SPECIAL REPORT. Aprés Paris: False flag in Copenhagen? bt Wayne Madsen

SPECIAL REPORT. Aprés Paris: False flag in Copenhagen?

After having shot up a free speech debate at Copenhagen's Krudttonden Cultural Center that was chaired by Swedish Prophet Mohammed cartoonist Lars Vilks, and killing a Danish film director, an unnamed man said to look like an Arab was tracked down by police, using CCTV footage, to Copenhagen's heavily-Middle Eastern NØrrebro distict. The unnamed 22-year old gunman, said to have been involved in a criminal gang, was then reported to have been killed in a shootout with police, however, not before the gunman made what has become an almost predictable stop at Copenhagen's main synagogue where he shot and killed a Jewish security guard named Dan Uzan, a dual Israeli-Danish citizen. 

Still, without initially disclosing the identity of the killer, police were able to conclusively state that the man was a "lone wolf" who was responsible for the attacks on the cultural center and the synagogue. The Copenhagen attacks began to take on the same air of "false flag" stench as did the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hyper Cacher kosher market in Paris. Some Danish news reports stated that the gunman had been hired from the ranks of a Danish skinhead motorcycle gang to commit the murders, a wrinkle that would dispel any notion of a "lone wolf" attack.

Those charged with carrying out the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher, the Franco-Algerian brothers Kouachi and Franco-Senegalese-Malian Amedy Coulibaly, it turned out, were well-known to French police and intelligence as was Mohammed Merah, charged in the 2012 slayings of French soldiers in Montauban and three children and their teacher at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish day school in Toulouse. And sure enough, Danish police and intelligence files did turn up the name of the alleged Copenhagen shooter, one Omar Alhamid Alhussein, a Danish national and criminal with a violent record who was released from a Danish prison just two weeks prior to the twin attacks. 

Echoing the "glittering generality" rhetoric of French President Francois Hollande in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt called the aftermath of the Copenhagen attacks “a fight for freedom against a dark ideology." Thorning-Schmidt is the daughter-in-law of former British Labor Party leader Neil Kinnock and a promoter of European federalism. 

There was no surprise that French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who is as staunchly pro-Israeli as Prime Minister Manuel Valls, whose wife is an ardent Zionist, flew off to Copenhagen after the twin attacks to show solidarity with the Danish people. Immediately, Danish police said the Copenhagen attacks were linked to the Charlie Hebdo slayings. A new meme, similar to "Je suis Charlie" (I am Charlie), spread aorund the Internet: "We are all Danish tonight." The predictable signage with such trite mottos followed in short order on the web.

The head of the Danish Security and Intelligence Service, the Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET), Jens Madsen, said, without giving the alleged terrorist's name, that the dead assailant was "inspired by Islamic radicalism." The script, as previously written in similar cases in Paris, Montauban, and Toulouse, appears to have been previously written. As with the alleged French terrorists, Alhussein's radicalization in prison was passed on to PET by Michael Gjorup, the head of Denmark's prison and probation service. Madsen verified that Alhussein had "been on the radar" of the PET prior to the attack. Veering away somewhat from the "lone wolf" theory, the Danish authorities decided to arrest two initially unnamed men who were said to have been accomplices of Alhussein.

But few recall that it was Cazeneuve who was reportedly under investigation by 45-year old French Police Commissioner Helric Fredou, the second in command of the French Judicial Police in Limoges, for links with Jeanette Bougrab, the so-called girlfriend of slain Charlie Hebdoeditor Stephane Charbonnier or "Charb." Bougrab claimed to have been Charb's girlfriend and even insinuated that he fathered her daughter. However, other French news reports claim that Charb was gay and that Bougrab made up her relationship out of whole cloth. Fredou is said to have committed suicide at the height of his investigation of a link between Bougrab and Cazeneuve. And, according to French news reports, Fredou had Cazeneuve under suspicion since the police commissioner's days as Cherbourg police commissioner. Cazeneuve has been mayor of the town of Cherbourg-Octeville since 2001 and it was during his time as police commissioner that Fredou first became aware of Cazeneuve's links with Mossad and his relationship with Bougrab and her cabal of anti-Muslim and Zionist provocateurs.

