Masters of Chaos

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Masters of Chaos

Postby seemslikeadream » Sun Jul 20, 2014 12:34 am

America’s neocons


The Human Price of Neocon Havoc
July 17, 2014

Exclusive: Neocons are the “masters of chaos” as they destabilize disfavored governments around the world. But real people pay the price as we’ve seen with Israel’s slaughter of four boys on a Gaza beach and an apparent shoot-down of a Malaysian airliner over war-torn Ukraine, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry

Whether the tragedy is four boys getting blown apart while playing on a beach in Gaza or nearly 300 killed from a suspected missile strike on a Malaysian Airliner over Ukraine or the thousands upon thousands of other innocent victims slaughtered in Iraq, Syria, Libya and other recent war zones, the underlying lesson is that the havoc encouraged by America’s neocons results in horrendous loss of human life.

While clearly other players share in this blame, including the soldiers on the ground and the politicians lacking the courage to compromise, the principal culprits in the bloodshed of the past dozen years have been the neoconservatives and their “liberal interventionist” allies who can’t seem to stop stirring up trouble in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”
Image
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.

Rather than work out reasonable – albeit imperfect – compromises with various foreign leaders, the neocons and their liberal allies insist on ratcheting up demands to such unrealistic levels that conflict becomes inevitable and the outcomes are almost always catastrophic.

In Iraq in 2003, the neocons and many liberal fellow-travelers insisted that the only acceptable solution was the violent removal of Saddam Hussein through an unprovoked U.S. invasion. Though Hussein was ousted and hanged, the collateral damage included hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, including many children, along with the complete destabilization of the country.

In Syria and Libya, many of the same U.S. actors – although in this case led by the liberal “responsibility-to-protect” crowd – pushed for the overthrow of the existing governments, supposedly to save lives and spread democracy.

In Libya, the U.S.-led air war did cause Muammar Gaddafi to be overthrown and murdered but the ensuing chaos has led to many more deaths, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, plus the spread of Islamic militancy across the region.

In Syria, the U.S.-backed “regime change” bid failed to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad but the resulting chaos has left more than 100,000 people killed and has given rise to an ultra-violent jihadist group called the Islamic State, which first emerged from the U.S.-created war in Iraq and has now boomeranged back onto Iraq as the jihadists have seized major cities and spurred more sectarian killings.

But there may be a method to the apparent neocon madness. The neocons have always been committed to protecting Israel and enabling its oppression of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza. Indeed, one can understand pretty much every confrontational policy pushed by the neocons as being designed to serve Israeli interests.

These “regime change” schemes can be directly traced to the work of prominent U.S. neocons on Benjamin Netanyahu’s 1996 campaign for Israeli prime minister. Rather than continuing inconclusive negotiations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu’s neocon advisers – including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Mevray Wurmser – advocated an aggressive new approach, called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.”

Essentially, the neocon thinking arose from Israeli frustration over negotiations with the Palestinians. The Israelis were angry at Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the militant group Hamas as well as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. So the “clean break” scratched negotiations and replaced talking with “regime change” in countries supporting those groups, whether Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Syria under the Assad dynasty or Iran, a leading benefactor of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

Two years later, in 1998, came the neocon Project for the New American Century’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. PNAC was founded by neocon luminaries William Kristol and Robert Kagan. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mysterious Why of the Iraq War.”]

Helpful Chaos

Though many of the neocon plans have not worked out as advertised – the promised “cakewalk” in Iraq turned into a bloody slog – the neocon strategy could still be labeled a success if the actual intent was to destabilize and weaken Middle Eastern countries that were perceived as threats to Israel.

Through that lens, it’s not entirely bad that old sectarian hatreds have been revived, pitting Sunni against Shiite and ripping apart societies such as Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. In the end, the regional chaos has helped Prime Minister Netanyahu starve the Palestinians of the financial support that they once had, supposedly making them more susceptible to whatever demands the Israelis choose to make. And it has given Netanyahu a freer hand to engage in periodic slaughters of Gazan militants, a process that Israelis call “mowing the grass.”

When the 1.7 million Palestinians packed into the Gaza Strip lash out at their Israeli oppressors – as they periodically do – the neocons who remain very influential in Official Washington are quick to dominate the U.S. media, justifying whatever levels of violence that Netanyahu chooses to inflict. But raining bombs down on this densely populated area is sure to kill many children and other innocents.

On Wednesday, the Israeli military targeted a shed on the beach in Gaza. According to reports, the first missile hit the shed and killed one small boy playing in the vicinity. When three other boys began running, the Israelis blew them away with a second rocket. New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks explained the events this way:

“A small shack atop a sea wall at the fishing port had been struck by an Israeli bomb or missile and was burning. A young boy emerged from the smoke, running toward the adjacent beach. I grabbed my cameras and was putting on body armor and a helmet when, about 30 seconds after the first blast, there was another. The boy I had seen running was now dead, lying motionless in the sand, along with three other boys who had been playing there.”

Presumably, the Israeli pilots or whoever targeted the missile deserve the immediate blame for this atrocity. But the far-worse criminals are the Israeli leaders who refuse to address the longstanding injustices inflicted on the Palestinian people. Also, sharing in this crime are the American neocons who justify whatever Israel does.

Similarly, it has been the neocons and their “liberal interventionist” allies who have been stoking the crisis in Ukraine in part out of a desire to drive a wedge between President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has assisted Obama in defusing crises in Syria and Iran, two areas where the neocons hoped to engineer more “regime change.”

By last September, leading neocons, such as National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, had identified Ukraine as the geopolitical instrument for punishing Putin. Gershman deemed Ukraine “the biggest prize” and hoped that grabbing it for the Western sphere of influence might undercut Putin at home as well.

Gershman’s NED funded scores of Ukrainian political and media organizations while Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland estimated that the U.S. government had invested $5 billion in the cause of pulling Ukraine into the West. Nuland, a neocon holdover who had been a top adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, is the wife of PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan.

Nuland went so far as to show up at mass demonstrations in Kiev’s Maidan Square passing out cookies to the protesters, while neocon Sen. John McCain stood with the far-right Svoboda Party – under a banner honoring Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera – to urge on the protesters to challenge elected President Viktor Yanukovych. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “What the Neocons Want from Ukraine Crisis.”]

Wreaking Havoc

The political crisis in Ukraine reached a boiling point Feb. 20-22 as the demonstrations turned increasingly violent and the death toll among police and protesters mounted. On Feb. 21, three European foreign ministers reached an agreement with Yanukovych in which he agreed to limit his powers and accept early elections to vote him out of office. He also pulled back the police, as Vice President Joe Biden had demanded.

At that point, however, well-trained neo-Nazi militias – organized in brigades of 100 – took the offensive, seizing government buildings and forcing Yanukovych’s officials to flee for their lives. Instead of trying to enforce the Feb. 21 agreement, which would have safeguarded Ukraine’s constitutional process, the U.S. State Department cheered the unlawful ouster of Yanukovych and quickly recognized the coup regime as “legitimate.”

The Feb. 22 coup set in motion a train of other events as “ethnically pure” Ukrainians in the west were pitted against ethnic Russians in the east and south. The crisis grew bloodier as the ethnic Russians resisted what they regarded as an illegitimate regime in Kiev.

Meanwhile, the U.S. mainstream press – always enthralled to the neocons – pushed a false narrative about Ukraine that put nearly all the blame on Putin, though he clearly was reacting to provocations instigated by the West, not the other way around.

Still, the neocons achieved one of their chief goals, alienating Obama from Putin and making the two leaders’ collaboration on Syria, Iran and other trouble spots more unlikely. In other words, the neocons have kept alive hope that those problems won’t be resolved through compromise, but rather might still lead to more warfare.

While some Machiavellians might admire this neocon “always-say-die” determination, the human consequences can be quite severe. For instance, the violence in eastern Ukraine may have led to the Thursday crash of a Malaysian Airliner flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur with all 295 people onboard killed.

It was not immediately clear which side in the fighting – if any – was responsible for the suspected shoot-down of the plane. The various parties to the conflict all denied responsibility. But it would not be the first time that an international conflict has contributed to the destruction of a civilian airliner.

On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air Flight 655 over Iranian territorial waters in the Persian Gulf, killing all 290 people onboard, after apparently mistaking the airliner for a warplane.

While Ukraine’s new President Petro Poroshenko was quick to call the crash “a terrorist act” – and implicitly blame the ethnic Russian rebels – the reality is almost assuredly that it was an accident (assuming that a missile did bring down the airliner). Presumably, the same is true about the Israeli twin missile strikes killing those four boys on a beach in Gaza. The Israeli military most likely misjudged their ages.

But the overriding lesson from these tragedies should be that the real villains are people who opt for chaos and war over progress and peace. And, in the case of the Middle East and Ukraine, the greatest purveyors of this unnecessary warfare are America’s neocons.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Oct 31, 2014 9:26 pm

WEEKEND EDITION OCT 31-NOV 02, 2014

Not Behind Bars, Friends Still in Power, Iraq Destroyed
The Gloating of the Neocons
by GARY LEUPP
The greatest crime of the twenty-first century so far was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Broadly conceived by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney immediately after 9/11, it initially lacked a coherent justification . But as Condoleezza Rice noted at the time, the tragedy brought “opportunities.” (People in fear can be persuaded to support things policy-makers long wanted, but couldn’t quite sell to the public.)

First Bush and Cheney (and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice) made the decision to go to war. Then they sat down and carefully invented the reasons for their war.

On Sept. 11, 2001 Bush asked his counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, who had warned him in early 2001 about an “immanent al-Qaeda threat” (warnings Clarke alleges Bush “ignored”) to produce a report blaming Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

In his own account Clarke says: “I said, Mr. President. We’ve done this before.” (Meaning, we’ve explored the possibility of ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda before.) “We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There is no connection.”

But Clarke’s recollection of the event continues:

“He came back at me and said, ’Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’”

Few policy decisions in modern history can rival the evil of that demand that the U.S. intelligence community deliberately contrive a false historical narrative, to justify a war that has destroyed a country and killed half a million people.

Meanwhile Secretary of “Defense” Donald Rumsfeld advocated—from day one—attacks on Iraq as a response to 9/11. Clarke has stated that he assumed Rumsfeld was joking when he first suggested, immediately after the event, that since Afghanistan had “no good targets” the U.S. should proceed to bomb the totally un-related country. But he soon learned that Rumsfeld and his staff headed by Paul Wolfowitz were in deadly earnest.

Three months after the 9/11 attacks, which as Clarke knew had nothing to do with Iraq, George W. Bush used his first State of the Union address to declare that Iraq belonged to an “axis of evil” including North Korea and Iran. It made no sense. It was, as the Iraqi vice president at the time observed, simply “stupid.” Iraq and Iran had fought a long bloody war, with the U.S. (under Bush’s father) actively aiding Iraq. The Baathists of Iraq and the Shiite mullahs of Iran were mortal enemies, and while Tehran had proper diplomatic and trade ties with North Korea as of 2002, Baghdad had broken off ties with Pyongyang to protest its support for Iran in the war.

In any other context, this reference to an “axis” between the three countries would have been merely hilarious, an embarrassing expression of George W. Bush’s astounding historical ignorance. (And you’d think a cause of shame to Yale University, which accorded him a BA in history in 1973 with a 2.35 GPA. 0ne reason European leaders privately faulted Bush during his tenure in office was his ignorance of history and evident lack of intellectual curiosity in general.)

