While Trump tweeted and sniffled, grown-up leaders planned major global projects By The Wayne Madsen Report

While Trump tweeted and sniffled, grown-up leaders planned major global projects By The Wayne Madsen Report
While Donald Trump displayed his immaturity by tweeting threats and sniffling during televised interviews, the world's grown-up leaders were meeting in Beijing to plan major and ambitious global projects foreseen by China's "One Belt, One Road" (OBOR) recreation of the ancient Silk Road. Chinese President Xi Jinping told assembled world leaders, who included Russian President Vladimir Putin, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, and United Nations Secretary General Antonio Gutteres, that China's vision of a new Silk Road would expand beyond its ancient predecessor to include global highways, railways, and maritime routes.

Xi spoke of the ancient road that linked  the "Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and Ganges, and the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers" via trade routes that extended through "Jiuquan, Dunhuang, Tulufan, Kashi, Samarkand, Baghdad and Constantinople, as well as ancient ports of Ningbo, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Beihai, Colombo, Jeddah, and Alexandria." The discussions in Beijing were a far cry from the "he said, she said" antics occurring in Washington, DC, the capital of what has truly become, in Mao Zedong's famed words, a "paper tiger."

The one clear message the Beijing meeting sent out to the world is that America’s “unipolar” vision of the world lies dead and buried. Even among Washington’s longtime friends and allies, one will not hear Donald Trump referred to as the “leader of the Free World.” That phrase has been discarded into the waste bin of history, along with America’s insistence that it is the world’s only “superpower.” The United States is a power, a second-rate one that happens to possess a first-rate nuclear arsenal.
The United States almost ignored the Beijing meeting completely. Its pathetic representation was carried out by Matt Pottinger, a little-known special assistant to Trump and the senior director for East Asia for the National Security Council. The only reason Trump sent anyone to represent the United States in Beijing was because President Xi made a special request for American representation during his recent meeting with Trump at the president’s private Mar-a-Lago Club resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Perhaps Trump was disinterested in OBOR because there were no projects for which his Trump Organization could profit. The gathered leaders were not discussing hotels and golf courses but trans-Eurasian transportation systems, South American regional infrastructure, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Western Balkans extension of Eurasian transport networks, and the very important environmental issues of "conserving and sustainably using oceans and seas, freshwater resources, as well as forests, mountains and drylands, protecting biodiversity, ecosystems and wildlife, combating desertification and land degradation." China announced two major environmental initiatives in Beijing: the Big Data Service Platform on Ecological and Environmental Protection and the Joint Initiative to Establish the International Coalition for Green Development on the Belt and Road with the United Nations Environment Program.

Why would Trump want to participate in a conference in which 1) he saw no profit motivation and 2) the assembled leaders were discussing issues that stand diametrically opposite from policies being enacted by Environmental Protection Agency director Scott Pruitt and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke?

It is reassuring that other world leaders are taking the environment into consideration when planning major projects like the Eurasian Land Bridge and the East-West Middle Corridor, the latter running from Xian in China to Rotterdam in Europe. Land bridges, comprising highway and rail routes, are planned throughout Eurasia, including China-Mongolia-Russia, China-Central and West Asia, China-Indochina Peninsula, China-Pakistan, and Bangladesh-China-India-Burma.

Xi announced that a China-Russia Regional Cooperation Development Investment Fund would have a initialization capital of $14 billion in capital to begin funding One Belt, One Road projects. Meanwhile, Trump's Congressional allies were talking of economic sanctions on China over North Korea and increased sanctions on Russia over everything from Syria to Ukraine. It is noteworthy that among the governments represented by influential political players in Beijing were both North and South Korea, as well as Syria -- the government, not the "regime," as it is referred to by Trump's chest-thumpers in the White House.



Further plans were enacted in Beijing to expand the Interbank Association of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), an alternative to the SWIFT interbank financial transfer network that is subject not only to surveillance by the Five Eyes (FVEY) signals intelligence allies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but also Western-imposed sanctions. The chiefs of the Washington, DC-based World Bank and International Monetary Fund listened to Chinese officials explain how the new Silk Road would bypass the Western and European Union political strings attached to both their institutions. China has initiated a Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme and Belt and Road Multi-currency Special Lending Scheme for Infrastructure Development that will allow participant nations to kiss the World Bank and IMF, with all of their "austerity" measures, goodbye. There is little wonder why the prime ministers of Greece, Spain, and Italy were in Beijing to find out more about loosening the financial shackles placed on them by the IMF, World Bank, and their European Union surrogates.

