Washington.

Try telling any of these Israeli-firsters at the United States Congress what are the real immediate consequences of an attack on Iran; the Strait of Hormuz closed within minutes, at least 6 million barrels of oil out of the world economy (already in recession in the industrialized North), a barrel of oil hitting $300 or $400.

It doesn't matter; they're incapable of doing the math.

Prep well, and stick to the agenda

Rumors swirl about the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) recently claiming, according to the Fars news agency, that only four Iranian missiles can deter Israel.

These missiles might - or might not - be Soviet Kh-55 nuclear cruise missiles from the Ukraine and Belarus, with a maximum range of 2,500 kilometers, that Iran may have bought years ago in the black market.

The IRGC, of course, is mum. That only feeds the fog of (pre)war - as nobody exactly knows how well defended Iran is.

It's an open secret in Washington that regime change in Iran is being war-gamed by the Pentagon since at least 2004.

The favorite neo-con 2002 road map still applies, the targets being Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia and Sudan - all key nodes in the Pentagon-coined ''arc of instability''.

Imagine PhDs in warmongering examining the chessboard. Iraq was duly shocked and awed (even though the US is now being booted out). Syria is too hard to crack for incompetent North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Lebanon (Hezbollah) can only be captured if Syria falls first. Libya was a victory (forget about a protracted civil war). Somalia is containable with Uganda and drones. And South Sudan is in the bag.

That leaves - for hardcore practitioners of Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine - the enticing possibility of a successful attack on Iran as the ultimate creative destruction move, reshuffling all the cards from the Middle East to Central Asia. The ''arc of instability'' terminally destabilized.

How to accomplish it? So simple - as the warmongers see it. Convince Obama that instead of being whacked around, conservatives will kiss his brogues and he'll be canonized as the re-energizer of the US economy if he just went to fight another war.

Anyone for Occupy Iran - literally?

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Cops request "non-lethal" crowd control systems from Pentagon

2011-11-10T00:59:00.002-05:00

Department of Homeland SecurIty sources have told WMR that police departments across the United States are requesting the Pentagon to provide Active Denial Systems to immobilize, through "non-lethal" means, large crowds at Occupy Wall Street and other mass demonstrations. The Obama White House and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta are said to be considering the police request. Homeland Security supports the deployment of the systems to the police.

The Active Denial System (ADS) is a directed energy weapon that sends a microwave beam that causes human bodies to heat up, much as a microwave oven cooks food, but at a lower intensity. The targets of ADS have the sensation that they are on fire. However, the energy pulse weapon, manufactured by Raytheon, causes discomfort and results in targeted groups of people running away from the beam's targeted area. In addition, severe injuries can be caused to individuals wearing jewelry or metallic body piercings, as well as people wearing metal-framed eyeglasses or with metallic implants.

ADS was used by the Pentagon in Afghanistan but was rejected for use in Iraq because it could have been considered a form of torture.

There has also been interest by some police departments in using a new generation of Pentagon ultra-sound weapons. Targeted on a mass group of people, such weapons result in vertigo, nausea, sudden defecation and urination, and breathing problems. For high-risk targets such as the elderly, asthmatics, and young children, ultra-sound weapons could be lethal.

A bad case of nuclear Iranophobia By Pepe Escobar

2011-11-09T13:14:00.000-05:00

THE ROVING EYE

A bad case of nuclear Iranophobia

By Pepe Escobar

As the climax to a leaking frenzy in Western corporate media that bordered on - literally - nuclear hysteria, United Nations inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) finally released a report essentially charging that Tehran had tried to design a nuclear weapon to fit in a missile warhead until as late as last year.

According to the report, Iran worked "on the development of an indigenous design of a nuclear weapon including the testing of components".

Besides the effort to redesign and miniaturize a Pakistani nuclear weapon, Tehran is also accused of trying to develop a covert operation to enrich uranium - the "green salt project" - that could be used "in an undisclosed enrichment program".

All this leads the IAEA to express "serious concerns" about research and development "specific to nuclear weapons".

The report sells the notion that while the IAEA has tried for years to monitor declared Iranian stockpiles of uranium ore and processed uranium - currently 73.7 kilograms of 20%-enriched uranium in Natanz plus 4,922 kg of uranium enriched to less than 5% - Tehran, in secret, has been trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Dodgy intel

The IAEA insists is relying on "credible" intelligence - over 1,000 pages of documentation - from more than 10 countries, and has drawn on eight years of "evidence".

Yet the IAEA has no independent means to confirm the enormous mass of information - and disinformation - it receives from mostly Western powers. Mohammad ElBaradei - who was the predecessor of the Japanese Yukya Amano as the head of the IAEA - said so, explicitly, many times. And he always disputed what passes for "Iran intelligence" - knowing it was politicized to the extreme, and trespassed by waves of rumor and speculation.

No wonder ultra-conservative Iranian newspaper Kayhan had reason to ask whether that was a IAEA report or an American diktat to the meek, easily pressured Amano.

There's nothing even remotely earth-shaking about the report - satellite images and speculation by "diplomats" being sold as irrefutable "intelligence". If this looks like the build-up towards the war on Iraq, that's because it does. Essentially, it's regurgitation of a four-year-old farce, known as the "laptop of death". [1]

The scenario closer to reality - even taking into consideration the existence of a covert program, which is not substantiated - spells out that building a nuclear warhead, for Tehran, is counter-productive.