But in early 2002, this vilification of Iraq signaled an intention to go to war. The neoconservatives surrounding Dick Cheney were assigned the task of building a case. The key bodies responsible for hoodwinking the masses were the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) under Bush’s senior political advisor Karl Rove (a master of deceit, as shown in the fine book by James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush’s Brain, and the documentary film based upon it), and the Office for Special Plans (OSP), in the Pentagon, under neocon Douglas Feith, a close associate of Wolfowitz. (Wolfowitz was in theory the deputy of Rumsfeld. But he actually co-managed the department and devoted all his time after 9/11 to planning the Iraq war and occupation.) Through the thoroughly corrupted U.S. “free press”—the New York Times in particular—they circulated lies in the most efficient exercise in disinformation in modern history.

Day after day we read the wild headlines. Iraq had tried to import aluminum tubes for use as uranium centrifuges. Mobile biological weapons labs. Senior-level al-Qaeda contacts. An Iraqi Kurdish al-Qaeda group producing chemical weapons with Saddam’s support in northern Iraq. Plane hijacking lessons for al-Qaeda in Iraq. Drones to disperse chemical and biological weapons. Saddam’s ability to strike British forces in Cyprus on 45 minutes’ notice. Saddam’s supposed attempt to purchase uranium from Niger. All of it was lies.

(Recall how this last allegation was announced by Bush in his 2003 State of the Union speech; how it was immediately challenged by the IAEA, then headed by Mohamed ElBaradei, later to win the Nobel peace prize. Recall how the U.S. administration hated ElBaradei for not abetting their efforts to allege that Iran had a nuclear weapons program, and how the U.S. bugged his phone. Recall how U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, confronted with the IAEA’s conclusion that Bush had used forged documents to make a false charge against Iraq, shrugged it off as though it were no big deal.)

As revealed by the infamous “Downing Street memo,” as early as July 2002 the head of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) concluded that in the U.S. “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around policy.” In other words, Washington’s closest ally was aware that Bush administration officials were lying through their teeth to build support for the war against, and occupation of, Iraq.

On January 10, 2003, Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, told CNN that “there will always be some insecurity” about how quickly Saddam Hussein could obtain nuclear weapons. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” The terrifying image of a nuclear explosion over New York City was taken up by other war-mongers; the public was indeed successfully frightened. A Gallup poll showed 75% of those surveyed supported the assault on Iraq in March 2003.

The world did not. Outside the U.S., only Israeli polls showed mass approval. (But Israel and its chief advocates in the U.S.—including war architects Wolfowitz, Feith, Richard Perle, Scooter Libby, David Wurmser, Elliott Abrams, Adam Shulsky, John Bolton, etc.—did not foreground Israel’s Interests in the propaganda campaign. They did not want to draw attention to the fact that Israel was pressing for Saddam’s fall, or that the plan for “regime change” throughout the Middle East had been conceptualized by Perle, Feith and Wurmser—in their capacities as Israeli citizens— in a paper presented to Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in 1996. The concept, in a nutshell, was that rather than negotiating with Arab foes Israel should urge the U.S. to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, and Somalia replacing them with non-threatening governments..

Former NATO chief Gen. Wesley Clark has repeatedly recounted that weeks after 9/11 he was told by a—rather appalled—Pentagon colleague that the Bush administration had a “five year plan” to effect this region-wide transformation. Clark also noted in August 2002 that those favoring an attack on Iraq “will tell you, candidly and privately, that it is probably true that Saddam Hussein is no threat to the United States. But they are afraid that at some point he might decide if he had a nuclear weapon to use it against Israel.” The war on Iraq was motivated less by U.S. oil companies’ desire for Iraqi concessions—which have never substantially materialized— than by ideologues’ drive to remold the “Greater Middle East.”)

The U.N., which Cheney wanted to simply ignore but Powell thought had to be engaged to secure the planned war’s international support, refused to endorse it. Powell’s address to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 was based entirely on lies. It was unconvincing. Powell had actually tossed an early draft of the neocon-authored speech into the air at a White House meeting. “I’m not reading this,” he exploded, “This is bullshit!”

But he did read it. Such is the morality of the career army officer who covered up the My Lai Massacre in 1968. His silence in retirement is the silence of shame (although he’s communicated his resentment of Cheney and the neocons, and how they used him, through statements by his former chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson—who treats him as a victim). He knows he was used— and oh, so convenient—the first African-American secretary of state trotted out there to deliver the neocons’ lies.

The Powell UN speech, demanding global support for an attack on a threatening, al-Qaeda aligned Iraq, in fact bombed. But more than that, key U.S. allies—NATO heavies France and Germany among them—refused to get on board the program. This occasioned an amazing campaign of vilification of France, best symbolized by Congress’s decision to rename “French fries” “freedom fries” in the Congressional cafeteria. An asinine book trashing France as “our oldest enemy” became a best-seller.

Reason itself was under attack. Karl Rove, that master of disinformation, actually told Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ron Suskind in October 2004 that his colleagues at the White House referred to people like himself—critiques of the Bush administration and its wars—contemptuously as people “in what we call the reality-based community.”

Rove defined these as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’” Suskind according to his account “I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism.” But Rove cut him off.

‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he explained. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'”

In other words, “we” have—having gotten Congress to pass the (unread) PATRIOT Act in October 2001, which vastly augmented the power of the state; having invaded and occupied two countries and intimidated others into submission; having cowed the press and political opposition—the power to reconstruct the world on the basis of myth. This was not quite true, actually. The imperial project has met with setbacks, and journalistic exposés have not been entirely ineffective in undermining the “new reality.” But at that time, and even now, the ability of the rulers to shape the mentality of the ruled is quite extraordinary.

Fascism—the merger of state and corporate power—looms. Sure there is some variation within the corporate press; Fox and MSNBC back different political parties, that differ on such issues as gay marriage and abortion rights. But they march in lock step in supporting the State Department’s narrative on Ukraine (and in rejecting “discernible reality”, whether it involves the details of the Feb. 22 coup, and the plot to bring Ukraine into NATO; the rational fear of many Ukrainian citizens about the neo-fascist upsurge and racists’ influence in government; the details of the civil war and the limited Russian role in it—etc.

And the reports of virtually all U.S. telecommunications companies and social media networks cooperating with the National “Security” Agency to make available to mid-level NSA personnel at their whim details about all of our private lives without even bothering with the formality of a court subpoena—these confirm the merger of state and corporate power central to the fascist project.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, responding to a British reporter’s question in September 2004, matter-of-factly declared that the U.S. invasion of Iraq had been “illegal.” “I have indicated that it was not in conformity with the UN charter,” he told the press. “From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.”

This was an understatement of course, made by a cautious man being monitored like all of us by the NSA. But the meaning was clear: the U.S. had committed the most heinous of crimes, a crime against peace. It was far worse than a madman’s mass murder in an elementary school, or a crazed fiend enslaving women in his basement. We’re talking at least half a million civilians dead due to the invasion, a modern nation murdered, dismembered. We’re taking two million internal refuges, and two million external refugees—one out of eight Iraqis. We’re talking about massive ethnic cleansing unthinkable in the Baathist era when mixed marriages and mixed communities were not even controversial. We’re talking about the flight of most of the Iraqi Christians, the plummeting status of women, the imposition of Shiite fundamentalist rules (or Sunni ones, in some places) on secular-minded people. An absolute disaster.

And no one in this country ever charged with a crime in connection with it! No accountability! When Obama calls the U.S. an “exceptional nation” he refers in part to the fact that it pointedly refuses to join the International Criminal Court. (153 countries have signed the Rome Statute that established the court. The U.S. and Israel refuse. Washington is happy when someone like Slobodan Milosevic is brought before it, but it wants its own nationals immune. It fears that—god forbid—someday U.S. soldiers might be tried before it for war crimes! And that would be just unacceptable.)

In July 2004 the U.S. Senate released its report on “pre-war intelligence” about Iraq, making clear that Iraq had had no weapons of mass destruction nor operational ties to al-Qaeda. It was a quiet admission that the war had been based on lies. But it also determined that the falsehoods merely constituted “intelligence errors” and that no laws had been broken in the construction of the case for war. One might say it was an invitation for future liars in government to make up stories as they see fit (about a Libyan leaders intention to commit genocide, or a Syrian leader’s use of chemical weapons, or an Iranian regime’s pursuit of a nuclear weapons program, etc.), without having to worry about any consequences after the lies are exposed.

After his election in 2008, Barack Obama—the great reconciler, backed by Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Time Warner etc. because he seemed to be the man to mitigate the gathering storm clouds of absolute disgust among the people with the system itself, to draw the youth and angry blacks into harmless political participation firing them up with naïve expectations of “change” and “hope—made it immediately clear. He would not instruct his Justice Department to bother George W. Bush & Co. for anything they’d done. Remember that post-election video of him at the White House, his arm around Bush, thanking him for his service? Does it not make you feel sick?

So the whole rotten lot of them live comfortably, while Iraq bleeds uncontrollably. Bush appears these days occasionally, interviewed by Diane Sawyer or Jay Leno about his new painting avocation. The more voluble Cheney gets elder statesman treatment. There is no mass movement demanding their imprisonment. That is a national shame.

The fruition of the crimes of 2003 is the emergence of the Islamic State. No one can convincingly argue that this beast would have materialized without the U.S. destruction of the Iraqi state, and the forcible disbandment of its basic (secular) institutions including the army and the Baathist Party that alienated the Sunnis (and threw them out of work!).

The savagery of the U.S. forces produced immediate hatred. I wrote a CounterPunch column posted on April 29, 2003, just one month into the disastrous war, entitled “Shooting Schoolboys.” It was about the U.S. massacre of 13 kids, including an 11 year old, who’d had the audacity to throw stones (or a least one stone) at a schoolhouse in the city of Fallujah that had been commandeered by invading troops. (Now it appears 17 were killed and over 70 wounded.)

We all know what happened in Fallujah after that. In March 2004 four armed U.S. Blackwater contractors were killed by angry Iraqis. The U.S. responded with the aptly named “Operation Phantom Fury”. The city was almost entirely destroyed, its population massacred or dispersed. The U.S. made its point. It showed the people who was boss. It showed them the power of a cruelty rivaling anything so far manifested by ISIL. Among other things, there has been a fourfold increase in childhood cancer rates in Fallujah since 2004.

And since January 2014 Fallujah has been solidly in the hands of ISIL. Who’s responsible for that?

Saddam Hussein was a nasty character (and as you know—or maybe didn’t—a CIA asset from 1959 to 1990). And always, when confronted with historical details, when faced with their own lies, those responsible for those crimes say, “Well, we don’t need to apologize for toppling a dictator.” But the U.S. is always in bed with dictators—such as, for example, the Saudi and Bahraini monarchs, who rarely get bad press in the U.S. Why is that that only when a Shah or Marcos or Suharto or Mubarak is overthrown, after millions of people rise up, making it absolutely obvious that they have been despised for a long time—that the U.S. press observes (as a sort of parenthetical afterthought) that, well, after all, these guys were dictators?

Yes, Saddam used gas on Kurds during the Iran-Iraq War. He killed Shiite clerics whom he thought threatened his rule. He invaded and temporarily annexed Kuwait (thinking, foolishly, that his U.S. allies wouldn’t mind, since the U.S. ambassador had actually told him in July 1990 the U.S. “had no position” on Iraq’s conflict with Kuwait). But was he worse than George W. Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, who refused to give Saddam an out in December 1990, even though the Soviets and French both had brokered terms for an Iraqi withdrawal avoiding war, and insisted on going to war so he could vitiate Iraq’s powerful army?