It also rankled the feathers of Trump's key Zionists in his administration -- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, special adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and National Economic Council chairman Gary Cohn -- to see the China Development Bank sign Silk Road memorandums of understanding with two banks that have been subjected to sanctions by the West: Tejarat Bank of Iran and Raiffeisen Bank International of Austria. The Chinese are beginning to supplant the Zionists in their own playground of international banking and finance, something that irritates the Goldman Sachs players who surround Trump in his White House and Cabinet.

Serving to further irritate the interests of the Zionists of Trump World, China signed an agreement with Palestine on establishing a Think Tank Cooperation Program on Enhancing People-to-People Connectivity. The initiative is part of the Silk Road Think Tank Network (SiLKS). And in a show of force to George Soros and his friends at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), China announced that the China NGO Network for International Exchanges and over 150 civil organizations are jointly establishing the Silk Road NGO Cooperation Network. China has a long memory and will not forget Soros and USAID/NED meddling in Tibet, Hong Kong, Inner Mongolia, and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

The Western corporate media tried to spin the One Belt, One Road summit as a disappointment because Britain, France, and Germany were not represented. It was a specious argument from the likes of The Washington Post and Associated Press. British Prime Minister Theresa May would have been in Beijing except for the tiny little issue of her waging a general election campaign. In her place was Chancellor of the Exchequer Phil Hammond. At least May did not copy Trump and send some middle-grade civil service flunkie. Speaking of elections, France had just seen a presidential election and President Francois Hollande had an excuse not to be in Beijing as he was preparing to hand over the presidency to his successor. France was represented by former prime minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin. Politics kept the prime minister of Japan and Chancellor of Germany away from Beijing, but both nations were represented by important personal representatives of Shinzo Abe and Angela Merkel, respectively.

Only Donald Trump saw fit to send a virtual nobody to Beijing. Perhaps it is fitting because on the world stage, Trump, in every way, increasingly shows that he, too, is a nobody in charge of a bloviating, meandering, and listless former "superpower." Trump vowed to "Make America Great Again." America's "greatness" died decades ago and Trump neither has the power nor the inclination to change that sobering fact of life regardless of all the red ball cap and t-shirt slogans to the contrary.

The CIA's jihadist formation team by Wayne Madsen

The CIA's jihadist formation team
by Wayne Madsen
By 1980, the Central Intelligence Agency had decided that it would use the most violent of Muslim jihadists to help bring down the Soviet Union. Target number one was the pro-Soviet secular government of Afghanistan, a land where men and women were co-equals, jihadism and Islamist radicalism was banned, and which was much more democratic than the CIA-backed Islamist regimes that followed it.

The formation of the jihadist "Arab Legion" that would go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets and the socialist Afghan government was largely conducted out of the CIA station at the U.S. embassy in Cairo. There, CIA officials, using Saudi-supplied cash and lots of it, worked with Egyptian intelligence officers, many covert Muslim Brotherhood supporters, to select the most radical Islamist mercenaries to head off to Pakistan and then across the border with Afghanistan to take on the Afghan and Soviet armies. President Jimmy Carter's radically anti-Soviet national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Polish nationalist, actually began supporting the Afghan mujaheddin against the ruling People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan six months before the Soviet invasion of the country. The mujaheddin had already been attacking Afghan military and other government installations with the encouragement of the CIA. When Secretary of State Cyrus Vance objected to the U.S. policy of supporting Afghan terrorists, he was forced out of the Carter administration as a result of pressure on Carter from Brzezinski.

Chief among the CIA's support team in Cairo were Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind shaikh," who was later convicted for his involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri, now the reported chief of "Al Qaeda," which was, according to the late British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, a database of the CIA's Islamist contacts, mercenaries, and financiers around the world; and Osama bin Laden, the wealthy scion of the founder of the Saudi Bin Laden construction firm.