Yet the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) - in charge of all high-level military programs - may certainly keep the option of building a nuclear warhead as fast as lightning, as a deterrent in case they were absolutely sure the US would invade, or even launch an extended "shock and awe". The undisputed true consequence of Iran eventually holding a nuclear weapon is to end once and for all with the ever-present threat of an American attack. Any doubts, please consult the North Korean dossier.

The Tehran regime may be ruthless, but they're no amateurs; to build a nuclear weapon - either in secret or in full view of the IAEA - and go bang, would lead them nowhere. The regime - which is already embroiled in a vicious, complex internal battle between the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the faction of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad - would be totally isolated geopolitically.

The Iranian population is way more concerned with inflation, unemployment, corruption and the yearning for more political participation to be plunged inside a global nuclear controversy. There is ample positive consensus in Iran about a civilian nuclear program. But there's no guarantee even a minority would endorse an "Islamic bomb".

Calling Israel's bluff

What does rattle the nerves not only of Israel but the powerful array of US interests who 32 years later are still in denial about losing their prized gendarme of the Gulf (the shah of Iran) is that Tehran keeps them guessing, forever.

Predictably, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel will keep barking to deafening levels, while trying by all ruses necessary to wag the (American) dog.

The same Netanyahu that neither US President Barack Obama nor French President Nicolas Sarkozy can stand anymore has a single-minded strategy; to draw Washington and a few minions, from the Brits to the House of Saud - and this has nothing to do with "international community" - to exercise maximum pressure on Tehran. Otherwise, Israel will attack.

This is nonsense, because Israel can't attack even a stray poodle. All its crucial military hardware is American. It needs special permission to cross Saudi or Iraqi airspace. It needs a green card from Washington from A to Z. The Obama administration may be accused of everything - but it's not suicidal.

Only those non-entities at the US Congress - despised by the overwhelming majority of Americans, according to any number of polls - can possibly believe in the martial marching orders they get from Netanyahu via the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobby.

So what's left is the possibility of even more sanctions. Four rounds of harsh UN Security Council sanctions already target Iran's imports and banking and finance. But that's the end of the line.

Russia is not convinced by the IAEA report, and already said so explicitly. China is not impressed; the IAEA simply did not have enough evidence to flatly accuse Iran of conducting an active nuclear weapons program.

So forget about Russia and China accepting another US-imposed round of sanctions at the UN - which would be literally nuclear; a de facto boycott of Iran's sales of oil and gas.

Only a bunch of clowns can assume that China would vote against its national security interest at the UN Security Council. Iran is China's third-largest oil supplier, after Saudi Arabia and Angola. China is importing around 650,000 barrels of oil a day from Iran - 50% more compared to last year. That's over 25% of Iran's total oil exports.

Even the Obama administration had to admit publicly that a boycott is unimaginable; it would deprive the depression-bound global economy of no less than 2.4 million barrels of oil a day, with the barrel probably hitting $300 or even $400.

Tehran has - and will continue to find - ways to bypass financial sanctions. India has paid Iranian oil imports via a Turkish bank. Tehran is starting to use a Russian bank as well.

This also proves that Israel's mantra of the "international community" isolating Iran is a monumental bluff. Key actors such as BRICS members Russia, China and India keep close commercial relations.

On top of it, amid all the Iranophobic hysteria, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) - China, Russia and four Central Asian "stans" - engaged in their latest summit in St Petersburg. Iran - which enjoys observer status - was there, via Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi. Sooner or later Iran will be admitted as a full member.

If even before Iran joining the SCO China and Russia considered an attack on Iran as an attack on both of them - as well as on the idea of Asian energy integration - it will be very enlightening to watch Israel trying to convince the US to conduct an attack on Asia.

Note

1. See here .

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

The War Against the Poor Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality By Frances Fox Piven

2011-11-06T20:31:00.000-05:00

Tomgram: Frances Fox Piven, The War on the Home Front

Posted by Frances Fox Piven at 6:01pm, November 6, 2011.

It was a beautiful, sunlit fall morning when the patrol, many in camouflage jackets, no more than 40 of them in all, headed directly into enemy territory. Their ranks included one sailor in uniform, three women, and a small child named Viva in a stroller. Except for Viva, all of them were vets, a few from the Vietnam era but most from our more recent wars.

As they headed for Wall Street, several carried signs that said, “I am still serving my country,” and one read, “How is the war economy working for you?” Many wore Iraq Veterans Against the War t-shirts under their camo jackets, and there was one other thing that made this demonstration unlike any seen in these last Occupy Wall Street weeks: there wasn’t a police officer, police car, or barricade in sight. As they headed out across a well-trafficked street, not a cop was there to yell at them to get back on the curb.
In the wake of the wounding of Scott Olsen in the police assault on Occupy Oakland last week, that’s what it means to be a veteran marching on Zuccotti Park. Scott Kimbell (Iraq, 2005-2006), who led the patrol, later told me: “Cops are in a difficult position with vets. Some of them were in the military and are sympathetic and they know that the community will not support what happened to Scott Olsen.” Just before Broad Street, a line of waiting police on scooters picked up the marchers, for once feeling more like an escort than a gang of armed avengers, while media types and photographers swarmed in the street without police reprimand.

Suddenly, the patrol swiveled right and marched directly into the financial heart of the planet through a set of barricades. (“Who opened up the barrier there?” shouted a policeman.) It was aiming directly at a line of mounted police blocking the way. In front of them, the march halted. With a smart “Left face!” the platoon turned to the Stock Exchange and began to call out in unison, “We are veterans! We are the 99%! We swore to protect the Constitution of the United States of America! We are here to support the Occupy Movement!”