In the first U.S. war on Iraq, the U.S. Air Force deliberately slaughtered absolutely helpless retreating Iraqi forces on the road from Kuwait City to Basra. For them the liquidation of defenseless conscript teenagers was part of a geopolitical strategy (centrally involving the enhancement Israel’s position in the region).

Talk about terrorism. This episode in 1991 was not followed up by an outright invasion of Iraq (although some in the first Bush administration, including then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, were urging it); the president thought it would be unwise. But it was followed by a sanctions regime that Clinton-era Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged killed half a million Iraqi kids (and was “worth it”). Bill Clinton renewed the assault in 1998, between his attacks on the former Yugoslavia (in 1995 and 1999) and as he pursued NATO expansion. Bush II’s war on Iraq (and the world) beginning in 2003 was part of a hideous continuum spanning three administrations.

Republican presidents, Democratic presidents. All on the same page when it comes to maintaining what Wolfowitz termed “full-spectrum dominance” in the post-Cold War world. Now as it all falls apart—as ISIL expands its “caliphate,” as the Syrian Baathists hold out against both U.S.-backed and other Islamists, as Iran gains respect as a serious negotiator in the Geneva talks, as China rises, as Russia thwarts NATO expansion, as U.S.-Israeli ties fray, as a multi-polar world inevitably emerges— what triumphs can the neocons claim?

Once flushed with history, proclaiming the “end of history” with the triumph of capitalist imperialism over Marxist socialism and other competing ideologies, they have only a handful of successes they can claim.

* They have successfully avoided prison. They calculated that they could mislead the people and commit the gravest possible crimes with impunity, under the U.S. system. Wolfowitz was nominated by Bush to become World Bank president in 2005, and held the post two years before departing amidst a scandal. Feith sashayed out of office the same year, hired at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (despite opposition from the more principled faculty). They serve as news consultants and live comfortable lives.

* They have left behind in positions of power and influence fellow neocons (most notably, Victoria Nuland, architect of the Ukraine disaster) and neocon allies, “liberal internationalists” like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as an assortment of dear friends who simply love war, such as Sen. John McCain. Some are describing Obama’s renewed bombing of Iraq, and the strikes on Syrian targets, as a new “neocon moment.” It must give them great pleasure.

* Perhaps most importantly: Iraq, although (or because) it has been absolutely destroyed as a modern state by U.S. fury, is no longer a threat to Israel.

Oilmen Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush (and Rice who has an oil tanker named after her) lusted after oil profits. They lusted too for an expansion of U.S. military power in the “Greater Middle East.” They were less concerned with Israel. But Israel’s survival as a specifically “Jewish” state, with a subject Arab population that must never become demographically threatening—and blow the whole Zionist project by forcing a one-state multi-ethnic solution—is the central neocon concern. They will not say this, of course; Leo Strauss students like Wolfowitz and Shulsky believe in the need for deception to get things done. But this was the minimal objective of the neocons’ response to 9/11: to use the event to advantage Israel.

Recall how, in late 2003, as it became embarrassingly evident that Iraq had had no weapons of mass destruction, Wolfowitz in Iraq tried to change the subject entirely. Who cares about weapons of mass destruction? he told a reporter. The Iraqi people want to reconstruct their country, he declared (as though the question of the war’s legitimacy was an irrelevant detail). Having acknowledged some “intelligence flaws” (attributing them to the CIA, rather than to themselves—despite what we know of the unprecedented Cheney-Libby visits to the Pentagon to browbeat the intelligence professionals to include their bullshit into official reports), Cheney and his neocon camp changed the subject.

The real issue, they now averred, was creating “democracy” in the Middle East. Condi Rice happily connived with this strategy, arguing dramatically that it was as wrong to deny people in the Middle East their freedom as it had been to deny black people in her home of Birmingham, Alabama their right to vote. Suddenly special diplomats were dispatched to Arab countries to lecture skeptical, sometimes glowering audiences on the advantages of the U.S. political system.

Under great pressure, some Arab countries somewhat expanded their parliamentary processes. The effort backfired as Islamists were elected in Egypt, Hizbollah made advances in Lebanon, and Hamas won a majority in the first free Palestinian election (in 2006). The “terrorists” were winning elections! The State Department denounced such results and has since shut up about “democracy” in the Middle East.

No, it wasn’t about the announced reasons: weapons of mass destruction, or al-Qaeda ties. Nor was it about U.S. Big Oil (which hasn’t profited from the Iraq War, the big contracts going to China and Russia). Nor was it about permanent military bases; the Iraqis have successfully rejected them. What does that leave us with?

A war pushed by the neocons to destroy a foe of Israel. It succeeded, surely, but only to produce a vicious Sunni successor state in Anbar Province potentially far more threatening to Israel than Saddam ever was.

But Binyamin Netanyahu doesn’t see it that way. He has repeatedly dubbed Iran as a greater threat than ISIL. Having predicted since 1992 that Iran is close to developing a nuclear bomb; having repeatedly demanded (echoed by prominent U.S. neocons such as Norman Podhoretz) that the U.S. bomb Iran (to prevent a “nuclear holocaust”); having angrily dismissed U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran has no nuclear weapons program, Netanyahu wants Obama to focus on destroying the Iranian regime.

That Shiite-dominated regime, as you know, however repressive it might be, allows Iranian Jews (the largest community of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel) to go to their synagogues, attend Hebrew schools, maintain their kosher shops and elect a Jewish representative to the parliament. Just like it allows Sunni Muslims, Christians and Zoroastrians limited religious freedom. It is a model of civilization compared to the Islamic State.

But, just as Victoria Nuland (a Jewish American neoconservative and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, a protégé of both Cheney and Hillary Clinton) is less concerned with the rise of Ukraine’s anti-Semitic Svoboda Party and Right Sector than the achievement of U.S. objectives in Ukraine including its incorporation into NATO, Netanyahu is less concerned with the rise of the ferociously anti-Semitic ISIL than the attainment of his long held goal: the downfall of Iran.

They talk about the defense of world Jewry. And when criticized, they howl about the imagined anti-Semitism of their critics. In fact they, along with the planners of the Iraq War and the campaign of lies surrounding it, are Israel-firsters determined to use U.S. power to crush anyone challenging Israel in the Middle East. If that means what Rumsfeld called “creative chaos,” they’re fine with it.

Again: they have succeeded. They’re not in prison, they have friends still in power, and they have destroyed the Iraqi state on behalf of Israel. Will they attain their next goal, and using their press and awesomely powerful lobby, sabotage a nuclear deal with Iran? I would not take any bets.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby conniption » Fri Nov 28, 2014 8:36 am

CrossTalk: Warmongers Victorious

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX0b0F070KQ
Published on Nov 28, 2014

With the GOP soon to control both houses of Congress and the firing of Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon, it appears Washington’s neocons will face little opposition when demanding more foreign interventions. The hawks again will have their day – who will be their victims? CrossTalking with Jim Lobe, Bruce Fein, and Alex Newman.




http://rt.com/shows/crosstalk/209187-us ... s-neocons/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby slimmouse » Fri Nov 28, 2014 12:50 pm

The masters of chaos.

A visionary title for such information. :thumbsup

Cos lets face it thats what these fuckers are

They create it, and then deal with it to suit their ends.

Can we not do the same, or is part of this problem understanding that we''re already doing that?
slimmouse
 
Posts: 6129
Joined: Fri May 20, 2005 7:41 am
Location: Just outside of you.
Blog: View Blog (3)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby Iamwhomiam » Fri Nov 28, 2014 2:50 pm

Blow it up and build it anew; repeat.

Everybody who's not a body works supporting the chaos machine; those that are mere bodies are irrelevant: They don't vote and can't protest. Everyone left with a heartbeat looking for their bootstraps eventually dies, slowly or quickly while being too focused searching for survival to either vote or raise their failing voice in protest.

Capitalism: 2014

Thanksgiving has become a financial transaction. The corporatists thank you for giving them your wealth. A national holiday - 2014

Don't you feel better now?

Waddya mean you don't have a gadget that beats an egg in its shell? Sheesh!

Not $29.95.. but 2 for $19.99!


Masters of Chaos
User avatar
Iamwhomiam
 
Posts: 6572
Joined: Thu Sep 27, 2007 2:47 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby conniption » Tue Oct 20, 2015 8:56 pm

Paul Craig Roberts

Will The Crazed Neocons Bring Us Nuclear Winter?


October 20, 2015

Paul Craig Roberts

As readers know, I have emphasized that the declared neoconservative intention of achieving global hegemony has resurrected the threat of nuclear armageddon as Russia and China are most definitely not going to submit, as every European country, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Columbia, and Japan have submitted, to being Washington’s vassals.

The president of Russia and the president of China have made this completely clear.

If the arrogance, ignorance and incompetence of the Western political systems permit the continuation of the crazed, totally unrealistic, neoconservative agenda, the planet will die.

Ronald Reagan is the only US president during the era of nuclear weapons who was committed to removing them from all arsenals. I know because I was a part of his effort. If you can’t believe me, ask Pat Buchanan who was with Reagan at Reykjavik. In previous columns on my website, I quoted Buchanan’s response to my statements. Buchanan wrote to me that I was correct, that Reagan wanted rid of every nuclear weapon. That was President Reagan’s primary goal and is the reason for his economic program, which he placed in my hands. Reagan reasoned that if the US economy could be restored, the inability of the Soviet economy to be restored would allow him to pressure the Soviets into agreement to end the cold war and rid the world of nuclear weapons. When I get letters from those denouncing Reagan for his crimes, I wonder at the pride that the writers show in their utter ignorance and stupidity.

What the neocons have done is to throw away every treaty and violate every agreement that had the world on the path to nuclear disarmament. These evil persons have caused massive moderization of Soviet and Chinese nuclear forces. There is no prospect whatsoever of American hegemony over the world. Yet, the insane neoconservatives continue to speak as if the world is subordinate to them, a collection of arrogant two-bit punks who could not subdue a few thousand lightly armed Taliban after 14 years of effort and American sacrifice and whose disastrous policies have made, until Vladimir Putin’s intervention, the Islamic State the most potent military force in the Middle East.

The damned neoconservatives have destroyed seven countries, and the bastards and bitches walk around free!

Their two-bit, dumbshit punk media spokespersons ask, “What’s the good of nucear weapons if you can’t use them?”

If the insouciant Western population sits on its sofa watching “reality shows” while the insane neoconservatives who control Western foreign policy drive us to Armageddon, the inattentive dumbshits that comprise the Western populations will find themselves exterminated by nuclear winter. It would be their just reward.

Unfortunately, the rest of the world would go with them.

Steven Starr has been a guest columnist for us before. Like myself, he understands that there are no survivors of nuclear war. Here is his latest, published by the Federation of American Scientists: https://fas.org/pir-pubs/nuclear-war-nu ... xtinction/

The neoconservatives should be quickly rounded up, arrested, tried, convicted, and executed for their massive crimes before they destroy the world.

Life hangs in the balance. It is the neocons or us.
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby seemslikeadream » Tue Oct 20, 2015 9:01 pm

NATO Launches Massive Exercise to Prep for War With ‘Not Russia’
Exercise Will Include Focus on 'Hybrid Warfare' and 'Propaganda'
by Jason Ditz, October 19, 2015

NATO today launched its biggest single military exercise in more than 13 years, involving some 36,000 troops in the Mediterranean Sea, simulating a war spanning from Sicily to Spain and Portugal against a major invading European superpower, who officials are insisting is definitely totally not Russia.