Fredou is said to have shot himself in the head after becoming despondent after meeting the family of one of victims of the French attacks. However, Fredou's family and friends discounted reports that Fredou was depressed. Furthermore, they pointed out that he had cracked open a major lead in the terrorist attacks a move that placed him at loggerheads with Cazeneuve and Israeli Prime Minster Binyamin Netanyahu, who intended, as his display of arrogance in Paris indicated, to make as much political hay out of the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks as possible. After the Copenhagen attacks, Netanyahu called on all European Jews to emigrate to Israel. He made the same call after the Paris attacks. 

In addition to the suspicions around Fredou's alleged, but unlikely "suicide," came word from a Dutch on-line publication Quote that Charlie Hebdo, in addition to the French newspaper Libération, was purchased byÉdouard Baron de Rothschild shortly before the attacks. Charlie Hebdo, while publishing blasphemous cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, Jesus, and Pope Francis, took a decidedly cautious road in criticizing Judaism or important figures of world Jewry. In fact, in 2009, Charlie Hebdocartoonist Maurice Siné was fired for publishing a cartoon in the satirical magazine for making fun of Jean Sarkozy, the son of Nicolas Sarkozy, for "marrying up" when he wed Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, the Jewish heiress of the large consumer electronics company, Darty Group. Siné was accused of "inciting racial hatred" but Siné had the last laugh when a French court in 2010 awarded him €40,000 from Charlie Hebdo's coffers for wrongful termination.

Michael Emsalem, the CEO of Hyper Cacher, conveniently sold his shares of stock in Hyper Cacher the day before Coulibaly allegedly stormed the market and shot several hostages after a standoff with police. Emsalem announced plans to move to Manhattan's Upper East Side, where his wife and daughters had already been living before the attack on the Paris market. Emsalem and his family have applied for U.S. green cards as a result of purported rampant "anti-Semitism" in France. Emsalem's dumping of his firm's stock was reminiscent of Wall Street insiders placing put options on American and United Airlines a day before the 9/11 attack. 

For Denmark, the recent attacks smelled of the same psychological operations that were employed by PET's previous chief, Jakob Scharf, a Danish Jew who never missed an opportunity of linking Danish terror events to global "jihadism." In January 2011, Scharf, who has close connections to Israel, led a joint Danish PET-Swedish SAPO security service law enforcement team in self-congratulating themselves for rounding up a group of five alleged Islamist terrorists who were charged with planning to attack the Copenhagen offices of the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in a Mumbai-like attack planned for the same month. Scharf stated, "It is our assessment that this is a militant Islamist group and they have links to international terrorist networks," adding that the group could have been linked to David Headley, an American charged with aiding in the Mumbai attacks. Scharf conveniently left out the fact that Headley was covertly working for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) at the time of the Mumbai attacks and may, himself, have been a false flag terrorist operative working for U.S. intelligence.

The Mossad's Danish "PET" partner-in-crime for false flag attacks

Jyllands-Posten sparked outrage among Muslims worldwide when it published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed considered blasphemous by Muslims. The newspaper's cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who approved the publication of the cartoons, was identified as being linked to various neocon and Israel Lobby operatives in Washington, including the propagandists at the neocon American Enterprise Institute. While Scharf, who has moved Denmark's PET closer to Mossad more than his predecessors have done, talks of international Islamist conspiracies to carry out terrorism, he is silent on the international conspiracy by Israeli propagandists to incite violence by publishing cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. The neocon Mohammed cartoon operation, which incited violence that resulted in deaths from riots staged in cities in the Muslim world, never registered on Scharf's "criminal conspiracy meter" since he is part and parcel of it. Rose's columns have been welcomed by the neocon and Israel Lobby-owned and operated Wall Street Journal.

Scharf's operation against the alleged terrorists, lauded by the Obama administration, began to fall apart shortly after it started. One of the five charged, Abdullah Muhammed Salman, an Iraqi immigrant, was released after his arrest due to lack of evidence. He said that he merely rented an apartment to three of the accused in the plot and was unaware of their "plans."