Then, the horses parted like the Red Sea, like a wave of emotion sweeping ahead of us, and the vets marched on triumphantly toward Zuccotti Park as a military cadence rang out (“...corporate profits on the rise, but soldiers have to bleed and die! Sound off, one, two...”)

The platoon came to attention in front of Trinity Church for a moment of silence for “our friend Scott Olsen,” after which it circled the encampment at Zuccotti Park to cheers and cries of “Welcome Home!” from the protesters there. (One of the occupiers shouted to the skies: “Hey, police, the military’s here and they’re on our side!”) And if you don’t think all of it was stirring, then you have the heart of a banker.
Soon after, veterans began offering testimony, people’s mic-style, at the top of the park. Eli Wright, 30, a former Army medic in Ramadi, Iraq (2003-2004), now on military disability and Viva's dad, parked her stroller when I asked him why he was here. “I came out today to march for economic justice," he responded. "I want a future for my daughter. I want her to have an education and a job. I served seven years for our country to defend our constitution only to see it being dismantled before my eyes. I think it’s time for vets and others to stand up and fight back.” As for two-year-old Viva, “This,” he said, “is the introduction to democracy that she needs to see.” As a matter of fact, amid the tumult, Viva was soundly and peaceably asleep.

Joshua Shepherd, in the Navy from 2002 to 2008, told me that, during those years, he came to realize "it wasn’t about protecting anyone, it was about making money.” Now a student, he was holding up a large poster of his friend Scott Olsen. He had been with Olsen when he was hit, possibly by a beanbag round fired by the police, and had flown in from San Francisco for this march. “It’s important that the people at Wall Street know that we support them. For the life of me I’m not sure why the police escalated the way they did [in Oakland], but the powers that be are threatened. Income disparities have never been higher and they want to keep it that way. It’s my intention to raise my voice and say that’s not right.”

T.J. Buonomo, 27 and unemployed, a personable former Army military intelligence officer, told me that he had come up from Washington specifically for the march. “Seeing what happened to Scott Olsen made me feel like we had to stand up for Americans getting their democracy back. If this country keeps going like this, we’re going to look like Latin America in the 1970s.”

Of course, as with so much else about Zuccotti Park, there’s no way of knowing whether these vets were a recon outfit preparing the way for a far larger “army,” possibly (as in the Vietnam era) including active-duty service people, or whether they were just a lost American patrol. Still, if you were there, you, too, might have felt that something was changing in this country, that a larger movement of some kind was beginning to form.

And speaking of such movements, if you’ve read the final essays in the remarkable new book Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven?, an essential guide to the writings of the activist and professor “Glenn Beck loves to hate,” then you know that no one came closer than her to predicting the rise of OWS. Having covered the fate of the poor memorably for almost half a century, Piven, whom Cornel West calls “a living legend,” has a bead on the “war” these vets are now facing on the American home front. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Piven discusses Glenn Beck’s bizarre fascination with her click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

The War Against the Poor
Occupy Wall Street and the Politics of Financial Morality
By Frances Fox Piven
We’ve been at war for decades now -- not just in Afghanistan or Iraq, but right here at home. Domestically, it’s been a war against the poor, but if you hadn’t noticed, that’s not surprising. You wouldn’t often have found the casualty figures from this particular conflict in your local newspaper or on the nightly TV news. Devastating as it’s been, the war against the poor has gone largely unnoticed -- until now.

The Occupy Wall Street movement has already made the concentration of wealth at the top of this society a central issue in American politics. Now, it promises to do something similar when it comes to the realities of poverty in this country.

By making Wall Street its symbolic target, and branding itself as a movement of the 99%, OWS has redirected public attention to the issue of extreme inequality, which it has recast as, essentially, a moral problem. Only a short time ago, the “morals” issue in politics meant the propriety of sexual preferences, reproductive behavior, or the personal behavior of presidents. Economic policy, including tax cuts for the rich, subsidies and government protection for insurance and pharmaceutical companies, and financial deregulation, was shrouded in clouds of propaganda or simply considered too complex for ordinary Americans to grasp.
Now, in what seems like no time at all, the fog has lifted and the topic on the table everywhere seems to be the morality of contemporary financial capitalism. The protestors have accomplished this mainly through the symbolic power of their actions: by naming Wall Street, the heartland of financial capitalism, as the enemy, and by welcoming the homeless and the down-and-out to their occupation sites. And of course, the slogan “We are the 99%” reiterated the message that almost all of us are suffering from the reckless profiteering of a tiny handful. (In fact, they aren’t far off: the increase in income of the top 1% over the past three decades about equals the losses of the bottom 80%.)

The movement’s moral call is reminiscent of earlier historical moments when popular uprisings invoked ideas of a “moral economy” to justify demands for bread or grain or wages -- for, that is, a measure of economic justice. Historians usually attribute popular ideas of a moral economy to custom and tradition, as when the British historian E.P. Thompson traced the idea of a “just price” for basic foodstuffs invoked by eighteenth century English food rioters to then already centuries-old Elizabethan statutes. But the rebellious poor have never simply been traditionalists. In the face of violations of what they considered to be their customary rights, they did not wait for the magistrates to act, but often took it upon themselves to enforce what they considered to be the foundation of a just moral economy.

Being Poor By the Numbers
A moral economy for our own time would certainly take on the unbridled accumulation of wealth at the expense of the majority (and the planet). It would also single out for special condemnation the creation of an ever-larger stratum of people we call “the poor” who struggle to survive in the shadow of the overconsumption and waste of that top 1%.