In 1980, the CIA chief of station in Cairo in 1980 responsible for organizing the Islamist Arab Legion for the Afghan front was Murat Natirboff, who, in 1980, was 59 years of age, relatively old for an active station chief. Murat is the Russian derivative of the Arabic word "murad," which means "will" or "purpose." Murad was the name of the son of the 16th century Moghul emperor of India, Akbar. The Natirboffs had strong Muslim roots in the Soviet Union. The family had fled the Northern Caucasus in the 1920s during the Russian civil war. Eventually, they settled in the United States. Murat's brother, Elmourza "Elmo" Natirboff, was a pilot for Bahamas Airways and a veteran of the Soviet Air Force during World War II. "Elmo" was the co-pilot for World War II Soviet ace pilot Boris Sergievsky.

It is clear that Natirboff was central CIA cog in formulating a pan-Islamic "jihad" against the USSR. In the mid-1980s, Natirboff turned up at the U.S. embassy in Moscow where his official job was "counselor for regional affairs." In fact, Natirboff was the CIA's station chief and his main target, in addition to spying on Soviet activities against the CIA-supported mujaheddin in Afghanistan, was to stir up Islamist opposition to Communist rule in the predominantly Muslim republics of the USSR, including those in the North Caucasus. The restive region was where another CIA officer, Graham Fuller, was making contact with Chechens and other Muslim groups in hopes of starting a Muslim "second front" against the Soviets from within their own "soft underbelly" of the Caucasus region. Fuller would appear in the news later. The nephews of his former son-in-law, Tamerlan and Dzkokhar Tsarnaev, were charged with carrying out the Boston Marathon bombing. Ruslan Tsarni, formerly Tsarnaev, was married to Fuller's daughter, a marriage obviously born out of Fuller's dalliances with anti-Soviet Muslim operatives during and after the Afghanistan campaign.

In Moscow, Natirboff was front and center in the espionage charges brought against U.S. News & World Report reporter Nicholas Daniloff in 1986. Daniloff got involved in a nasty espionage operation that involved David Goldfarb, a Soviet Jewish "refusenik" and Natirboff. Daniloff was eventually released by the Soviets after he pleaded nolo contendre to the spy charges. 
The North Caucasus-American "grandfather" of Al Qaeda, Taliban, and ISIL: Murat Natirboff, CIA station chief Cairo, 1978-80.

David Goldfarb is said to have refused a KGB request that he help frame Daniloff. However, David Goldfarb was merely the Jewish refusenik connection to the CIA and Natirboff, which combined with in the Muslim radicalization program, were central elements of the CIA's overall operations to destabilize the Soviet Union. David Goldfarb's son, Alex Goldfarb, was the attorney for ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko and exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. Alex Goldfarb issued forth statement after statement accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of being behind the radiation poisoning of Litvinenko in London in 2006. In fact, and as originally reported by WMR, Litvinenko, who had joined with the Chechen Islamist guerrillas battling Russian forces, was killed by Berezovsky in order to place blame on Putin.

Alex Goldfarb, an Israeli national who claimed to have been a former radiation specialist in microbiology at Kurchatov Research Institute of Nuclear Energy when he declared that Litvinenko was assassinated by a radiation weapon ordered into London by Putin, never wrote a single paper dealing with nuclear physics or nuclear chemistry. He also claims to have been a lawyer. The truth of the matter is that Goldfarb, like his father, were participants in a Mossad and CIA operation to use Muslim radicals to bring down first the USSR and then the Russian Federation. David Goldfarb worked with the CIA Islamophile Natirboff while his son worked with the Chechen liaison operative Litvinenko. Lording over Alex Goldfarb was George Soros, who funded Goldfarb's medical research in New York, and Berezovsky, who, along with Soros, funded Goldfarb's front NGO, theInternational Foundation for Civil Liberties, an anti-Russian government organization. In 1994, Goldfarb ran Soros's Russian Internet Project, which developed the Internet across the Russian Federation. In 1995, Goldfarb was involved in Soros operations in Georgia aimed at overthrowing the Georgian President, Eduard Shevardnadze, the last foreign minister of the Soviet Union.