Scharf's fingerprints were on past fale flag events in Denmark while he headed the PET

Scharf resigned as the head of the PET in December 2013 amid charges that he spied on the then-leader of the right-wing People's Party and Member of Parliament Pia Kjærsgaard. A number of Scharf's staff resigned after they said they lost confidence in his leadership abilities. However, Scharf has remained as National Police Commissioner in an unpaid leave status since his departure as the head of the PET. In a complaint, five PET employees said Scharf abused his position as head of Danish "homeland security" by ordering agents to access Kjærgarrd's private calendar to prevent her from visiting the "independent" Copenhagen hippie/anarchist commune of Christiana ub her capacity as a member of the parliamentaryJudicial Commission. Was Scharf concerned that the anti-immigration leader might have discovered that Scharf was using Christiana to recruit all sorts of ne'er-do-wells for his Al Qaeda false flag operations?

Scharf's Al Qaeda "Ugly Duckling"
One such ne-er-do-well reportedly recruited by Schard was Al Qaeda infiltrator Morten Storm. The blond-haired Storm convinced Al Qaeda that he was a fellow jihadist. However, Storm said he was recruited by Scharf to send the PET, as well as the CIA, plans of Al Qaeda's next moves. Storm, in a book, said he helped the CIA target several al Qaeda leaders for assassination, including the American Islamist leader Anwar a-Awlaki, killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. Given the close relationship between PEWT and Mossad, made stronger under Scharf's tenure, Storm was also accused of working for the Mossad as a triple agent. Storm did admit that he also acted as an agent for Britain's MI5. Storm appeared on CBS News's 60 Minutes to hype his "exploits" as the "Danish James Bond" who successfully infiltrated Al Qaeda. Scharf was secretly patting himself on the back for the success of the operation that put him on the intelligence "A-list" in Langley.

Scharf denied having recruited Storm or having any relationship with him. However, Scharf's predecessor as the head of the PET, Hans JØrgen Bonnichsen corroborated Scharf's role in Storm's book, "Agent Storm: My Life Inside Al Qaeda and the CIA."

  
Al Qaeda's Danish "Ugly Duckling" Morten Storm. Left as an Al Qaeda jihadist. Right as celebrity spy.

The newspaper that helped hype Storm's "exploits" was none other thanJyllands-Posten, the same Zionist-connected paper that spurred on the first Prophet Mohammed cartoon violence. The newspaper wasted no time in cashing in on the Copenhagen shootings in stating, "Unfortunately, it is difficult to claim surprise at the attacks in Copenhagen . . . [the attack] was not a question of if, but when." The neoconservatives relish in their self-fulfilled prophecies.

The Three "Jakobs" of Copenhagen

Meanwhile, Scharf has started a private security firm, Certa Intelligence and Security A/S with his partner Jakob Dreyer. Scharf's status as a National Police Commissioner within the Ministry of Justice continues until January 2016, which gives him continued access to police business, including the investigation of the attack on the freedom of speech conference and the Copenhagen synagogue. Scharf's special status also allows him to recruit for Certa from his former PET agents. A third board member of Certa's board is Jakob Shank-Pedersen. Scharf says that Certa's main mission is to convince countries around the world that the Islamist radical threat is real. Schard recently said in an interview, "We are also more exposed than before because of the militant Islamist environments that have allies and sympathizers in all countries." It is the same scare tactics that have successfully been used by former U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to drum up business for their post-9/11 security businesses. The recent attacks in Copenhagen should certainly increase business for Certa.

While the Danish police, along with INTERPOL and the FBI, are looking for Muslims and "Arab-looking" terrorists running around Denmark, perhaps they should be paying closer attention to the recent activities of the "Three Jakobs of Copenhagen."

While there is definitely "something rotten in the state of Denmark," to quote Marcellus in Shakespeare's "Hamlet," it is not the cheese or the halal butcher shop but something that was thrown from the top rung of "Jakobs' ladder." But this ladder is not the fabled staircase to heaven but an express elevator to the top floor of Mossad headquarters.