Some facts: early in 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 14.3% of the population, or 47 million people -- one in six Americans -- were living below the official poverty threshold, currently set at $22,400 annually for a family of four. Some 19 million people are living in what is called extreme poverty, which means that their household income falls in the bottom half of those considered to be below the poverty line. More than a third of those extremely poor people are children. Indeed, more than half of all children younger than six living with a single mother are poor. Extrapolating from this data, Emily Monea and Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution estimate that further sharp increases in both poverty and child poverty rates lie in our American future.

Some experts dispute these numbers on the grounds that they neither take account of the assistance that the poor still receive, mainly through the food stamp program, nor of regional variations in the cost of living. In fact, bad as they are, the official numbers don’t tell the full story. The situation of the poor is actually considerably worse. The official poverty line is calculated as simply three times the minimal food budget first introduced in 1959, and then adjusted for inflation in food costs. In other words, the American poverty threshold takes no account of the cost of housing or fuel or transportation or health-care costs, all of which are rising more rapidly than the cost of basic foods. So the poverty measure grossly understates the real cost of subsistence.

Moreover, in 2006, interest payments on consumer debt had already put more than four million people, not officially in poverty, below the line, making them “debt poor.” Similarly, if childcare costs, estimated at $5,750 a year in 2006, were deducted from gross income, many more people would be counted as officially poor.

Nor are these catastrophic levels of poverty merely a temporary response to rising unemployment rates or reductions in take-home pay resulting from the great economic meltdown of 2008. The numbers tell the story and it’s clear enough: poverty was on the rise before the Great Recession hit. Between 2001 and 2007, poverty actually increased for the first time on record during an economic recovery. It rose from 11.7% in 2001 to 12.5% in 2007. Poverty rates for single mothers in 2007 were 49% higher in the U.S. than in 15 other high-income countries. Similarly, black employment rates and income were declining before the recession struck.

In part, all of this was the inevitable fallout from a decades-long business mobilization to reduce labor costs by weakening unions and changing public policies that protected workers and those same unions. As a result, National Labor Board decisions became far less favorable to both workers and unions, workplace regulations were not enforced, and the minimum wage lagged far behind inflation.

Inevitably, the overall impact of the campaign to reduce labor’s share of national earnings meant that a growing number of Americans couldn’t earn even a poverty-level livelihood -- and even that’s not the whole of it. The poor and the programs that assisted them were the objects of a full-bore campaign directed specifically at them.

Campaigning Against the Poor
This attack began even while the Black Freedom Movement of the 1960s was in full throttle. It was already evident in the failed 1964 presidential campaign of Republican Barry Goldwater, as well as in the recurrent campaigns of sometime Democrat and segregationist governor of Alabama George Wallace. Richard Nixon’s presidential bid in 1968 picked up on the theme.

As many commentators have pointed out, his triumphant campaign strategy tapped into the rising racial animosities not only of white southerners, but of a white working class in the north that suddenly found itself locked in competition with newly urbanized African-Americans for jobs, public services, and housing, as well as in campaigns for school desegregation. The racial theme quickly melded into political propaganda targeting the poor and contemporary poor-relief programs. Indeed, in American politics “poverty,” along with “welfare,” “unwed mothers,” and “crime,” became code words for blacks.

In the process, resurgent Republicans tried to defeat Democrats at the polls by associating them with blacks and with liberal policies meant to alleviate poverty. One result was the infamous “war on drugs” that largely ignored major traffickers in favor of the lowest level offenders in inner-city communities. Along with that came a massive program of prison building and incarceration, as well as the wholesale “reform” of the main means-tested cash assistance program, Aid to Families of Dependent Children. This politically driven attack on the poor proved just the opening drama in a decades-long campaign launched by business and the organized right against workers.

This was not only war against the poor, but the very “class war” that Republicans now use to brand just about any action they don’t like. In fact, class war was the overarching goal of the campaign, something that would soon enough become apparent in policies that led to a massive redistribution of the burden of taxation, the cannibalization of government services through privatization, wage cuts and enfeebled unions, and the deregulation of business, banks, and financial institutions.

The poor -- and blacks -- were an endlessly useful rhetorical foil, a propagandistic distraction used to win elections and make bigger gains. Still, the rhetoric was important. A host of new think tanks, political organizations, and lobbyists in Washington D.C. promoted the message that the country’s problems were caused by the poor whose shiftlessness, criminal inclinations, and sexual promiscuity were being indulged by a too-generous welfare system.

Genuine suffering followed quickly enough, along with big cuts in the means-tested programs that helped the poor. The staging of the cuts was itself enwreathed in clouds of propaganda, but cumulatively they frayed the safety net that protected both the poor and workers, especially low-wage ones, which meant women and minorities. When Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office in 1980, the path had been smoothed for huge cuts in programs for poor people, and by the 1990s the Democrats, looking for electoral strategies that would raise campaign dollars from big business and put them back in power, took up the banner. It was Bill Clinton, after all, who campaigned on the slogan “end welfare as we know it.”

A Movement for a Moral Economy
The war against the poor at the federal level was soon matched in state capitols where organizations like the American Federation for Children, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the Institute for Liberty, and the State Policy Network went to work. Their lobbying agenda was ambitious, including the large-scale privatization of public services, business tax cuts, the rollback of environmental regulations and consumer protections, crippling public sector unions, and measures (like requiring photo identification) that would restrict the access students and the poor had to the ballot. But the poor were their main public target and again, there were real life consequences -- welfare cutbacks, particularly in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, and a law-and-order campaign that resulted in the massive incarceration of black men.