When Berezovsky was found dead in his bathroom of his Berkshire, England manor house, Goldfarb was strangely silent about the suspicious death that even involved British police dispatching a nuclear, chemical, and biological hazardous materials team to the estate. Berezovsky's death came after the exiled oligarch sent a letter to Putin, in which he apologized to the Russian leader for his past actions and requesting to be allowed to return to Russia. Berezovsky was also in a position to brief Putin on the anti-Russian activities involving Goldfarb, Soros, and other exiled Russian Jews, some of whom were providing support to Chechen and other Islamist groups via countries like Turkey, Ukraine, and Georgia.

The CIA was able to cobble together an anti-Soviet/Russian coalition that involved Muslim jihadists and Jewish Zionists. The effects of that dangerous duo have been felt since the fall of the socialist Afghan government and the USSR: the 9/11 attack; joint Israeli and jihadist support for the Islamist rebels in Libya, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen; and the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris in early 2015.

All of these operations grew out of the CIA's station in Cairo in 1979-80. Natirboff's deputy in Cairo was Charles T. Englehart, a veteran of the CIA station in Karachi, Pakistan, a country that would become a central player in deploying the Arab Legion of jihadists into Afghanistan. The Cairo station's number three man was Mati Lohuaru, a German native and Arabic speaker who had been assigned to the CIA stations in Beirut and Kuwait, the latter of which helped fund the Arab Legion.

A key mujaheddin support figure from 1979 to 1980 was CIA case officer in Islamabad Gary Schroen. Ironically, Schroen, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad from 1996 to 1999, was tapped after the 9/11 attack to lead a CIA team into Afghanistan to find and kill Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden reportedly escaped from Tora Bora in Afghanistan into Pakistan after a battle with U.S. forces. But what were Schroen's actual orders from Langley with regard to the leader of Al Qaeda and his one-time comrade-in-arms against the Soviets? Was it "find and kill" bin Laden or "find and help him to escape?"

Another Arab Legion player was Jackson Sigler, the CIA station chief in Jeddah from 1978 through 1980. Sigler was a central player in arranging for Saudi financial and other support for the Islamist fighters being recruited around the Arab world to head off to Pakistan to join the mujaheddin forces gearing up for the anti-Soviet operations in Afghanistan. Sigler's deputy in Jeddah was Charles E. Waterman. Waterman, a national intelligence officer for the Middle East, was fired by the CIA in 1985 for leaking top secret CIA information to "Middle Eastern interests." Waterman was a strong believer that the U.S. intelligence community should have been organized along Israeli lines, which he considered to be more successful. When he was investigated by the FBI, Waterman was protected by the CIA's general counsel Stanley Sporkin, a friend of director William Casey and a pro-Israeli asset within the CIA. Sporkin was later nominated by Ronald Reagan for a federal judgeship amid howls of protest from Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

However, Waterman was also a confirmed Arabist but one tilting toward the Saudis and Gulf monarchies. According to Robert Dreyfus's book "Devil's Game," Waterman did not feel that the Wahhabist-oriented Muslim World League (MWL) and World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) were anything to worry about. Waterman, who knew the group supported Islamic student movements around the world, was happy that "charitable" organizations like WML, WAMY -- both linked to the Muslim Brotherhood -- fight against "left-wing students" and the CIA was fine with that.

Waterman's success in helping recruit Arab volunteers for the mujaheddin would later pay off handsomely. Waterman's K Street lobbying firm, Jefferson Waterman International (JWI), would help client dictators around the world evade international sanctions. Among JWI's clients were the Croatian leader Franjo Tudjman, the Burmese military junta, Gambia's brutal dictator Yahyah Jammeh, and Liberian dictator Charles Taylor.



A not-so-insignificant "gem" of a Charles Waterman memo from the Reagan years.

There are strong suspicions that current CIA director John O. Brennan harbors loyalty toward the Saudi Wahhabist/jihadist cause. While that may be surprising to some people, consider the fact that in 1980, an anti-Russian from the Islamist hotbed of the North Caucasus was the CIA's point man in Cairo responsible for organizing the muhajeddin mercenaries, some of whom would later form the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Brennan appears to be following a long CIA tradition.