The exercise is planned to last through November 6 and will focus on support a “Spearhead Force” that NATO intends to install along the Russian border, nominally to fend off a Russian invasion of Eastern Europe. The predictions of a Russian invasion have been growing out of NATO for a couple of years, and have justified significant increases in spending and military deployments into otherwise calm nations in the east.

The exercise is also going to involve “hybrid warfare” and challenging officers with Internet “propaganda” involving manipulated pictures and false intelligence, claiming to center on “lessons learned” during the 14-year-plus occupation of Afghanistan.

In addition to the NATO nations, 7 non-member nations will be participating in the exercise. Noteworthy among these is Ukraine, which predicts a full-scale global war with Russia seemingly on a weekly basis, and has ambitions to join the alliance.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby zangtang » Wed Oct 21, 2015 12:35 am

obviously the trick is to get all or most of them in the same place at the same time.
zangtang
 
Posts: 1247
Joined: Fri Jun 10, 2005 2:13 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby 82_28 » Wed Oct 21, 2015 1:46 am

I don't think that there will ever be a war war war war. This is the "war". Politicians are astutely incompetent and expertly corrupt. It's probably going to take two or so generations to die off, data bases defunct, libraries gone, the knowledgeable teachers and professors gone, the kind churches have all of their congregations die and etc and then they will reach their goal of a "master plan". We're 15 years removed from the initial peace rally that at least I went to and I feel like I was just a kid back then. There was no "social media" "on the go". Your networking jammed up just like supposedly the servers for tickets to see the new star wars crashed. I doubt it. It is a "crusade" of built in obsolescence. But the kids born 15-20 years ago know nothing of this. This is their world and it is quasi illegal to even bring anything like this up at this point in time to an adolescent.

In my day, young buck. . .

I've done it and do it when the occasion arises, but when people say I should be a teacher, I say no way. I'd be arrested and put in prison. This, I fear is basically the story for the lot of us. Everything is fucked up and bullshit.
There is no me. There is no you. There is all. There is no you. There is no me. And that is all. A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of this universe is love. -- Propagandhi
User avatar
82_28
 
Posts: 11194
Joined: Fri Nov 30, 2007 4:34 am
Location: North of Queen Anne
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 21, 2015 2:00 pm

How the US Created Middle East Mayhem
Rebecca Gordon and Tom Engelhardt, October 21, 2015

Originally posted at TomDispatch.

To this day, it remains difficult to take in the degree to which the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq destabilized the Greater Middle East from the Chinese border to Libya. Certainly, as the recent Republican and Democratic presidential debates suggest, Americans have some sense of what a disaster it was for the Bush administration to use the 9/11 attacks as an excuse to take out Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein. The gravity of the decision to occupy and garrison his country, while dismantling his party, his institutions of state, and much of the economy, not to speak of his military, can hardly be overemphasized. In the process, it’s clear that the U.S. punched a giant hole through the oil heartlands of the planet. The disintegrative effects of those moves have only compounded over the years. Despite the many other factors, demographic and economic, that lay behind the Arab Spring of 2011-2012, for instance, it’s hard to believe that it would have happened in the way it did, had the invasion of Iraq not occurred.

Though you’ll seldom find it mentioned in one place, in the ensuing years five countries in the region – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen – all disintegrated as nation states. Three of them were the focus of direct American interventions, the fourth (Yemen) was turned into a hunting ground for American drones, and the fifth (Syria) suffered indirectly from the chaos and mayhem in neighboring Iraq. All of them are now embroiled in seemingly unceasing internecine struggles, wars, and upheavals. Meanwhile, the phenomenon that the Americans were ostensibly focused on crushing, terrorism, has exploded across the same lands, resulting among other things in the first modern terrorist state (though its adherents prefer to call it a “caliphate”).

Those two invasions also loosed another deeply destabilizing phenomenon: 24/7 counterinsurgency from the air and the “manhunting” drone that was so essential to it. At first, this was an American phenomenon as U.S. Air Force planes with their “smart” weaponry and CIA and Air Force drones, all hyped for their “surgical precision,” began cruising the skies of the Greater Middle East, terrorizing parts of the backlands of the region. In effect, they acted as agents of disintegration as well as recruitment posters for expanding terror outfits. The “collateral damage” they caused was considerable, even if it has, until recently, been largely ignored in our world. Hundreds, for instance, died in three of those disintegrating countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen) when at least eight wedding parties were obliterated by American air power, and yet few noticed. This may recently have changed when an American AC-130 gunship eviscerated a hospital run by Doctors Without Borders in Kunduz, Afghanistan. Doctors, staff, and patients were killed, some burned in their beds, because American special operations analysts believed, according to the Associated Press, that a single Pakistani intelligence agent might be on the premises. (He evidently wasn’t.) Soon after, the Intercept published a cache of secret U.S. documents from a “new Edward Snowden” on the American drone program in Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen that offered a strong sense of the “apparently incalculable civilian toll” taken in the constant search for terror targets.

But here’s the truly grim reality of the Greater Middle East today: what the Americans started didn’t end with them. The skies of the region are now being cruised by French, British, Jordanian, United Arab Emirates, Kuwaiti, Qatari, Bahraini, Moroccan, Egyptian, Saudi, and Russian planes and drones, all emulating the Americans, all conducting “counterinsurgency,” all undoubtedly blasting away civilians. In Yemen, the Saudi air force, backed and supplied by Washington, recently took up the twenty-first-century American way of war in the most explicit fashion possible – by knocking off two wedding parties and killing more than 150 celebrants.

And can the Iranians, the Chinese, and others, all now building or purchasing drones, be far behind? We are, it seems, already on a Terminator Planet. In that light, as TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon points out today, this year’s Nobel Prize to a Tunisian foursome of civil organizations that struggled to bring peace, not war, to their land has special meaning. It offers a tiny window on what the world of the Greater Middle East might have looked like if Washington had never intervened as it did. ~ Tom

The Secret to Winning the Nobel Peace Prize
Keep the U.S. Military Out
By Rebecca Gordon

This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to Tunisia’s National Dialogue Quartet “for its decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy… in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.” The Quartet is a group of four organizations – two national labor unions, a business group, and a lawyers’ association – whose work helped prevent Tunisia from sliding into civil war in the years following that “revolution.”

Seeing the peace prize go to an organization that actually seems to have kept the peace is cheering news in a month that witnessed the military of one former Nobel laureate destroying a hospital run by another winner. Doctors Without Borders (Médecins Sans Frontières) certainly earned its 1999 Peace Prize by providing medical services to people in more than 80 countries, often working in some of the most dangerous places on earth. On the other hand, as far as anyone can tell, a weary Nobel committee gave Barack Obama his prize in 2009 mostly for not being George W. Bush.

Tunisia, home of this year’s winners, is the country where the Arab Spring began when a vegetable seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death after the police confiscated the cart from which he made his living. His lingering death catalyzed a variety of social forces demanding an end to the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. These included young people, students, and workers – all with deep economic grievances – as well as human rights supporters and some Islamists who hoped to see the country adopt a version of Sharia law. On January 14, 2011, 10 days after Bouazizi’s death and under popular pressure, Ben Ali gave up power and accepted asylum in Saudi Arabia.

In October 2011, Tunisia held parliamentary elections. A right-wing religious party, al-Nahda (“Renaissance”), took 37% of the vote and formed a coalition government with two other parties, one on the left and the other composed of secular liberals. Hamadi Jebali, a solar energy scientist and member of al-Nahda, became the first prime minister. He later stepped down when fellow party members pressured him to abandon his efforts to build a coalition government of national unity in favor of a more explicitly Islamist approach.

In the following years, while the al-Nahda party continued to rule, several prominent left-wing politicians were assassinated, for which the far right-wing Islamist militia Ansar al-Shariah claimed responsibility. Unhappy with the Islamist turn of their revolution and furious at what they saw as the government’s inaction after the assassination of leftwing Popular Front politician Mohamed Brahmi, Tunisians once again took to the streets. There, as Juan Cole wrote shortly afterwards, they staged “enormous demonstrations.” Unions, women’s organizations, and student groups all demanded that al-Nahda step down in favor of a more neutral, technocratic government.

At this point, the profound political conflict in Tunisia could easily have turned into an armed confrontation. But it didn’t. Instead the country’s organized political forces, aided by the National Dialogue Quartet, achieved something remarkable, especially in the context of the present Greater Middle East. Al-Nahda withdrew from governing and was replaced with a “technocratic” caretaker government. Under it, a new, secular constitution was written and, in October 2014, parliamentary elections were held, followed by presidential elections that November.

Today, Tunisia continues to face economic and political problems, including two separate terrorist attacks on foreigners this year, but for now it has something unique among the Arab Spring countries: an apparently stable, democratic government.

What Made Tunisia Different?

Of all the countries touched by Arab Spring uprisings, including Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and Syria, Tunisia is the only one that has neither devolved into vicious internal warfare nor reverted to authoritarian rule. What makes Tunisia different?

In Tunisia, as Juan Cole has suggested and the Nobel committee recognized, a uniquely strong, organized, and varied civil society, especially trade and student unions, was key to the country’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. There were other differences as well. Unlike the Egyptian army, which had long supported the Mubarak regime, Tunisia’s relatively small military was never tightly allied with the Ben Ali government. And, as Cole says, almost uniquely in the region, its commanders chose to stay out of the ensuing turmoil.

Egypt’s military, however, thanks in part to U.S. aid, is among the 20 most powerful in the world, and has long played a central role in that country’s politics and economy. After the Arab Spring protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square brought autocrat Hosni Mubarak down, the first elections put a religious party, the Muslim Brotherhood, in power. However when (as in Tunisia) Egyptians started to grow restive under the Brotherhood’s rule and returned to the streets in protest, instead of allowing a transition to secular democracy, the military chose to reinsert itself in political life, elevating the head of the armed forces, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who now serves as president and supreme military commander.

Among other differences with the rest of the Arab Spring states, Tunisia is a country, rare in the region, with a certain religious homogeneity: more than 99% of its population is at least nominally Sunni Muslim, so it has not experienced the sort of sectarian violence that has roiled countries like Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. And as Cole also points out, when Tunisia’s secularists came to power, unlike the Sisi government in Egypt, they did not outlaw and repress the country’s religious parties.

The Biggest Difference

There is one more key difference to mention: since the revolution the United States has largely stayed out of Tunisian affairs. Admittedly, U.S. military aid did rise from $17 million before the revolution to $29.5 million in 2012 before dropping again to almost pre-revolutionary levels for the next few years. Perhaps in response to the growth of Islamic State adherents, however, the U.S. recently announced that military aid to Tunisia would triple in 2016. We know that British special forces have been sent to Tunisia and it’s certainly possible that U.S. special forces have been there as well.

For now, however, it appears that the U.S. has not intervened in the governance of the country. In contrast, Washington has played a significant role in the affairs of all the other Arab Spring countries. Let’s consider these situations, one by one:

Egypt: Egypt has long been one of the world’s biggest recipients of U.S. military aid, second only to Israel. When el-Sisi came to power, the Obama administration briefly withheld aid, but in March 2015 restored the full $1.3 billion a year it had slated for the Egyptian military. In fact, in 2013 when that army overthrew elected President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, President Obama took care never to describe this action as a “coup d’état,” because U.S. law would then have prohibited any military aid to Egypt. In other words, after Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring rising, Egyptians essentially traded one U.S.- and military-backed regime for another.

Yemen: Ali Abdullah Saleh had been president of Yemen for 33 years when Arab Spring demonstrators took to the streets of the capital, Sana’a, at the end of January 2011. Between 200 and 2,000 died in the crackdown that followed, but by November Saleh was out, replaced by one of his deputies, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who has since been ousted by the Houthi rebellion.