The Great Recession sharply worsened these trends. The Economic Policy Institute reports that the typical working-age household, which had already seen a decline of roughly $2,300 in income between 2000 and 2006, lost another $2,700 between 2007 and 2009. And when “recovery” arrived, however uncertainly, it was mainly in low-wage industries, which accounted for nearly half of what growth there was. Manufacturing continued to contract, while the labor market lost 6.1% of payroll employment. New investment, when it occurred at all, was more likely to be in machinery than in new workers, so unemployment levels remain alarmingly high. In other words, the recession accelerated ongoing market trends toward lower-wage and ever more insecure employment.

The recession also prompted further cutbacks in welfare programs. Because cash assistance has become so hard to get, thanks to so-called welfare reform, and fallback state-assistance programs have been crippled, the federal food stamp program has come to carry much of the weight in providing assistance to the poor. Renamed the “Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program,” it was boosted by funds provided in the Recovery Act, and benefits temporarily rose, as did participation. But Congress has repeatedly attempted to slash the program’s funds, and even to divert some of them into farm subsidies, while efforts, not yet successful, have been made to deny food stamps to any family that includes a worker on strike.

The organized right justifies its draconian policies toward the poor with moral arguments. Right-wing think tanks and blogs, for instance, ponder the damaging effect on disabled poor children of becoming “dependent” on government assistance, or they scrutinize government nutritional assistance for poor pregnant women and children in an effort to explain away positive outcomes for infants.

The willful ignorance and cruelty of it all can leave you gasping -- and gasp was all we did for decades. This is why we so desperately needed a movement for a new kind of moral economy. Occupy Wall Street, which has already changed the national conversation, may well be its beginning.

Frances Fox Piven is on the faculty of the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She is the author, along with Richard Cloward, of Regulating the Poor and Poor People’s Movements. Her latest book, just published, is Who’s Afraid of Frances Fox Piven? The Essential Writings of the Professor Glenn Beck Loves to Hate (The New Press). To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Piven discusses Glenn Beck’s bizarre fascination with her click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 Frances Fox Piven

Fear and loathing in the Cannes debt festival

2011-11-06T10:54:00.000-05:00

THE ROVING EYE
Fear and loathing in the Cannes debt festival
By Pepe Escobar

Death is better, a milder fate than tyranny.
- Aeschylus, Agamemnon

Words, once pronounced, are like mountains.
- Manchu proverb

Cannes is world-famous for its annual film festival that pulls all stops between glam and trash. That's qualification enough for this Club Med resort as the perfect setting for a monster financial horror movie - a sort of drowning-by-numbers version of the Odyssey on crack. Some have called it the G-20 meeting. Others have called it The Slow and the Furious.

The apparent leading couple in this otherwise porno flick has been what some Parisian wits dubbed Merkozy - that camera-unfriendly cross-pollination of German Prime Minister Angela "Dear Prudence" Merkel and neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

In the initial scenes, straight out of a crappy episode of Friends, Merkozy are in total panic; the (invisible) God of the Market is angrier than Zeus, threatening by lightning bolt to reduce Fortress Europe to sub-Saharan poverty - without the benefit of a North Atlantic Treaty Organization-imposed no-fly zone.

The photogenic Great Barack Obama - the leader of the free world - is about to descend in Cannes, and Merkozy gotta do their best to show their humble abode - Europe - is in order, the (debt) trash at least swept under the (made in China) carpet.

And worse, the Almighty Chinese President Hu (Jintao) - the leader of the universe - will also show up, and they gotta use all their Brangelina charm to seduce the Chinese Almighty into disbursing some pocket money for charity out of his US$3.2 trillion reserves.

But then the Furies intervene - in the unlikely form of Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou, more besieged than Leonidas at the vThermopylae. He decides to ritually invoke democracy, via a popular referendum - so the Greek populace decides about their debt-ridden future. The whole eurozone, like a chorus of Harpies, shrieks in horror.

Merkozy then concoct a plot to put Aeschylus to shame. They rule that the Greeks are not allowed to decide on a bailout Merkozy - or their Franco-German banks - are imposing; the poor Greeks can only decide on whether Greece will remain in the eurozone. To add insult to injury, the bureaucratic vultures at the European Commission thunder that Greece should be expelled from the European Union if it leavest the euro.

Neo-Napoleonic Sarkozy at last finds a reason to beam, pronouncing the fateful words, "We cannot accept the break up of the euro, that would mean the break up of Europe."

So in this subplot at least, Merkozy and the European Harpies seem to have blackmailed the Greek masses into submission. Who among the masters cares about the Greek people living under a de facto protectorate and losing over 50% of their standard of living so foreign banks can be repaid? Who cares about Greece still buried under an - unsustainable - debt of 120% of their gross domestic product still by 2021?

Certainly not Mario Draghi, the new president of the European Central Bank (ECB), the successor of Jean-Claude Trichet. Dragon Draghi was a Goldman Sachs partner when the US giants were "helping" the then right-wing Greek government to mask their debts. It's all in the (too big to fail) family.

So Merkozy win against democracy - and "Europe" as we know it is no more. What's left is a giant prison B-movie, where the masters are Merkozy and zombies such as Draghi, European Commission head Joao Manuel Barroso, European council president Herman van Rompuy, and Franco-German banks, and the slaves are virtually the whole population of Club Med countries.