Obama's 'stupid stuff' turned upside down By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Obama's 'stupid stuff' turned upside down By Pepe Escobar  PARIS - I've been rovin' around Europe for a while and the star of the show is definitely The Caliph. Former Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has totally outstripped Vladimir Putin as Doctor Evil of the hour. Where's a good ol' Cold War 2.0 when you need it? Well, upstaged by the Pentagon's "long war" - our familiar GWOT (Global War on Terror). First Obama promised there would be no ground troops to fight The Caliph - as in a re-invasion of Iraq. Then General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that if the current gambit of Obama's self-defined "Don't So Stupid Stuff" foreign policy doctrine does not work - and it won't - he'll go for ground troops, embedded or otherwise. Right on cue, The Caliph went Hollywood, releasing the trailer of The Caliphate's upcoming mega-production, Flames of War. Directed by Michael Bay (Fall, 2014). Will that go straight to Netflix? You just can't beat the Marvel Comics school of geopolitics. Confide in me, baby  Meanwhile, in Paris, President General Francois Hollande is itching to deploy his Rafales and get into a new war - considering that's about the only thing that could lift the mood of a wretched president, whose administration has barely survived a "confidence" vote; compare that "confidence" with the nasty epithets with which his team is showered by largely unemployed, taxed to death or swamped by red tape Parisians. Obama has already sent 475 extra military "advisers" to Baghdad and Iraqi Kurdistan. There are at least 1,600 US military already on the ground in Iraq. That's how Vietnam started. The CIA, supported by unmatched ground intel, swears there are exactly 31.785 jihadis fighting for The Caliph. Well, roughly. Two-thirds of these are supposed to be in Syria. So the new war, in fact, is all across "Syraq". Or what The Caliph calls IS, Islamic State, his own private emirate. The no less meticulous Dempsey, for his part, is sure it will take up to five months to train and weaponize a new bunch of "moderate" rebels to fight the Caliph. Wait a minute; foolish global public opinion was supposed to believe the previous "moderate" rebels - supported by Qatar - would one day fulfill the "Assad must go" Obama mandate. Well, they didn't. "Our" bastards at the petrodollar racket known as GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) have duly promised to help Obama's new war, alongside Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq. Turkey will only get involved in the "humanitarian" front - while allowing smuggled oil sold by The Caliph's goons into its territory. The members of the wretched Arab League have solemnly promised to be "determined" in cutting off the flux of weapons and cash to The Caliph show. Yet they would never have the balls of the Kurdish peshmerga, who have just killed the Mosul chief of IS. This kind of ground intel, plus following the money, as in the oil smuggling routes, would finish off the Caliphate in no time. But that's not what endless GWOT is all about. Caliph, give us a hand  With such an array of Hollywood thrills on show, who cares about Ukraine? Well, it may have been snuffed out of the news cycle after the latest nasty package of US/EU sanctions, but it's back in the spotlight this Thursday, as Ukrainian oligarch turned president Petro Poroshenko visits The Caliph's nemesis in Washington. So expect a frantic rerun of Evil Empire rhetoric - plus ample indignation caused by the Russian "invasion" of Ukraine. That will last barely a day. "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" changes its tune like surfing on iTunes. And the tune now is the "Syraq" offensive; yet another Obama "kinetic" operation, Billy Idol's Rebel Yell remixed. That leaves plenty of space for US Think Tankland to carp that Russia "aggression" will profit from the new tune to "advance" in Central and Eastern Europe, and the China "threat" will profit to "dominate" the Western Pacific. So what's more crucial for the Empire of Chaos; Russia, China or "Syraq"? They don't have a clue. They are just trying not to do "stupid stuff". \ For all that volcanic Beltway paranoia, the Big Picture in the long run spells out Moscow expanding its Pipelineistan nodes throughout Eastern Europe all the way to Western Europe, thus enlarging, commercially, its "soft" zone of influence. No "invasion" required. On Ukraine, the Big Picture spells out the European Union mired in a horrendous crisis, under a third recession in five years, obviously without the cash, not to mention the will, to pay Ukraine's humongous bills. Sooner - with negotiations starting this Saturday in Berlin - or later the EU will have to find an accommodation with Moscow to guarantee its precious gas supplies. That leaves warmongering NATO - as in the EU under the Pentagon's thumb. All rhetoric about that puny "rapid reaction force" aside, the fact is that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization won't have the balls to confront Russia, via troops deployed in Ukraine. And there will be no Obama "Stupid Stuff" aerial bombing of federalists in Donbass - as if Russophones in Ukraine defending their land and their language against a form of slow motion ethnic cleansing could be compared to The Caliph's multinational goons in "Syraq". US public opinion very well knows - well, maybe not - that people in Donbass are not threatening to cross into El Paso tomorrow. So much hard work to pivot from GWOT to the Big Boys in Eurasia. So little time - and competence. The Caliph's goons have announced on the record they would go for beheading Putin. If only the Pentagon would subcontract the job. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Obama and Putin should be in the same room at Normandy celebrations’ by Pepe Escobar

Obama and Putin should be in the same room at Normandy celebrations’

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times/Hong Kong, an analyst for RT and TomDispatch, and a frequent contributor to websites and radio shows ranging from the US to East Asia.