In Yemen, the United States and Saudi Arabia have taken the side of the now-deposed Hadi government in an internal struggle with Houthi rebels. The Houthi movement – like everything in Yemen – is complicated. It’s made up of rural tribespeople from the northern part of the country and is supported by the Iranians. Houthis are adherents of the Zaidi branch of Shia Islam, so Sunni-Shia tensions have played a part in Yemen’s collapse, as have north-south conflicts. (Yemen only became a single country in 1990.) In February 2015, a British academic expert writing for the BBC described Yemen’s condition this way:

“[A]nti-systemic movements – the ragtag Houthi militia astonished by the lack of resistance to their advance against the flailing ‘transitional’ regime; the separatist Southern Movement… marginalized from the National Dialogue but now taking up arms; fringe Yemeni and foreign Salafist fighters for al-Qaeda; and divisions of what used to be Mr Saleh’s security apparatus – are jockeying for power in the new order.”

What could possibly make this situation worse?

How about U.S.-supplied missiles and cluster bombs delivered by the Saudi air force? Washington, of course, long ago made Yemen part of its battlefield in the “global war on terror,” using “kill lists” to send drones to pick off al-Qaeda terrorists (who might well turn out to be Yemeni civilians shopping for supplies to celebrate the end of Ramadan or getting married). Now, the United States has rushed to support Saudi Arabia’s intervention against the Houthis in the country’s hydra-headed civil war, providing munitions, intelligence assistance, and even mid-air refueling for Saudi bombers, while a naval blockade of the port of Aden has helped shut off supplies to the country. Seven months of sustained Saudi bombing, violence, and food and fuel shortages have helped displace more than a million and a half Yemenis. In August, the U.N.’s World Food Program warned that the country faces famine.

The United States has been involved in Yemen for a while. In fact, when announcing the restoration of Egyptian military aid, the Obama administration stressed the importance of el-Sisi’s cooperation in the fight against al-Qaeda-style Islamic terrorism, particularly in Yemen (and also Libya). Now the U.S. finds itself in tactical agreement with these same Sunni fundamentalists. In a case of intervention making strange bedfellows, by supporting the Saudis against the Houthis, Washington has ended up on the same side of this fight as the Islamic State, which has been using its usual terror tactics in an attempt to drive the Houthis out of Yemen’s capital.

Libya: The Arab Spring came to Libya, too, when Libyans deposed Muammar Gaddafi, who had ruled the country since a 1969 coup.

U.S. relations with Gaddafi had been tense at least since 1988 when a terrorist explosion brought down Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. In 2003, Gaddafi acknowledged Libyan responsibility for the bombing and paid compensation to victims’ families (although maintaining his own innocence in the affair). In the same year, Tripoli abandoned its nuclear weapons program and allowed international inspectors free rein in the country. Washington reached an accommodation with Gaddafi in 2006, ending all previous sanctions. Two years earlier, he had also made peace with the European Union (EU), and in 2010 accepted 50 million Euros from the EU in return for help preventing African migrants and refugees from using Libya as a transit corridor to Europe.

However, in 2011, when it became clear that Libyans were threatening to depose Gaddafi, the Obama administration abandoned him, pushing NATO into military action. NATO launched a concerted campaign of airstrikes to cripple his military. Gaddafi died after a convoy in which he was traveling was hit by a U.S. Predator drone and French jet fighters. Although accounts of his death vary, it seems clear that, when Gaddafi was left without protection, a crowd attacked and killed him.

In reporting on his death, the New York Times presciently referred to “an instability that could trouble Libya long after the euphoria fades about the demise of Colonel Gaddafi.” Indeed, chaos followed, spilling into Mali and other countries as the Colonel’s weapons arsenals were looted and dispatched across the region as far east as the Sinai Peninsula and possibly as far south as Nigeria. In Libya itself, havoc ensued, along with civil war (or wars) and the rise of a branch of the Islamic State (IS).

As in Iraq, Washington once again proved remarkably skilled at dictator-toppling, but significantly weaker on its follow-up. Today, post-Arab Spring Libya is a failed state, riven by violence, and “governed” by rival parliaments. In September 2015, the Times reported (with no apparent irony): “Libyans are struggling with a problem that typically emerges after a bloody regime change: how to reassemble a functioning country after its brittle, autocratic and repressive government has been fractured and replaced with warring factions.” This is a question the United States might have thought to ask before getting into the government-fracturing business.

Bahrain: The Kingdom of Bahrain is a small island on the western side of the Persian Gulf with a population of 1.34 million. It provides a vital base for the U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf and is home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. As the U.S. State Department puts it, “The Government of Bahrain plays a key role in the Gulf’s security architecture and is an important member of the U.S.-led anti-ISIL coalition. U.S. assistance enables Bahrain to continue to obtain the equipment and training it needs to provide for its own defense and to operate alongside U.S. air and naval forces.”

The CIA’s World Fact Book lists Bahrain’s form of government as “constitutional monarchy,” but it is hardly a democracy. Political parties are outlawed, and although one legislative house is elected, King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa appoints the prime minister, the cabinet, and the members of the judiciary. He or his sons occupy most of the highest positions. More than two-thirds of Bahrain’s Muslims are Shia, while the royal family and the ruling elite are Sunni.

The Arab Spring reached Bahrain in January 2011. In the fashion of Egyptian demonstrators in Tahrir Square, Bahraini protestors occupied the Pearl Roundabout, a key intersection in the capital Manama, demanding the king’s ouster. Al-Khalifa responded by calling on his allies Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for help. The Saudis responded by sending 1,000 troops; the UAE sent another 500. Together they routed the demonstrators and ended the rebellion.

Dozens were killed, thousands were rounded up, and many of the prisoners were tortured. Once again, the United States took sides, throwing its support not to the Arab Spring demonstrators but to the king and his repressive state. Washington’s strategic interests and the desire to keep the Saudis happy took precedence over any pretense of supporting civil and human rights. As Middle East expert Toby Jones told NPR in early 2012, “If there is a place globally where there is not just distance but a huge gap between American interests and American values, it’s in the Persian Gulf.”

Syria: The Arab Spring in Syria began with small demonstrations in January 2011. These grew larger when people in the town of Dara’a came out to protest the torture of young men arrested for putting up political graffiti. By April, the government of Bashar al-Assad was using tanks and live fire to put down demonstrations. By July, demonstrators numbered in the hundreds of thousands. By the end of 2011, demonstrations had given way to armed conflict as a wide variety of rebel brigades with differing aims and loyalties began to fight back. Fighters on multiple sides, including the Assad regime, have been accused of war crimes – torture, summary executions, the barrel-bombing of civilians, and the use of poison gas.

The civil war in Syria is the premier humanitarian disaster of the twenty-first century, spawning the worst refugee crisis Europe has faced since the end of World War II. As of October 4, 2015, the U.N. High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) reports that there are 4,185,302 registered “persons of concern” (refugees) driven from the country by war. “This figure,” says the agency, “includes 2.1 million Syrians registered by UNHCR in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon, 1.9 million Syrians registered by the Government of Turkey, as well as more than 26,700 Syrian refugees registered in North Africa.”

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Organization reports at least another 7.7 million internally displaced people, forced by the conflict to leave their homes. Of a population of 22 million, almost 12 million, more than half, have been made refugees. The New York Times reports that more than 200,000 Syrians – almost one in every 100 – have been killed. In March 2015, the BBC put the figure at 220,000, and in August, the UN suggested that figure might even have reached 250,000.

And Washington has its fingerprints all over Syria’s civil war. As long ago as 1996, neocons Richard Perle and Douglas Feith, who would later serve as advisors to Vice President Dick Cheney, participated in a study group that produced a paper for the Israeli government. In it, they argued that “Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.” Such a campaign would begin, they suggested, by “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq – an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right – as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.”

The ultimate goal would be a realignment of power in the Middle East, with Syria destabilized, a Hashemite king ruling Iraq, and a new regional alliance among Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. Perle & Co. brought this plan to the Bush White House, where the 9/11 attacks provided a pretext for the first step: removing Saddam Hussein. It would seem that the neocon dream of destabilizing Syria has been realized as well, even if not in the way they expected.

When the 2011 uprising became an armed fight, the United States began supporting the “moderate” Free Syrian Army, initially with “non-lethal” assistance. Since then, the U.S. has sought to identify non-extremist Sunni Islamists to equip and set loose on the growing Islamic State, with results that would be comical if they hadn’t been so deadly and disastrous. On October 9th, the White House and the Pentagon admitted that the $500 million program to vet, train, and equip moderate fighters in Turkey and Jordan to be sent back to Syria had been an abject failure. The Obama administration’s new strategy, reported the New York Times, is “a revamped program that briefly screens Arab rebel commanders of existing Syrian units before equipping them with much-needed ammunition and, potentially, small arms,” as well as, it turns out, TOW anti-tank missiles.

On October 12th, the U.S. airdropped the first 50 tons of ammunition to these rebel groups, who presumably have been distinguished from the Islamic State, the al-Qaeda-linked al-Nusra Front, and other extreme outfits by those “brief” screenings. The official U.S. position on Assad himself remains that his leaving power is a prerequisite for any peace settlement, but the Obama administration prefers to frame its intervention as a battle against the Islamic State.

Confronting IS in Syria while also opposing Assad has proved problematic, to say the least. There may well be non-Salafist forces fighting the Syrian government, but much of the fight against Assad has been carried out by al-Qaeda affiliates like the al-Nusra Front, or by IS (when they are not fighting each other, that is). Just as in Yemen, the United States has, eerily enough, ended up on the same side as its supposed greatest enemies, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Meanwhile, the Syrian conflict has been made exponentially more dangerous for Syrians and the entire world by the intervention of Russia, which opposes IS, but supports the Assad regime. The last thing the country needed was to become the site of a proxy war between the United States and Russia.

Suffice it to say that U.S. intervention has in no way alleviated the suffering of the Syrian people, whether caused by Assad – to whose regime the Bush administration once sent people to be tortured – or Islamist groups like IS.

The Peace Prize: A Long Strange Trip

The history of Nobel Peace Prize recipients is an odd one. The first winner was Jean Henri Dunant, the Swiss citizen who founded the International Red Cross and inspired the first Geneva Conventions. The Red Cross itself has won three times, Doctors Without Borders once. My personal favorite laureate may be the scientist Linus Pauling, who won twice, once for his contributions to the anti-nuclear movement and the other time in chemistry.

Along with peacemakers and servants of justice like Martin Luther King, Jr., the prize has gone to some more questionable figures, including Henry Kissinger. Fresh from assisting the military coup that resulted in the death of elected president Salvador Allende and brought Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile, Kissinger shared the prize in 1973 with Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam for the Paris Peace Accords, which were supposed to end the Vietnam War. Tho had the good grace to decline the prize – partly on the grounds that the United States had already violated the agreement.

It seems that this year the committee has chosen well, fixing on the Quartet that helped Tunisia bring the promise of the Arab Spring to flower. It is sad indeed that the crucial role of the United States in that remarkable moment was to repeatedly intervene in ways that changed the temperature radically, helping to bring a cruel and deadly frost of repression, death, and destruction to too many countries. There ought to be a grim prize of some sort for such an achievement.
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby Luther Blissett » Thu Jan 28, 2016 10:28 am

Good thread for this? I liked this one.