That thing called EFSF
The plot thickens. In disaster movie mode, the (invisible), wrathful God of the Market has to be appeased should a country even flirt with defaulting on their debt. The Hail Mary pass - the solution of last resort - is in theory the International Monetary Fund's firepower, currently at a paltry $380 billion.

So the movie may have started as a fractious eurozone summit; but suddenly morphs into an even more fractious, protracted, Oliver Stone-style International Monetary Fund (IMF) shareholder's meeting. IMF-sponsored mini-horror movie spin-offs are already in effect in no less than 53 countries - including three of the "PIGS", Portugal, Ireland and Greece. The IMF cannot possibly say the word out loud - "We need money". So they whisper among themselves how much they need a monster "firewall" in Washington should the eurozone bail-out collapse (and it will).

Time to call Alfred Hitchcock. There's a McGuffin in da house, and it goes by the Orwellian name of European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF). This thing is supposed to be the "firewall" - the life jacket in case Italy, for instance, is about to go the Titanic way. The EFSF thing should be worth an astounding $1.4 trillion. But where the hell is the money?

Audiences are excused for being startled. No Euro-screenwriter could possibly explain the EFSF without dragging the action to the mud. So here's a very un-cinematic flashback. Time to get a Coke refill.

Germany adamantly refuses to use the ECB to help submerging countries. So "Europe" (as in Merkozy and assorted minions) invented the EFSF. How to run a fund with no cash? Simple - you go the Goldman Sachs (racket) way.

The EFSF is a shell company based in that dull financial haven - Luxembourg. There's no money there - just "guarantees". First there was a guarantee of 440 billion euros (US$607.9 billion), most of it Franco-German. You can extend them; Germany's goes up to 211 billion euros, and France's to 158 billion euros. That's a lot of (non-existent) euros, but not enough to threat France's triple A rating. Remember, there's no money, this is just blah blah blah.
So with this blah blah blah secured, the Europeans ask the rating agencies for a notation. The EFSF gets an instant Triple A. Then they hit the markets to get loads of money loaned. This means more debt. The new debt is then used to help the super-indebted - such as Greece, or Ireland.

But the real problem will come when there are not enough funds to save Italy (1.8 trillion euros) if Italy goes under (bond yields on Italian debt are skyrocketing). So they need a "firewall" of at least 1 trillion euros. It's really hard to suck up more loans using the same guarantees; it's gonna cost more. When the going gets tough, who're you gonna call?

Almighty Hu, of course. Or, as back up, those paragons of democracy - the Persian Gulf monarchies.

It's still not real money. It's debt. And it all depends on convincing China - and in the worst scenario, the petromonarchies - that if they help with their not so virtual cash they will make some kind of profit.

But is the Almight Hu - and China - convinced? Not really.

Yellow peril no more
When it comes to the crunch, the "global" economy is all about national protectionism. A viable Plan B to counter all sorts of crisis would be the Tobin Tax, also known as FTT (as in financial transactions tax), the Robin Hood tax or even Wall Street tax - essentially a sales tax on trades of stocks, bonds, derivatives and other "products". The key target happens to be the mega banks that caused the current, never-ending economic crisis.

It's quite enlightening to see who's against it. The Obama administration. US Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner - a Wall Street 1% if there ever was one - who has fiercely lobbied the Europeans to drop it. The Brits (because they would pay a whole lot more due to the enormous volume of trading at the City of London).

It's also enlightening to see who's for it. Bill Gates, who in a report to the G-20 said the tax was "clearly technically feasible". To his credit, Sarkozy ("technically possible"). The governments of Germany, Brazil and Argentina.

As for the Almighty Hu, he's been inscrutable on the subject. As a matter of fact, inscrutability is his middle name. Arriving in Cannes, the Almighty Hu inscrutably said he encouraged "the stability of the eurozone and the euro". And that's it.

Everyone remembers a previous movie where the BRICS emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) were mulling whether to rescue the eurozone by buying eurobonds. That went nowhere. Now the talk of the town is China entering the EFSF.

The Chinese know well enough that two-bit European governments simply cannot appease the God of the Market. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao actually told Van Rompuy that Europe needs a structural reform. Two weeks ago, China's vice finance minister Zhu Guangyao was more lenient, saying that China shelling out cash was "under discussion", but Beijing wanted to know what the EU was really up to.

But then this Thursday Guangyao said it's "too soon" for China to discuss the EFSF. And Zhang Tao, the director general of the Bank of China, essentially said that no one still has a clue what's going on.

With all these no-clue subplots developing, we reach the end of the movie. That's when the audience finally figures out how much of a monster schizophrenic Merkozy really is. Merkel - who was never accused of being a Cameron Diaz - sports a cheap "cash under the mattress" mentality; that's why she's opening the door for the Chinese to enter Europe via the EFSF.

As for Sarkozy - who thinks he's as hot as Alain Delon - his megalomania defies Napoleon's. For over two years, he's been promising non-stop to "re-found capitalism". After posing as the Great Liberator of Libya, he thought Cannes would be the crowning of a larger than life president - perfect public relations for next year's election. But hubris intervened - straight out of Greece, of all places.

That leaves us with the real stars of this story - the Almighty Hu and Premier Wen. What they really want is hidden by words that don't look like mountains. "Mutual advantages." A "win-win" situation. Translation: China does the EFSF shuffle if it gets a "market economy status" - something that will allow it to eschew strict European Union anti-dumping legislation. The bureaucratic vultures at the European Commission refuse it - because they argue the EU is swamped by made-in-China products. According to the World Trade Organization, China will only get the status in 2016.