Get short URL

Published time: June 04, 2014 14:29

U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

Share on tumblr

RT:President Hollande plans to dine twice in one night, separately with Barack Obama and with Vladimir Putin. Is this smart diplomacy or exacerbating the awkwardness?The Obama administration is pursuing schoolboy tactics by refusing to sit down with Putin at the same room to discuss the Ukrainian crisis and to try to diffuse existing tensions, Asia Times roving reporter Pepe Escobar told RT.

Pepe Escobar: I’ve been wondering about the menu actually. Who gets the cheeseburger, who gets the stick of foie gras. But this is really very serious because Ben Rhodes, that spectacular mediocrity that acts as one of Obama's foreign policy advisors, leaked to the American press that there was never supposed to be a one-on-one meeting between Obama and Putin. So, the White House actually refused to be in the same room with Hollande and Putin. So the French had to scramble to organize two dinners in a row. This is so ridiculous I cannot find words to qualify it. And coming on the heels of the $1 billion Obama hammer, which is more NATO expansion in Poland and close the Ukrainian border as well, practically giving a blank check to the extremely hysterical Polish government to keep trying telling the world that Russia is going to invade tomorrow, or the day after. It’s completely absurd. And they are in Normandy to celebrate 70 years [since the Normandy landings in WWII]. This is an extremely serious business, the participation especially of Russia. Twenty five million to 30 million people there were dead. In fact, Russia won the war first, and then the West won the war against Nazi Germany. So Obama and Putin should be in the same room, they belong to the same room vis-à-vis the effort of the 70 years ago. Now because of schoolboy tactics of the Obama administration we have these ridiculous two dinners in a row on Thursday in France.

RT: Obama will get the first meal sitting, the Russian president second. That's probably no accident, is it?

PE: The empire first with cheeseburgers and then Putin with borshch and beef stroganoff. Obama doesn’t know how to drink wine and Putin is not a big fan of it, so who is going to drink the big ones? Hollande. We have been diverted into faits de guerre (acts of war - RT) as the French say. Stupidity. When we should be talking about serious business like Obama, Putin and Hollande in the same room at a dinner discussing Ukraine, discussing the expansion of NATO, discussing the BRICS and NATO as opposing camps nowadays and trying to diffuse the international tensions they were stalked up essentially by the Obama administration going back to the putsch in February in Ukraine. And now we have the completely crazy narrative that over 200 or 300 civilians killed in Eastern Ukraine are terrorists. We have the victims being blamed. This is completely crazy. This should be discussed at the presidential level at the same room.

RT: Which of the dinners is likely to prove toughest for Hollande to digest, in your opinion?

PE: I would say more indigestible dinner would be with Obama in fact. French big business, they are not interested in applying more sanctions on Russia. French business wants to stay in Russia and do business with Russia and the Russian sphere. The Americans are more complicated because they are trying to ram over the heads of assorted European governments, the Trans-Atlantic Partnership and the French are absolutely terrified about it. Not only parts of Hollande’s government but the average French citizen. First of all, because of the drubbing that the Socialists got in the European Parliamentary elections, much of it had to do with the Trans-Atlantic Partnership, which is in a nutshell American big business taking over large slates of European industry and markets. This is what Obama is going to be plugging to Hollande on Thursday night: “Please, sign the Trans-Atlantic Agreement.” Obama is on a military trip – Poland, Brussels, NATO – and on a commercial trip, which is this very special meeting with Hollande, trying to convince Hollande to sign this agreement within the next few months. It’s not going to happen, and public pressure in France is going to be enormous against it.

Why France is playing 'stupid' on Iran By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE
Why France is playing 'stupid' on Iran
By Pepe Escobar 

PARIS - US Secretary of State John Kerry has famously stated the US "is not blind" or "stupid" in its push to clinch a historic deal over the Iranian nuclear program. [1] So now that the world has been informed, he must, cryptically, have been talking about France. 

The failed Geneva negotiations this past weekend over a temporary nuclear deal at least carried the merit of revealing who is really blocking it: the axis of fear and loathing composed by the Likudniks in Israel, the House of Saud, and the Francois Hollande administration in France. 