UN report into Saudi-led strikes in Yemen raises questions over UK role
Experts conclude Saudi-led coalition conducted widespread airstrikes against civilian targets in violation of international law

A United Nations panel investigating the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen has uncovered “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilian targets in violation of international humanitarian law, raising questions over UK arms exports to Saudi Arabia and the role of British military advisers.

The final 51-page report by a panel of experts on Yemen, which was sent to the UN security council last week but had not yet been published, has been obtained by the Guardian.

Human rights groups and the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn – who described the leaked report as disturbing – called for an immediate inquiry and a suspension of arms sales to Saudi pending its outcome.

David Cameron said he would look at the report but insisted Britain had one of the strictest set of rules governing arms sales almost anywhere in the world, adding that the UK was not directly involved in the Saudi-led airstrikes.

In one of the key findings, the report says: “The panel documented that the coalition had conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international humanitarian law, including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities; schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses; and other essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sana’a, the port in Hudaydah and domestic transit routes.”

It adds: “The panel documented 119 coalition sorties relating to violations of international humanitarian law.”

Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest buyers of UK defence equipment, including planes, began bombing in Yemen in March last year in support of the Yemeni president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was under threat from Houthi forces aligned with Iran.

According to the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, UK arms sales to Saudi totalled £2.95bn for the first nine months of 2015, and about £7bn since Cameron took office, including a contract for 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets.

Earlier this month the UK confirmed that British forces have been in the Saudi command and control centre for the strikes on Yemen, but denied that the forces have an operational role.

The panel findings will increase the pressure on Cameron to suspend sales. In a ministerial statement in March 2014, the UK government said explicitly that it “will … not grant a licence if there is a clear risk that the items might be used in the commission of a serious violation of international humanitarian law”.

The report says: “Many attacks involved multiple airstrikes on multiple civilian objects. Of the 119 sorties, the panel identified 146 targeted objects. The panel also documented three alleged cases of civilians fleeing residential bombings and being chased and shot at by helicopters.”

The report attributes 60% (2,682) of civilian deaths and injuries in Yemen to air-launched explosive weapons.

It says: “The coalition’s targeting of civilians through airstrikes, either by bombing residential neighbourhoods or by treating the entire cities of Sa’dah and Maran as military targets, is a grave violation of the principles of distinction, proportionality and precaution. In certain cases, the panel found such violations to have been conducted in a widespread and systematic manner.”

Although the report acknowledges that Houthi combatants are positioned in residential areas in violation of international humanitarian law, this “does not suspend the coalition’s obligation to respect international humanitarian law when undertaking military objectives.

“Holding perpetrators of violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law to account is fundamental and necessary for tackling impunity and deterring future violations in Yemen,” it says.

One of the panel’s main recommendations is the establishment of an investigation into its findings, “with a view to ensuring that those responsible are held accountable”.

The panel could not obtain entry to Yemen but used satellite imagery to look at areas before and after bombings. “The imagery revealed extensive damage to residential areas and civilian objects as a result of internal fighting and coalition airstrikes,” the report says.

It adds: “Alongside ground-led obstructions to humanitarian distribution, the panel documented 10 coalition airstrikes on transportation routes (both sea and air routes), four road supply routes and five storage facilities for holding food aid (including two vehicles carrying aid and three warehouses and facilities storing food), along with airstrikes on an Oxfam warehouse storing equipment for a water project funded by the European Union in Sana’a. The panel also documented three coalition attacks on local food and agricultural production sites.”

Speaking at prime minister’s questions in the House of Commons, Corbyn said: “These are very disturbing reports. In the light of this, will the prime minister agree to launch immediately an inquiry and full review into the arms exports licences to Saudi Arabia and suspend those arms sales until that review has been concluded?

Cameron replied: “We have the strictest rules for arms exports of almost any country anywhere in the world. And let me remind him that we are not a member of the Saudi-led coalition, we are not directly involved in the Saudi-led coalition’s operations, British personnel are not involved in carrying out strikes.

“I will look at this report as I look at all other reports, but our arms exports are carefully controlled and we are backing the legitimate government of the Yemen not least because terrorist attacks planned in the Yemen would have a direct effect on people in our country. I refuse to run a foreign policy by press release, which is what he wants. I want a foreign policy that is in the interests of the British people.”

The parliamentary committee on arms exports controls, which might have been investigating the Yemen bombing, has yet to be established.

David Mepham, the UK director of Human Rights Watch, said: “The findings of the UN report flatly contradict repeated statements made by British ministers about the actions of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.

“For almost a year, [foreign secretary] Philip Hammond has made the false and misleading claim that there is no evidence of laws or war violations by the UK’s Saudi ally and other members of the coalition.”

Amnesty International UK’s head of policy and government affairs, Allan Hogarth, said: “Thousands of civilians have already died and it’s been utterly dismaying to see Downing Street brushing aside extremely serious concerns about the reckless conduct of Saudi Arabia in this devastating conflict.”
The Rich and the Corporate remain in their hundred-year fever visions of Bolsheviks taking their stuff - JackRiddler
User avatar
Luther Blissett
 
Posts: 4990
Joined: Fri Jan 02, 2009 1:31 pm
Location: Philadelphia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Dec 21, 2016 3:19 pm

from The Guardian

Saudi Arabia admitted using UK cluster bombs, Fallon to tell MPs
Defence secretary to address Commons after Amnesty alleges British-supplied cluster munitions used by Saudis in Yemen

Rowena Mason and Ewen MacAskill
Monday 19 December 2016 10.05 EST First published on Monday 19 December 2016 07.31 EST

Michael Fallon will bow to pressure in the Commons by announcing that Saudi Arabia had privately admitted to using UK-made cluster bombs against rebels in Yemen.

The defence secretary will make a statement on Monday afternoon, more than six months after the Ministry of Defence said it would urgently investigate allegations in an Amnesty International report that British cluster munitions had been deployed.


UK cluster bombs used in Yemen by Saudi Arabia, finds research

The UK is aiding Saudi Arabia with military training but is a signatory to the convention on cluster munitions, which prohibits their use or assistance with their use.

The Guardian reported on Sunday that Fallon had seen government analysis indicating UK-made cluster bombs were deployed in the war, in which Saudi-led forces are fighting Houthi rebels who rose up against the Yemeni government.

Fallon’s admission is a major embarrassment, raising questions about whether the UK and Saudi Arabia are in breach of international humanitarian law.

Fallon is expected to dispute whether there is any such breach. The UK line is that the bombs were used against a purely military target close to the Saudi border and that no civilians were targeted. He is also expected to stress that Riyadh is not a signatory to the international treaty on cluster munitions.

But that still leaves a whole host of questions, given that the UK is a signatory. It also brings into the limelight again the role of British military attached to the Saudi headquarters advising on the Saudi-led coalition’s air campaign and the extent to which they were aware that cluster bombs had been used.

Analysis Saudi Arabia and UK-supplied cluster bombs: what do we know?
British government faces several difficult questions over what it knew after Riyadh confirms use of munitions in Yemen

The MoD has repeatedly said the attachment is only there to give guidance in broad terms about targets being within international law, not operational decisions.

A source said the defence secretary had known about the analysis for about a month. Saudi Arabia publicly denies the allegations.

The Financial Times reported a Whitehall official as saying: “It has been known for some time inside the system that this was a British cluster bomb and at some point we are going to have to come clean about it.”

In the last few months, ITV and Sky News have also reported from Yemen, alleging British-made bombs have been used in the war. The last exports of cluster munitions to Saudi Arabia are thought to have been made in the late 1980s.

Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s UK director, said confirmation from the government would not be a “bolt from the blue” and repeated the organisation’s calls for a suspension of arms sales to Saudi Arabia.

“The reality is that Amnesty and others have been reporting on Saudi Arabia’s use of UK cluster munitions in Yemen for months,” she said. “Back in May we revealed how the Saudi coalition had been using British-made cluster bombs in their attacks near Yemeni villages and farms in the north of the country.

“Over the years, the UK has sold billions and billions of pounds’ worth of weapons, including cluster bombs, to Saudi Arabia, and it’s hardly a surprise they’re turning up in bombed-out villages in Yemen. Thousands of Yemeni civilians have already been killed and injured by the Saudi coalition’s reckless and indiscriminate bombing of homes, hospitals, schools and factories.

“It doesn’t require a belated ‘investigation’ within the MoD to tell us what we already knew: that the UK should immediately suspend all further weapons sales to Saudi Arabia that risk fuelling these appalling atrocities in Yemen.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/ ... mbs-saudis
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
User avatar
seemslikeadream
 
Posts: 32090
Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
Location: into the black
Blog: View Blog (83)

Masters of Chaos

Postby conniption » Fri Apr 02, 2021 2:46 am

strategic culture

The ‘Transition’ of the Élites

Alastair Crooke
February 22, 2021


The neo-cons were for ever knifing Trump in the back. They’ve now gone to Biden, Alastair Crooke writes.

Rep. Jamie Raskin wrapped up the impeachment managers’ case for convicting Donald Trump by citing a 1776 passage by Tom Paine: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered, but we have this saving consolation: the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious in the end – will be our victory”. Light and dark. Good and evil – and so the essence of the ‘show trial’ stands revealed. It is one of extravagant theatre – touching on the Manichean through using edited clips from TV to present a drama consisting of, on the one hand, legitimacy and power, versus, on the other, Trump and his supporters as – not just ‘enemies’ – but ‘tyrants out of hell’.

The question ultimately is: Did it succeed? Was the ‘guilty party’ cowed by the majestic dramaturgy of the show trial, and fearful of a coming domestic Patriot Act ? Did it guarantee a long era of one-party’s rule?

At one level, it failed. Reports suggest that Sen. McConnell (perhaps reflecting his own emotional reaction to the 6 January), had assured the Democratic leadership of a much bigger contingent of Republican senators prepared to vote to convict. In the end, only seven did.

So, the trial may have been flawed in its execution, but also prove to be flawed in its purpose. Many of the most notorious show trials, U.S. historian Professor Vlahos notes, have headed in a far more fatal direction, ending up achieving the very opposite of what they intended: The twin show trials (from the first U.S. civil war) that were the Dred Scott decision (not a classic show trial, yet with all the hallmarks of a sacred national trial) and John Brown’s trial and execution, failed spectacularly in the late 1850s. Rather than buttressing the southern States’ place in the American polity, these two ceremonial events pushed Northern states (now emotionally opposed to slavery) into arguably existential opposition to the South and everything it represented, including, above all, its grip on political power. We know what happened next, Professor Vlahos wryly notes.

The point here is that the southern States’ grip on power in 1856 was considerably weaker than it appeared. It is too early to judge for today’s struggle, but there are indications (not least from the language of ‘darkness and light’ employed by Biden and other leaders) that the Democratic Party may be engaged in a self-defeating strategy, seeking to achieve things (such as the crushing of dissent), which cannot be achieved. And having launched down this continuum, they will find it hard to retreat back from it.

Congressional elections come in 2022. Will the Republicans be energised and motivated – as were the Northern states after those 1850s show trials – vigorously to contest them? Maybe. Both parties at this point are weakened. But events have flipped the U.S. balance of power before: In 1968, it was race riots; soaring crime rates; a social and cultural revolution on the campuses, and a war in Southeast Asia. In 1980, it was 21% interest rates, 13% inflation, and 52 U.S. hostages held in Iran.

Yes, the Republican Party may be entering a period of contention or civil war, but if the ‘show trial’ showed anything, it demonstrated again the hold that Trump has over the party base. The trial might well have consolidated that hold if anything – even if some old-style conservatives depart a metamorphosised GOP, in search of a more peaceful and civil anchorage. McConnell’s conservative contingent seems, in retrospect, to emerge as the ephemeral element, rather than a key pivot around which a new GOP might form.