CIA intelligence on Islam: heavily-influenced by Saudis and Wahhabis by Wayne Madsen

CIA intelligence on Islam: heavily-influenced by Saudis and Wahhabis

A Central Intelligence Agency's "comprehensive" report on political Islam, titled "Islam and Politics: A Compendium," a formerly SECRET document issued in April 1984 during the Reagan administration, gets more wrong than right about the nature of radical Islam. At the time the report was completed, the CIA was using radical Islamist mujaheddin groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan to fight a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

One laughable statement in light of the rise of a number of Al Qaeda and subsequent affiliates and subordinates after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 is the following:

"Although fundamentalist groups can cause national crises overnight with terrorist acts, they usually lose more than they gain as the government undertakes repressive measures against them."

That certainly was not the case with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Al-Nusra Front and Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) in Syria, ISIL in Iraq, and Ansar al-Sharia in Libya.

The CIA report then makes a statement that more resembles propaganda than in-depth analysis:

"Ruthless suppression has had its successes, most notable in the Communist states. Other secular states, such as Syria, Iraq, and Indonesia, have also found that repression keeps opposition manageable." The presence of a strong Islamist group in northern Sumatra is a direct outgrowth of a CIA-funded Sumatran secession movement directed against President Sukarno in the 1950s. The fact remains that it was the CIA that began backing fundamentalist Islamists in Iraq, Syria, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Bosnia, and other "secular" states, including more recently, Libya and Egypt. In 1984, the CIA ironically suggested that Islamist radicals could make gains from financial assistance provided by Muammar Qaddafi's Libya and the anti-Sunni Wahhabi government of Iran. In fact, it was neither Qaddafi nor Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini who supplied the radical Sunni groups with the bulk of their aid, but the CIA and its Saudi, Gulf Arab, and Pakistani allies.

The CIA also claimed "we know of no charismatic leader who transcends national lines." Of course, the CIA was then grooming Osama bin Laden as one such "transcendental" leader in Afghanistan. Bin Laden's rise to the leadership of Wahhabi Islam's most radical force, Al Qaeda, would also enable the rise of other transnational Islamist radical leaders, including Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, Al Qaeda's Egyptian number two; Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed Afghan war veteran who leads Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb or AQIM; and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the ISIL or the "Islamic State."

The CIA report cautions against an "overreaction" by the U.S. of an Islamic resurgence. The report claims, "In most cases, governments probably will continue to co-opt the clerics and integrate Islamic resurgence in a fashion that will not harm U.S. interests." That prediction did not come to pass in Afghanistan, Syria, briefly in Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt, and Libya.

The report does include an interesting reference to an active Muslim Brotherhood cell operating since 1980 in the Galilee region of Israel. Reports of Israeli connections to the battlefield successes of ISIL in Syria and Iraq may point to Israeli having co-opted the Muslim Brotherhood  and other Qatari- and Turkish-backed jihadist groups in Iraq and Syria. Although there have been reports of atrocities committed wholesale by ISIL of Christian, Kurdish, Yazidi, Turkoman, and Shi'a communities and shrines in northern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan, there have been no credible reports of ISIL's defiling of Jewish shrines and cemeteries in regions conquered by ISIL.

The CIA's report is a typical agency product that lacks the key ingredient of "intelligence" in its formulation of an intelligence report. And it is noteworthy that at the time the political Islam report was created, current CIA director John O. Brennan was a junior ranking CIA officer responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence on the Middle East.

Will the name "Brennan" eventually become a synonym for "incompetent" in the same manner that "quisling" now means traitor and "lynch," named for colonial Virginia judge Charles Lynch, means dubious executions by hanging, known as "lynchings?" Perhaps one day, a poor analysis job may be known as a "brennan."


Ronald Reagan's and Bill Casey's "Operation Cyclone" saw the CIA strengthen the most radical Islamist factions in Afghanistan and Pakistan. CIA documents show U.S. bias toward Islamist extremists.

The CIA took a hostile attitude toward the former People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen), which ultimately merged with North Yemen in 1990. The CIA was vexed that "the South Yemen radical regime has made only slight concessions to Islam and will continue to restrict fundamentalist activity." The CIA report had similar criticisms of secular, anti-Islamist governments in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Algeria.