China also wants the end of an EU embargo over weapons sales. And most of all China wants way more decision power at the IMF and the World Bank, something shared by fellow BRICS members Brazil and India.

So the ball is in the European court. The bottom line is that if Beijing decides to help the EU - what an earth-shaking historical reversal - it may be more in symbol than in real substance. No one accumulates $3.2 trillion in foreign reserves by acting like an emir's wife at Harrods.

At the same time, as much as Beijing essentially sponsors consumption in the US, it knows it doesn't hurt to support Fortress Europe enough so it keeps consuming. It also makes sense to place some reserves in euros; geostrategically, it's priceless PR.

So the point of the whole The Slow and the Furious movie experience - how to convince the Almighty Hu to shell out some cash - remains open-ended. Time for a sequel. But if only we had Brangelina instead of Merkozy.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

The Pentagon-Arab Spring love story By Pepe Escobar

2011-11-03T00:10:00.000-04:00

THE ROVING EYE
The Pentagon-Arab Spring love story
By Pepe Escobar

Anyone who hoped the Arab Spring might eventually take over the Persian Gulf and those lands once known as Arabia Felix has enough reason to drown in sadness.

The Arab counter-revolution is stronger than ever - led by the House of Saud and its monarchy minions at the Gulf Counter-revolution Club (GCC), officially known as Gulf Cooperation Council. And their most precious ally is the Pentagon.

The New York Times made it official by relaying related White House/Pentagon spin. Considering the NYT can hardly pose as an icon of credibility since those months in 2002/2003 when its front page peddled outright lies about Iraq's nukes and/or its carnal ties with al-Qaeda, the spin must be translated.

The further militarization of the counter-revolutionary Persian Gulf - especially via more boots on the ground in Kuwait, and more warships - is being sold as a response to "a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran".

Note that both are pure wishful thinking. The NYT's martial sources insist, "the withdrawal [from Iraq] could leave instability". The fact is the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad effectively booted the Americans out (the Pentagon wanted at least 20,000 US boots on the ground after late 2011).

Thus the necessity of revamped Pentagon Central Command (Centcom) newspeak, as well as a Plan B, a grand new "security architecture" for the Persian Gulf crammed with air and naval hardware and even missile defense sold as a bland "post-Iraq footprint in the region".

As for "the threat of a belligerent Iran", very precise interests - sections of the industrial-military complex, the Republican party as a whole, the Israel lobby, the majority of corporate media - have been cheerleading for a strike on Iran for years.

Major General Karl R Horst, Centcom's chief of staff, is a big fan of "commitment in building partner capability and partner capacity" (translation; what we say, goes). He sold the firepower increase in the Persian Gulf to the NYT as a bland, Hollywoodish "back to the future" strategy, focused on "smaller but highly capable deployments and training partnerships with regional militaries".

Translation: lots of special forces, lots of weaponized drones and an inflation of those "partnerships" the Pentagon and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are so fond of. This is spun as "more efficient ways to deploy forces and maximize cooperation with regional partners"; or the best way to "expand security relationships", especially when there will be a "steep decrease in the number of intelligence analysts assigned to the region" (translation; let the towel heads do the footwork).

It also helps that Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) proved their unlimited love for NATO in the Libya war (while Bahrain and the UAE have boots on the ground in Afghanistan). That Arab willingness to please the masters goes a step further than the standard mantra, "the United States will not abandon its commitments in the Persian Gulf."

To sum it all up; think of all this as the GCC as a de facto annex to NATO.

Behind the 'security architecture'
Out there in Tajikistan - where she was examining the non-proliferation of the Arab Spring in Central Asia - US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton encouraged what was later leaked to the NYT as "a robust continuing presence" throughout a region that "should be freed from outside interference to continue on a pathway to democracy."

So this means the further militarization of the Persian Gulf comes as a response for US/Saudi interference preventing democracy? That can't possibly be; somebody's got to rewrite the script.

This whole scenario was predictable ever since Washington struck a deal with Riyadh for the consolidation of the Arab counter-revolution; you get us an Arab League vote so we take Muammar Gaddafi out, and we leave you alone to do what you want in the Persian Gulf (see Exposed: The US-Saudi deal Asia Times Online, April 2, 2011).

This led to the House of Saud invading Bahrain; Qatar training Libyan NATO rebels in their own territory while also sending Qatari special forces to Libya; and now a "stronger, multilateral security alliance" between the GCC and the Pentagon.

Lost in space US senators spinning that the US withdrawal from Iraq will be interpreted as a "strategic victory by our enemies in the Middle East", is business as usual. But it's another thing to see the NYT being gullible enough - or basically treating its readers as idiots - as it swallows the Saudi propaganda line that Iran is "the most worrisome threat" to all GCC members "as well as to Iraq itself". It's as if the paper was edited in Riyadh.

As a matter of fact, the Barack Obama administration's foreign policy in the Middle East seems to be edited in Riyadh. One just had to follow the US corporate media falling over themselves to kiss the hem of the gown of the new crown prince (the next in line for the throne) at the House of Saud, Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz.
Nayef, 78, supported by the nec plus ultra of medievalism and counter-revolutionary, damn-this-Arab Spring forces, is essentially the House of Saud's inquisitor-in-chief. Since 1975 he has presided over the security apparatus at the Ministry of Interior, which along with the US-trained National Guard, faithful to frail King Abdullah, 87, are the best weaponized bodies in Saudi Arabia.