Yet Biden, in many ways, is in the politically weaker position. His party is less than homogenous – it is a more conflicted bunch. Many of its components simply detest each other. The Clinton-Obama neoliberal wing is fixated in its belief that they, and the U.S., have been on the global side-lines for far too long – and are agog to jump back in. They are escalating in Afghanistan, in Syria, and preparing a new push in Ukraine. Trump’s troop withdrawals have been all reversed (even for Germany) – and numbers deployed rather, have been augmented.

In spite of their heady eagerness to lead the world, they are likely to find themselves banging heads with a changed world. Iran, Russia – even the EU – are not showing regard to the Biden bugle call: ‘America is back’.

In party terms, though, the urban Millennial base (and even more so, the angry X-Gen), view the Clinton-Obama neo-cons derisively as ‘just Boomers’ – establishment tools of the despised Oligarchs and billionaires, who have so screwed their lives. These generations are not ‘up’ for more war. They want a Life back. They despise Wall Street which they see as bankrolling and colluding with the Boomer political class. Recently, the trading mania surrounding Robinhood and Gamestop reflected just how strong is the animus – a visceral Millennial anger channelled against the Wall Street ‘suits’, and against Boomers as a class.

Then, (aside from the Millennials), how will the ‘war party’s’ hawkishness jibe with the Climate-change, lockdown-prioritising, urban, woke wing of the party? And how will the Clinton-Pelosi-Obama iron lock on the Party apparatus and institutions mesh with the woke radicals seeking cultural ‘revolution’? And will what remains of Blue working class continue to support a party which puts climate objectives above jobs? A major Biden donor, the powerful AFL-CIO’ union President Trumka, was deeply angry at Biden’s executive order immediately ending the Keystone XL pipeline – and the loss of 11,000 jobs. How will the Dems war on fossil fuels, sit with today’s Texas’ renewables freeze up?

In what way will Biden try to ‘square this non-contiguous circle’? Notwithstanding that there are major domestic challenges ahead, too: Yellen is saying that now is time to ‘Go Big’ with helicopter money (though government deficit already amounts to 18% of GDP); lockdowns are ever more polarising; and markets ever more ‘make-believe’.

Likely there will be more ‘theatre’: The Campaign, the Primary, the Inauguration and Impeachment were all mounted as reality-TV drama. With the help of the Silicon Oligarch’s platforms, the public can be endlessly distracted by de-platforming drama, ‘cancellation’ and woke melt-downs at ‘Orange Man Bad’. AOC’s twitter tantrums no longer touch on substance: It is all theatre. This is where it’s going.

However that essentially is but one squaring of a small circle (the ‘public square’) – compared to the wider ‘squaring’ underway, known as the Great Reset: The globalist élites see a car crash fast approaching. Financialism as an era, is drawing to a close. Public finances are ‘for the birds’. Hyper-financialism brings no prosperity (except to the 1%), and it incubates rising ‘populist’ anger.

The point here, is that this concatenation of change elides with Tech innovation and digitalised finance, to threaten the intermediation role of the finance and banking system.

The ruling élites therefore are trying to square this circle by transiting from their historic role (since 1700s) as a financial and banking plutocracy, to become a technocratic oligarchy of ‘expertise’. In this mode, they can both contain and absorb disruptive Tech innovation, and oversee the concentration and re-grouping of business cartels under the new rubric of Big Tech.

Re-defining this new ‘reality’ as Carl Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution is just a device to allow ‘things to change – so that everything remains the same’. It is not a fourth revolution, but a continuation of earlier phases of industrialisation. This ‘transition’ of the élites – as Big Tech and the MSM are deployed to smother political dissent – is aimed precisely to avoid any effective rotation at all – the oligarchs of the banking world simply would meld into the Tech billionaires whose ‘expertise is required to guide the world – through its health, climate, security and economic challenges’.

There would be no true rotation. The élites – and their vast wealth – would be saved. This is the job entrusted to Biden et al to bring to a conclusion. It is why Wall Street is financing him so handsomely.

Obviously, this transition is a delicate manoeuvre. Unforeseen events can easily disrupt it. Trump simply was too disruptive (in spite of all that he did for Wall Street – which was a lot).

Which brings us back to the GOP: What should we expect, by contrast to the Biden approach? Trump is angry. Angry at ‘the system’ which he believes threw him under a bus – and which will now try to punish him with an entanglement of legal suits. He will be more radical. McConnell just had a first taste. He will likely be disruptive. His disruptiveness and unerring focus on bringing real jobs, however, will endear him to most of the existing GOP base – and to constituencies beyond, perhaps, too. There is a lot of anger out there.

In terms of foreign policy, a new book by Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow the World: The birth of U.S. Global Supremacy potentially gives the GOP the intellectual framework for a return to an earlier more Burkean Republicanism, which has correspondences with Trump’s instincts against interventionist adventures. (Pat Buchanan has long been its advocate.)

Wertheim’s main thesis is that it was the fall of France in 1940 – and not Pearl Harbour – that was the catalysing event that led to “U.S. global supremacy being born.” It is a gripping intellectual history, revealing how American foreign policy was manufactured by the economic and political planners congregated by the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), “the conceptual core of the imperial matrix” (which it still is).

The planners argued (in the early 1940s) that, were Nazi Germany to come to dominate Europe, the U.S. would have to dominate everywhere else. That was the logical conclusion based on the planners’ initial hypotheses. Thus U.S. foreign policy for the next 80 years was born: the U.S. had to wield “unquestionable power”, as stated in the CFR planners “recommendation” to the State Dept. “The United States was born of exceptionalist nationalism, imagining itself providentially chosen to occupy the vanguard of world history”, Wertheim observes.

But it still had to be sold to the American people, and that led to two new developments. First, partisans of hegemony demonized opposition thinkers as “isolationists”, a new term of opprobrium designed to put naysayers on their heels. “By developing the pejorative concept of isolationism,” writes Werthheim, “and applying it to all advocates of limits on military intervention, American officials and intellectuals found a way to make global supremacy sound unimpeachable”.

And there it is: Team Biden’s foreign policy gurus remain clinging to the same ideas that emerged from the minds of those strategic CFR planners back in the 1940s, ignoring the changed world (and ignoring too, that the U.S. is not the same as the state which emerged onto the world stage at the end of WW2). As Professor Vlahos notes, it is a vanity to seek to achieve things which cannot be achieved. It is self-defeating, too.

This detailed intellectual story of the CFR however, may well find its resonance within an evolving GOP, seeking a fresh look for American foreign policy. It would fit well with Trumpism: The neo-cons were for ever knifing him in the back. They’ve now gone to Biden.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ ... of-elites/
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby conniption » Wed Mar 02, 2022 11:34 pm

Voltaire Network

This article is a follow-up to :
1. "Russia wants to force the US to respect the UN Charter," January 4, 2022.
2. "Washington pursues RAND plan in Kazakhstan, then Transnistria," January 11, 2022.
3. "Washington refuses to hear Russia and China," January 18, 2022.
4. "Washington and London, deafened", February 1, 2022.
5. "Washington and London try to preserve their domination over Europe", February 8, 2022.
6. “Two interpretations of the Ukrainian affair”, 16 February 2022.
7. “Washington sounds the alarm, while its allies withdraw”, 22 February 2022


Rising tensions (8)

Russia declares war on the Straussians

by Thierry Meyssan
Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 1 March 2022

Russia is not waging war on the Ukrainian people, but on a small group of people within the US power that has transformed Ukraine without its knowledge, the Straussians. It formed half a century ago and has already committed an incredible amount of crimes in Latin America and the Middle East without the knowledge of the United States. This is their story.

Image
Leo Strauss

At dawn on February 24, Russian forces entered Ukraine en masse. According to President Vladimir Putin, speaking on television at the time, this special operation was the beginning of his country’s response to "those who aspire to world domination" and who are advancing Nato’s infrastructure to his country’s doorstep. During this long speech, he summarized how NATO destroyed Yugoslavia without the authorization of the United Nations Security Council, even bombing Belgrade in 1999. Then he perused the destruction of the United States in the Middle East, in Iraq, Libya and Syria. Only after this lengthy presentation did he announce that he had sent his troops to Ukraine with the dual mission of destroying the Nato-linked armed forces and ending the Nato armed neo-Nazi groups.

Immediately all the member states of the Atlantic Alliance denounced the occupation of Ukraine as comparable to that of Czechoslovakia during the "Prague Spring" (1968). According to them, Vladimir Putin’s Russia had adopted the Soviet Union’s "Brezhnev doctrine". Therefore, the free world must punish the resurrected "Evil Empire" with "devastating costs".

The interpretation of the Atlantic Alliance is aimed above all at depriving Russia of its major argument: although Nato is not a confederation of equals, but a hierarchical federation under Anglo-Saxon command, Russia is doing the same. It refuses Ukraine the possibility of choosing its destiny, just as the Soviets refused it to the Czechoslovakians. It is true that Nato violates the principles of sovereignty and equality of states stipulated in the UN Charter, but it should not be dissolved, unless Russia is also dissolved.

Perhaps, but probably not.

President Putin’s speech was not directed against Ukraine, or even against the United States, but explicitly against "those who aspire to world domination", i.e. against the "Straussians" in the US power structure. It was a real declaration of war against them.

On February 25, President Vladimir Putin called the Kiev leadership "a clique of drug addicts and neo-Nazis". For the Atlantic media, these words were those of a mental patient.

During the night of February 25-26, President Volodymyr Zelensky sent a ceasefire proposal to Russia via the Chinese embassy in Kiev. The Kremlin immediately responded by setting out its conditions:
arrest of all Nazis (Dmitro Yarosh and the Azov Battalion, etc.)
removal of all street names and destruction of monuments glorifying Nazi collaborators during the Second World War (Stepan Bandera, etc.),
laying down of weapons.

The Atlantic press ignored this event, while the rest of the world, which knew about it, held its breath. The negotiation failed a few hours later after Washington intervened. Only then would Western public opinion be informed, but the Russian conditions would always be hidden from them.

What is President Putin talking about? Who is he fighting against? And what are the reasons that have made the Atlanticist press blind and mute?

Image
Paul Wolfowitz

A brief history of the Straussians

Let us stop for a moment to consider this group, the Straussians, about whom Westerners know little. They are individuals, all Jewish, but by no means representative of either American Jews or of Jewish communities worldwide. They were formed by the German philosopher Leo Strauss, who took refuge in the United States during the rise of Nazism and became a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. According to many accounts, he had formed a small group of faithful students to whom he gave oral instruction. There is no written record of this. He explained to them that the only way for the Jews not to fall victim to a new genocide was to form their own dictatorship. He called them Hoplites (the soldiers of Sparta) and sent them to disrupt the courts of his rivals. Finally, he taught them discretion and praised the "noble lie". Although he died in 1973, his student fraternity continued.

The Straussians began forming a political group half a century ago, in 1972. They were all members of Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson’s staff, including Elliott Abrams, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. They worked closely with a group of Trotskyite journalists, also Jewish, who had met at the City College of New York and edited the magazine Commentary. Both groups were closely linked to the CIA, but also, thanks to Perle’s father-in-law Albert Wohlstetter (the US military strategist), to the Rand Corporation (the think tank of the military-industrial complex). Many of these young people intermarried until they formed a compact group of about 100 people.