As for the USSR, the CIA report gloats over early Islamist extremism in the central Asian Soviet Socialist Republics. The CIA appears to relish the following events:

• March 1980: Riots in Alma Ata, capital of Kazakh SSR, when Muslims refused to let dead Muslims soldiers be buried in military cemeteries.
• April 1980: Assassination of Sultan Ibrahimov of Kirghiz SSR by "Muslim nationalists."
• Nov. 1982: Three days of violence in Muslim-dominated North Severo-Osetinkaya in the Caucasus, included ransacking of Communist Party headquarters.
• Nov. 1982:  Authorities broke up a large-scale  Muslim publishing operation in Uzbekistan.

These events coincided with stepped-up CIA support for Afghan mujaheddin guerrillas. At the same time, Yugoslavia began experiencing subterfuge within its own Muslim population in Bosnia, all linked to foreign interests.

It would not be surprising if the CIA's fingerprints were on all these radical Muslim events in the Communist bloc. It would also be interesting to ascertain what CIA director Brennan [below right with his Saudi friend, Interior Minister Prince Mohammad bin Naif bin Abdulaziz] may know about Saudi "off-the-books" CIA funding for such operations by Langley's operatives that targeted the USSR and Yugoslavia.

Another formerly TOP SECRET CIA report, dated March 26, 1985, states that the CIA's mujaheddin resistance in Afghanistan was tightly linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, including its operations in "Europe and the United States," all of which were supported by "the governments of the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the UAE."

Chief beneficiaries of the Muslim Brotherhood's assistance in Afghanistan were the Gulbuddin Hekmatayar and Younis Khalis factions of Hizb Islami, the Jamiat  i Islam, and the Harakat-i-Inqilab, based in Peshawar, Pakistan.

CIA and Arab support for the Afghan mujaheddin was funneled through Pakistan's Jamiat i Islam fundamentalist group, whose leader, Mian Tufail, was identified in the March 1985 CIA report as a relative of Pakistani President Muhammad Zia Ul-Haq.