Torrents of bytes have already detailed how Israel routinely hijacks US foreign policy. Here's yet one more graphic demonstration of how Wag the Dog works. Last Friday evening, President Barack Obama called Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu asking him not to derail Geneva. Bibi then duly picked up the phone and called, in succession, British Prime Minister David Cameron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Hollande and asked them ... to derail Geneva. 

Hollande was the only one who followed Bibi's marching orders. And all this after Kerry himself had been lectured by Bibi at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport on Friday morning. 

Flash forward to the coda, early Sunday morning. Not by accident, Wendy Sherman, the lead US negotiator on the Iranian nuclear dossier, a certified Israeli-firster and borderline racist, [2] flew from Geneva straight to Israel to duly "reassure" her true leader, Bibi, that no deal would be clinched. 

It's no secret that Bibi and the Likudniks also run a great deal of Capitol Hill. Apart from bombing Geneva, Bibi may also rack up another temporary victory, with the US Congress about to add even more sanctions on Iran by attaching them to the National Defense Authorization Act. 

Meet Bandar Fabius 
As far as French behavior is concerned, it is conditioned as much by the formidable Israeli lobby in Paris as hard cash from Gulf petro-monarchies. 

It certainly helped that, according to The Times of Israel, French parliament member Meyer Habib - also a holder of an Israeli passport, a former official Likud spokesperson in France, and a close pal of Bibi's - called French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius to tell him Israel would attack Iranian nuclear installations if the current deal on the table was clinched. [3] 

Call it the AIPAC effect. Habib is the vice-president of the Conseil Representatif des Institutions juives de France, or CRIF - the French equivalent to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The ghostwriter of President Hollande's speeches also happens to be a member of CRIF. 

Fabius, grandiloquent and as slippery as runny Roquefort, invoked - what else - "security concerns of Israel" to derail Geneva. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Mohammed Javed Zarif were always extremely worried about being sabotaged by their own internal opposition, the hard line Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. So their number one directive was that no details of the deal should be leaked during the negotiations. 

That's exactly what Fabius did. Even before Kerry landed in Geneva, Fabius was telling a French radio station that Paris would not accept a jeu des dupes ("fools' game"). 

The role of Fabius was pricelessly summed up by the proverbial unnamed Western diplomat telling Reuters, "The Americans, the EU and the Iranians have been working intensively for months on this proposal, and this is nothing more than an attempt by Fabius to insert himself into relevance late in the negotiations." [4] 

Terabytes of spin have been asserting that Washington and Paris are playing good cop-bad cop on the Iranian dossier. Not exactly; it's more like the Gallic rooster once again showing off. 

Hollande was gung-ho on bombing Damascus when Obama backed off at the 11th minute from the Pentagon's "limited" attack; Hollande was left staring at a stale bottle of Moet. On both Syria and Lebanon, Paris is unabashedly playing a mix of neocolonial hugs and kisses while sharing the bed with Israel and the House of Saud. 

But why, once again, shoot itself in the foot? Paris has lost a lot of money - not to mention French jobs, via automaker Peugeot - because of the Iran sanctions dementia. 

Ah, but there is always the seduction of Saudi Arabia's intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan, aka Bandar Bush, and the Gulf petro-monarchies. In a nutshell; Bandar Fabius was nothing but playing paperboy for the House of Saud. The prize: huge military contracts - aircraft, warships, missile systems - and possible construction of nuclear power plants in Saudi Arabia, a deal similar to the one energy giant French Areva clinched last year with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). 

The ghost of Montaigne must be squirming; France does not do irony anymore. Iran has no right to have its own nuclear plants, but France builds them and operates them for its Wahhabi clients.

The West doing Israel's bidding makes sense; after all Israel may also be interpreted as a Western aircraft carrier in the heart of the Arab Middle East. As for France doing the Wahhabis' bidding, just follow the money - from Veolia building and operating water desalination plants in Saudi Arabia to all those Rafale fighter jets to be unloaded. 

Qatar, that slavery paradise presented by FIFA with a World Cup, has already invested over US$15 billion - and counting - in France, from shares in Veolia and energy behemoth Total to construction firm Vinci, media giant Lagardere, and full control of Paris Saint Germain, home of the new King of Paris, football icon Zlatan "Ibracadabra" Ibrahimovic. Not to mention that Qatar has bought virtually every significant square inch between Madeleine and Opera in Paris. 