Together they drafted and passed the "Jackson-Vanik Amendment" in the midst of the Watergate crisis (1974), which forced the Soviet Union to allow the emigration of its Jewish population to Israel under pain of economic sanctions. This was their founding act.

In 1976, Paul Wolfowitz [1] was one of the architects of the "Team B" charged by President Gerald Ford with assessing the Soviet threat [2]. He issued a delirious report accusing the Soviet Union of preparing to take over "global hegemony". The Cold War changed its nature: it was no longer a question of isolating (containment) the USSR, it had to be stopped in order to save the "free world".

The Straussians and the New York intellectuals, all of whom were on the left, put themselves at the service of the right-wing president Ronald Reagan. It is important to understand that these groups are neither truly left nor right wing. Some members have switched five times from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and back again. What is important to them is to infiltrate power, whatever the ideology. Elliott Abrams became an assistant to the Secretary of State. He led an operation in Guatemala where he put a dictator in power and experimented with Israeli Mossad officers on how to create reserves for the Mayan Indians in order to eventually do the same thing in Israel with the Palestinian Arabs (the Mayan Resistance earned Rigoberta Menchú her Nobel Peace Prize). Then Elliott Abrams continued his exactions in El Salvador and finally in Nicaragua against the Sandinistas with the Iran-Contra affair. For their part, the New York intellectuals, now called "Neoconservatives", created the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the U.S. Institute of Peace, a mechanism that organized many colored revolutions, starting with China with the attempted coup d’état of Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang and the subsequent repression in Tiananmen Square.

At the end of George H. Bush’s (the father’s) term of office, Paul Wolfowitz, then number 3 in the Defense Department, drew up a document [3] based on a strong idea: after the decomposition of the USSR, the United States had to prevent the emergence of new rivals, starting with the European Union. He concluded by advocating the possibility of taking unilateral action, i.e. to put an end to the concerted action of the United Nations. Wolfowitz was undoubtedly the designer of "Desert Storm", the operation to destroy Iraq that allowed the United States to change the rules of the game and organize a unilateral world. It was during this time that Straussians valued the concepts of "regime change" and "democracy promotion."

Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz entered the US intelligence community through the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence’s Working Group on Intelligence Reform. They criticized the assumption that other governments think the same way as the US government [4]. Then they criticized the lack of political leadership in intelligence, leaving it to wander into
unimportant issues instead of focusing on the essential ones. Politicizing intelligence is what Wolfowitz had already done with the B-team and what he would do again in 2002 with the Office of Special Plans, inventing arguments for new wars against Iraq and Iran (Leo Strauss’ "noble lie").

The Straussians were removed from power during Bill Clinton’s term. They then entered the Washington think tanks. In 1992, William Kristol and Robert Kagan (the husband of Victoria Nuland, widely quoted in the previous articles) published an article in Foreign Affairs deploring President Clinton’s timid foreign policy and calling for a renewal of "benevolent global hegemony" [5]. The following year they founded the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) at the American Enterprise Institute. Gary Schmitt, Abram Shulsky and Paul Wolfowitz were members. All of Leo Strauss’s non-Jewish admirers, including the Protestant Francis Fukuyama (the author of The End of History), immediately joined them.

Image
Richard Perle

In 1994, now an arms dealer, Richard Perle (a.k.a. "the Prince of Darkness") became an advisor to the President and ex-Nazi Alija Izetbegović in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It was he who brought Osama Bin Laden and his Arab Legion (the forerunner of Al Qaeda) from Afghanistan to defend the country. Perle was even a member of the Bosnian delegation at the signing of the Dayton Accords in Paris.

In 1996, members of the PNAC (including Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser) wrote a study at the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS) for the new Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This report [6] advocates the elimination of Yasser Arafat, the annexation of the Palestinian territories, a war against Iraq and the transfer of Palestinians there. It was inspired not only by the political theories of Leo Strauss, but also by those of his friend, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of "revisionist Zionism", of whom Netanyahu’s father was the private secretary.

The PNAC raised funds for the candidacy of George W. Bush (the son) and published before his election its famous report "Rebuilding America’s Defenses". It called for a Pearl Harbor-like catastrophe that would throw the American people into a war for global hegemony. These are exactly the words that PNAC Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used on September 11, 2001.

Image
Robert Kagan

«»
Thanks to the 9/11 attacks, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz installed Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in Donald Rumsfeld’s shadow. He played a role comparable to that of Albert Wohlstetter during the Cold War. He imposed the strategy of "endless war": the US armed forces should not win any more wars, but start many of them and keep them going as long as possible. The aim would be to destroy all the political structures of the targeted states in order to ruin these populations and deprive them of any means of defending themselves against the US [7]; a strategy that has been implemented for twenty years in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen...

The alliance between the Strausians and the revisionist Zionists was sealed at a major conference in Jerusalem in 2003, which Israeli political figures from all sides unfortunately thought they should attend [8]. It is therefore not surprising that Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife, then ambassador to NATO) intervened to declare a ceasefire in Lebanon in 2006, allowing the defeated Israeli army not to be pursued by Hezbollah.

Image
Bernard Lewis et Benjamin Netanyahu
Bureau de Presse du Premier ministre


Some individuals, such as Bernard Lewis, have worked with all three groups, the Straussians, the Neoconservatives and the Revisionist Zionists. A former British intelligence officer, he acquired both U.S. and Israeli citizenship, was an advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu and a member of the U.S. National Security Council. Lewis, who halfway through his career assured that Islam is incompatible with terrorism and that Arab terrorists are in fact Soviet agents, later changed his mind and assured with the same aplomb that the religion preaches terrorism. He invented the strategy of the "clash of civilizations" for the US National Security Council. The idea was to use cultural differences to mobilize Muslims against the Orthodox, a concept that was popularized by his assistant at the Council, Samuel Huntington, except that Huntington did not present it as a strategy, but as an inevitability that had to be countered. Huntington began his career as an advisor to the South African secret service during the aparteheid era, and later wrote a book, The Soldier and the State [9], arguing that the military (regular and mercenary) is a special caste, the only one capable of understanding national security needs.

After the destruction of Iraq, the Straussians were the subject of all sorts of controversies [10]. Everyone is surprised that such a small group, supported by neoconservative journalists, could have acquired such authority without having been the subject of a public debate. The U.S. Congress appointed an Iraq Study Group (the so-called "Baker-Hamilton Commission") to evaluate its policy. It condemned, without naming it, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski strategy and deplored the hundreds of thousands of deaths it had caused. But Rumsfeld resigned and the Pentagon inexorably pursued this strategy, which it had never officially adopted.

In the Obama administration, the Straussians found their way into Vice President Joe Biden’s cabinet. His National Security Advisor, Jacob Sullivan, played a central role in organizing the operations against Libya, Syria and Myanmar, while another of his advisors, Antony Blinken, focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. It was he who led the negotiations with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei that resulted in the arrest and imprisonment of key members of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s team in exchange for the nuclear deal.

Regime change in Kiev in 2014 was organized by the Straussians. Vice President Biden is firmly committed to it. Victoria Nuland came to support the neo-Nazi elements of the Right Sector and to supervise the Israeli "Delta" commando [11] in Maidan Square. A telephone intercept reveals her wish to "fuck the European Union" (sic) in the tradition of the 1992 Wolfowitz report. But the leaders of the European Union do not understand and protest only weakly [12].

"Jake" Sullivan and Antony Blinken placed Vice President Biden’s son, Hunter, on the board of one of the major gas companies, Burisma Holdings, despite opposition from Secretary of State John Kerry. Hunter Biden is unfortunately just a junkie, he would serve as a front for a gigantic scam at the expense of the Ukrainian people. He would appoint, under the supervision of Amos Hochstein, several of his stoner friends to become other front men at the head of various companies and to plunder Ukrainian gas. These are the people that President Vladimir Putin called a "clique of drug addicts".

Sullivan and Blinken relied on mafia godfather Ihor Kolomoysky, the country’s third largest fortune. Although he is Jewish, he financed the heavyweights of the Right Sector, a neo-Nazi organization that works for NATO and fought in Maidan Square during the "regime change". Kolomoïsky took advantage of his connections to take power within the European Jewish community, but his co-religionists rebelled and ejected him from international associations. However, he managed to get the head of the Right Sector, Dmytro Yarosh, appointed deputy secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defence Council and to get himself appointed governor of the Dnipropetrovsk oblast. Both men would be quickly removed from any political function. It was their group that President Vladimir Putin called a "clique of neo-Nazis."

In 2017, Antony Blinken founded WestExec Advisors, a consulting firm that brought together former senior Obama administration officials and many Straussians. The firm’s business is extremely low-key. It uses the political connections of its employees to make money; what anywhere else would be called corruption.

Image
Joe Biden is not a Straussian, but he has been doing business with them for about fifteen years. Here with Anthony Blinken.

The Straussians are still the same as ever

Since Joe Biden returned to the White House, this time as President of the United States, the Straussians have been running the show. "Jake" Sullivan is National Security Advisor, while Antony Blinken is Secretary of State with Victoria Nuland at his side. As I have reported in previous articles, she went to Moscow in October 2021 and threatens to crush Russia’s economy if it ded not comply. This was the beginning of the current crisis.

Undersecretary of State Nuland resurrected Dmitro Yarosh and imposed him on President Zelinsky, a television actor protected by Ihor Kolomoysky. On November 2, 2021, he appointed him special advisor to the head of the army, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. The latter, a true democrat, rebelled at first and finally accepted. When questioned by the press about this astonishing duo, he refused to answer and mentioned a question of national security. Yarosh gave his full support to the "white führer", Colonel Andrey Biletsky, and his Azov Battalion. This copy of the SS Das Reich division has been staffed since the summer of 2021 by American mercenaries formerly from Blackwater [13].

Having identified the Straussians, we must admit that Russia’s ambition is understandable, even desirable. To rid the world of the Straussians would be to do justice to the million or more deaths they have caused and to save those they are about to kill. Whether this intervention in Ukraine is the right way remains to be seen.

In any case, if the responsibility for the current events lies with the Straussians, all those who let them act without flinching also have a responsibility. Starting with Germany and France, who signed the Minsk Agreements seven years ago and did nothing to ensure that they were implemented, and then with the fifty or so states that signed the OSCE declarations prohibiting the extension of Nato east of the Oder-Neisse line and did nothing. Only Israel, which has just got rid of the revisionist Zionists, has expressed a nuanced position on these events.

This is one of the lessons of this crisis: democratically governed peoples are responsible for the decisions taken for a long time by their leaders and maintained after alternations in power.

Thierry Meyssan

https://www.voltairenet.org/article215879.html

~~~


Voltaire Network

Defeat of Nazi Aidar Battalion
Voltaire Network | 2 March 2022

On 2 March 2022, the Nazi Aidar battalion suffered a huge defeat in southeastern Ukraine. More than 5,000 men are on the run, including their instructors from Greystone (ex-Blackwater). They abandoned the equipment they had received from NATO.

The Nazi Azov battalion continues the fight.


PS. The above photo is old. There is currently no verifiable photographic source on the spot.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article215890.html
conniption
 
Posts: 2480
Joined: Sun Nov 11, 2012 10:01 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Masters of Chaos

Postby Harvey » Thu Mar 03, 2022 11:00 am

^ In December, Voltaire Network predicted war with Russia by mid to late February. I didn't post the article at the time because I thought it was probably alarmist...
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
In return"


Eden Ahbez
User avatar
Harvey
 
Posts: 4165
Joined: Mon May 09, 2011 4:49 am
Blog: View Blog (20)

Next

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 35 guests