The Wahhabi-Likudnik war of terror By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE      The Wahhabi-Likudnik war of terror By Pepe Escobar The double suicide bombing targeting the Iranian embassy in Beirut - with at least 23 people killed and 170 wounded - was a de facto terror attack happening on 11/19. Numerology-wise, naturally 9/11 comes to mind; and so the case of the Washington-declared war on terror metastasizing - largely conducted by oozy forms of Saudi "intelligence". Yet don't expect the "West" to condemn this as terror. Look at the headlines; it's all normalized as "blasts" - as if children were playing with firecrackers. Whether carried out by a hazy al-Qaeda-linked brigade or by Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan's (aka Bandar Bush's) goons, the Beirut terror attack is essentially configured as a major, Saudi-enabled provocation. The larger Saudi agenda in Syria implies getting both Hezbollah and Iran to be pinned down inside Lebanon as well. If that happens, Israel also wins. Once again, here's another graphic illustration of the Likudnik House of Saud in action. Nuance also applies. Bandar Bush's strategy, coordinated with jihadis, was to virtually beg for Hezbollah to fight inside Syria. When Hezbollah obliged, with only a few hundred fighters, the jihadis scurried away from the battlefield to implement plan B: blowing up innocent women and children in the streets of Lebanon. While Hezbollah welcomes the fight, wherever it takes place, Tehran's position is more cautious. It does not want to go all out against the Saudis - at least for now, with the crucial nuclear negotiation on the table in Geneva, and (still) the possibility of a Geneva II regarding Syria. Yet the House of Saud is not welcoming Geneva II anytime soon because it has absolutely nothing to propose except regime change. On Syria, the main pillar of Bandar Bush's strategy is to turn the previously "Free" Syrian Army into a "national army" of 30,000 or so fully weaponized hardcore fighters - mostly supplied by the "Army of Islam", which is nothing but a cipher for the al-Qaedesque Jabhat al-Nusra. King Playstation of Jordan, also known as Abdullah, collaborates as the provider of training camps near the Syrian border. Whatever happens, one thing is certain; expect Bandar Bush's goons to be carrying out more suicide bombings on both Lebanon and Syria. The Zionist/Wahhabi/Salafi axis The dodgy al-Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades in theory exist since 2005, placing the odd bomb here and there. One sheikh Sijareddin Zreikat tweeted responsibility for the Beirut terror attack. Curioser and curioser, the claim was "discovered" and translated into English by the Israeli disinformation website SITE. [1] Yet another Israeli intelligence disinformation site, DEBKAfile, claimed the terror attack was an Iran/Hezbollah false flag, based on a "Saudi warning" reaching "Western intelligence agencies, including Israel". [2] The rationale, according to "Saudi intelligence", was "to convince Hezbollah fighters consigned against their will to the Syrian battlefield". This does not even qualify as pathetic. Hezbollah is basically defending the Lebanese-Syrian border, and has only a few hundred fighters inside Syria. Moreover, no string of suicide bombings will deter Hezbollah and Tehran from regaining control of what really matters in the Syrian strategic context; the Qalamoun area. Qalamoun, ringed by mountains, is a 50-kilometer stretch bordering the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, between Damascus and al-Nabk, and right on the absolutely critical Damascus-Homs corridor of the M5 highway. The Syrian army is on the offensive in Qalamoun. Recapturing the whole area is just a matter of time. This means controlling the northern approach to Damascus. Hezbollah is helping in the offensive out of Bekaa valley. This does not mean they will camp out in Syria afterwards. Now for the false flag accusation. As far as real false flags are concerned, one just has to re-examine three recent international bombings that supposed victimized Israel. In India the bomb had no projectiles; it barely injured an Israeli attache. In Azerbaijan the bomb was miraculously "discovered" before it went off. And in Thailand, the bomb exploded too soon, injuring only a nearby Iranian. Crass Israeli disinformation is unmasked when it leaps into this conclusion: If Tehran is capable of such atrocities merely as a diversionary tactic, then perhaps Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin ought to take a really hard look at their negotiating partner across the table before signing a major deal Wednesday, Nov. 20, which leaves Iran's nuclear program in place. So this neatly ties up with the current Israeli hysteria about the Geneva negotiations, which also includes the umpteenth report by a News Corporation outfit, London's Sunday Times, that Saudi Arabia will help Israel to attack Iran. [3] It also ties up with the proverbial US shills spinning, gloating rather, that, "strategically, this de-facto Israeli alliance with the Saudis is an extraordinary opportunity for Israel". [4] Even such shills have to admit that the House of Saud is "blocking formation of any government in Lebanon, for example, to obstruct Iran's ally, Hezbollah". "Blocking" of course is a euphemism to normalize suicide bombing. And then comes the ultimate wishful thinking disguised as "analysis"; Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu "bidding to replace the United States as military protector of the status quo". Translation; the Likudniks dreaming of becoming the new military Mob boss of petrodollar Wahhabis. The enablers Bandar Bush's strategy - weaponizing and providing cover to Salafis, jihadis and every patsy or mercenary in between - will go on unabated. After Bandar Bush convinced Washington to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood-friendly Qataris, the Saudis are the supreme warfare go-to channel. The Bandar Bush machine has ties with virtually every jihadi outfit in the Levant. It certainly helps that Bandar has the perfect cover; the fact that he knows and has cajoled every significant player in Washington. In the US, Bandar Bush remains a dashing hero, even eliciting fawning comparisons with Gatsby. [5] Right. And my name is actually Daisy. Even with its own embassy attacked in Lebanon, Iran is maintaining an extremely calibrated approach. The number-one priority is the nuclear negotiations in Geneva with the partner that really matters, the US. This explains Iran blaming the Beirut terror attack on the proverbial "Zionists", and not Saudi-enabled jihadis posing as "rebels" and part of the whole Bandar Bush nebula. For the moment though, enough of Orwellian newspeak. What happened in Beirut was a terror attack, cheered by Israel, and fully enabled by Saudis; a graphic display by the Likudnik-House of Saud axis. Notes: 1. Al-Qaida-linked group claims responsibility for deadly Beirut attack, Ha'aretz, November 19, 2013. 2. Incredible! Beirut bombings killing 25 people were self-inflicted by Iran and Hizballah as a diversionary tactic, DEBKAfile, November 19, 2013. 3. Israel, Saudi Arabia Unite For Attack On Iran, RT, November 17, '13. 4. The stakes of an Iranian deal, Washington Post, November 15, 2013. 5. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia's Gatsby, Master Spy, The Daily Beast, November 16, 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.