Hollande is a joke. This week he's on the cover of the Courrier International weekly (headline: "The Art of the Fall"), with pan-European media judging him "incoherent", "paralyzed" and "incompetent" (and these are the merciful epithets). On the weekend edition of the establishment Le Figaro daily, he was being destroyed because of France's (latest) credit rating downgrade by Standard & Poor's. 

King Sarko The First - aka former president Nicolas Sarkozy - must be beaming; Hollande is now the most unpopular president in French history. Paris remains great - but mostly for hordes of fleeting tourists from emerging markets, not for hordes of unemployed Parisians. 

So it's Bandar Fabius to the rescue! Gulf petro-monarchy cash is the salvation. In thesis, this show of "independence" should translate into billions of euros in contracts and investments. It also helps that "incompetent" Hollande is on an official visit to Israel in the next few days. 

That pivot to Persia
Forget about finding details of the real reasons for this "show of independence" in French mainstream media, apart from Le Monde Diplomatique's Alain Gresh in his blog. [5] 

Explanations are absolutely pathetic. France is "alone against all"; it has shown "responsibility"; it has "reaffirmed its independence". And of course all the blame lies on Kerry, who allegedly "came up with a text that nobody ever saw before". Every shill has scrambled to cast Israeli-firster Fabius as savior. And yet the Elysee Palace has stressed that Fabius was just following Hollande's orders - which, in thesis, meant renegotiating the "weak points" of the deal. Call it, essentially, "incompetent" Hollande showing Obama he's got balls. 

Paris has spun that the problems with the deal concern Tehran's heavy-water reactor in Arak and its stock of medium-enriched uranium. US and Iranian diplomats had been working hard towards a compromise; Tehran would keep building the reactor over the six-month period of the interim agreement, but tests would be with dummy fuel rods and ordinary water. 

Kerry was working on it until Fabius unleashed his peacock act in a long session that only finished late into Saturday morning. This led Iranian Foreign Minister Zarif to note, wryly, that the P5+1 (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) needed to negotiate with each other before negotiating with Iran. 

The P5+1 internal mess could seriously compromise the next round of negotiations next week in Geneva. Yet Kerry, if he noticed it, managed to change his narrative to something even more theater of the absurd; he's now blaming Iran for the non-deal. [6] It's as if, after reading the French papers, he decided to atone for his sins. 

Arguably Iran has proved to the whole, real, flesh and blood "international community" that it wants a deal and it is willing to negotiate. But then there are the sanctions to be approved by the US Congress - a de facto internal American sabotage. Yet these are third-party sanctions - where other countries are "punished" by the US for trading with Iran. No one will take these seriously, starting with the Asian powers, Turkey and Russia. 

For the moment, no deal may seem better than a bad deal. It might happen at the next meeting, in Geneva on November 22. Most likely, a full interim deal will happen in a few months. The Obama administration wants a deal. France, for all its posture, is irrelevant. 

Worse. Paris is being "blind" and "stupid" - to adapt Kerry's words - by alienating French companies, in the energy sector, nuclear energy and manufacturing, from the fabulous possibilities unleashed by a normalized relationship between Iran and the West. If the Hollande gang believes they will be "saved" by the Wahhabis, they must be on mescal. 

It may take years - and it will. But Washington will inevitably find some sort of accommodation with Iran. US corporations want it. The energy-starved West wants it. Even the US hyperpower complex wants it - as it will give it way more leeway in Southwest Asia and beyond. The axis of fear and loathing of Israel, the House of Saud and France may play spoilers - but not for long. "Pivot to Asia"? Not before a pivot to Persia. 

Notes:
1. Iran nuclear talks: US 'not stupid' - John Kerry, BBC News, November 10, 2013.
2. The DNA of Iranians and Under Secretary Sherman, Counterpunch, November 4, 2013.
3. Israel will attack Iran if you sign the deal, French MP told Fabius, Times of Israel, November 10, 2013.
4. Iran nuclear deal unlikely as split emerges in Western camp: diplomats, Reuters, November 9, 2013.
5. Click here (in French).
6. Iran balked at Geneva nuclear deal, says John Kerry, The Guardian, November 11, 2013. 

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

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.