Nayef is the Darth Vader of a 130,000-strong paramilitary force, all the national and local police, customs, immigration, the coast guard, the border guard and the dreaded religious police. His ministry's response to the Arab Spring has been a non-stop crackdown. Anyone who's even suspected of trying to start a political demonstration, not to mention a movement, is arrested; that includes young people uploading YouTube videos.

There are at least 20,000 political prisoners in Saudi jails. Since April, it's illegal to "threaten national security" or "insult Islam"; Nayef was responsible for the vagueness of the new law and all that implies. Anyone trying an Occupy Riyadh or Occupy Jeddah would be beheaded.

Yet for his countless Washington fans, who beam at this 36-year counter-terror CV, Nayef is a "conservative pragmatist". This is his official denomination since revealed by a WikiLeaks 2009 State Department cable.

No wonder they love Nayef in Washington. His Holy Trinity is Washington-Riyadh joined at the hip; his hatred of Iran and Shi'ites in general (even Saudi Shi'ites); and his war on terror commitment against al-Qaeda.

No one talks about his visceral hatred of women's rights, and his visceral hatred of all things democratic; that's when the label "social conservative" comes handy. At the start of the Arab Spring, Nayef dismissed Tunisians as "basically French", and Cairo residents as "louche urbanites". The only true Arabs were Saudis; democracy, as they see it (or as the House of Saud sees for them) is for sissies.

In internal House of Saud politics, that palace intrigue realm of desert macho men who love to dye their moustaches black, Nayef's top opponents are not his brothers, the powerful Sudayri seven, who are now five (after the death of King Fahd and recently Prince Sultan), named after the tribe of their mother Hassa, Ibn Saud's favorite wife.

Still gerontocracy is the name of the game; brothers Bandar, Musaid and Mishaal's health conditions are appalling. As for brother Salman, the governor of Riyadh, he likes to pose as a journalist, as owner of the Asharq al-Awsat newspaper.

Nayef's top opponents are the nephews of Ibn Saud, starting with wily former Washington ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush; Prince Talal, father of billionaire prince al-Waleed; Vice Minister of Defense Khaled bin Sultan; and Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of intelligence in the 1980s and former Osama bin Laden pal.

None of these will threaten Nayef; what matters for the House of Saud is the dynasty's survival. As King Abdullah prepares to meet his maker, the Pentagon could not find a more reliable regional partner: Grand Inquisitor Nayef.

NATO will soon rule over the whole Mediterranean as a NATO lake. Africom is implanting itself deeper and deeper in Africa. Centcom rules the Persian Gulf with the GCC in tow. Democracy is for sissies; there's no business like the "security architecture" business.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

(Copyright 2011 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue. It's a higher truth.

2011-11-02T00:59:00.000-04:00

The Anti-Empire Report

November 1st, 2011
by William Blum
www.killinghope.org

It doesn't matter to them if it's untrue. It's a higher truth.

"We came, we saw, he died."
— US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton,
giggling, as she spoke of the depraved murder of Moammar Gaddafi

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: "We came, we saw, 3,000 died ... ha- ha."

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands ... this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a "bloodbath" in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn't intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi's army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)¹
The New York Times (March 22) observed:

... the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

The Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels' media operation:

It's not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:
No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That's [Qaddafi's] propaganda.)

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels' trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for "humanitarian" intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can't get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?

In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.²

For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, have a look at this video.

If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.³

In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴ The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the "basic source" of legislation, and laws that contradict "the teachings of Islam" would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.⁵

Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as "terrorists" in the United States for a lot less.

What began in Libya as "normal" civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, "Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence". The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.

Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi's planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that's the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of "eyewitnesses": "little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally". After awhile, he declares that "there is no way" to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?

Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization's working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.

Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court's Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document's Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as "redacted". In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.

Historical footnote: "Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe's takeover" in the Mideast.⁶

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: "We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. ... Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair."⁷

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.⁸ ... Then came shock and awe!

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.⁹

In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that "he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians." "Finally," Marcos said, "they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes."¹⁰ Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.

The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.¹¹ The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America's help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that "the four powers" (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹² Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.

America's presstitutes

Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) ... Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here's the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: "Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide"; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.

And here's TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: "They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world ... 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican."¹³
The object of Leno's humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the "justification" of America's murderous attack on Libya. If I had been one of Leno's guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: "Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn't you like to have that here?"

I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.

And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi's personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There's no business like show business.

The Iraqi Lullabye

On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled "What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?" concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don't try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: "I'd like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days."
I received no reply.

Has there ever been an empire that didn't tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an "international pariah". We don't hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba". This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year	Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	59-2	US, Israel
1993	88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	101-2	US, Israel
1995	117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	157-2	US, Israel
1999	155-2	US, Israel
2000	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	187-2	US, Israel
2011	186-2	US, Israel

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: "The majority of Cubans support Castro ... The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. ... every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba." Mallory proposed "a line of action which ... makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government."¹⁴ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Notes

Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011 ^↩
See, for example, "Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya", June 20, 2011^↩
The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011 ^↩
Washington Post, September 15, 2011, "Islamists rise to fore in new Libya" ^↩
USA Today, October 24, 2011 ^↩
Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007 ^↩
Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected ^↩
New York Times, November 6, 2003 ^↩
New York Times, April 16, 2002 ^↩
Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7 ^↩
Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop: Associated Press, May 29, 1983, "Leftist Government Officials Visit United States" ^↩
The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123) ^↩
Washington Post, October 26, 2011 ^↩
Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩

–
William Blum is the author of:

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

The Real Reason Why Gadaffi Was Killed & Why We're In Libya

2011-11-01T11:52:00.000-04:00