Heart Warming Massacres

As published on Common Dreams, Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Uruknet and Intrepid Report, 3/31/11:






On January 28, 2003, George W. Bush gave a 50-minute State of the Union address, nearly half of which was devoted to his decision to invade Iraq. During this segment, he didn’t mention oil or, God forbid, the petro dollar even once, but focused relentlessly on weapons of mass destruction. America and the rest of the world were threatened by a dictator who was “assembling the world's most dangerous weapons,” “a brutal dictator with a history of reckless aggression, with ties to terrorism,” so that “this nation and our friends” were “all that stand between a world at peace, and a world of chaos and constant alarm.” The decision to attack Iraq, then, was a sacred, providential duty, a “call of history has come to the right country.” Bush concluded, “America is a strong nation and honorable in the use of our strength. We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers.”

Though America is always engaged in several wars simultaneously, she really hates to make wars, so we’re told by each U.S. President. An American war is always humanitarian in aim and execution. We wage war not because we love to kick ass, then go home, not because we’re born to kill, murder ‘em all, let God sort ‘em out, etc, but because we love foreigners, actually, the browner the better. It doesn’t matter if they have petroleum or not, or if they’re scarfed with a keffiyeh (while eating a donut). America wages war out of compassion.

Thus, this week, we’re told by Obama that his attack on Libya is to prevent innocents from being massacred and chaos from spreading, “For generations, the United States of America has played a unique role as an anchor of global security and advocate for human freedom. Mindful of the risks and costs of military action, we are naturally reluctant to use force to solve the world’s many challenges.” Reluctant, yes, but not when it is America’s duty, again, to attack a sovereign nation, “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and—more profoundly—our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as President, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

Like Bush, Obama did not mention oil once, but surely, some of you are saying, this is not really about oil, again? Here are the facts: Libya has the largest oil reserves in Africa. Sweeter and cheaper to extract than elsewhere, Libyan oil is also easier to bring to market, thanks to its proximity to Europe. About three fourths of this is exported to NATO countries, primarily Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Greece and the U.K. With the exception of Germany, these are also the main European nations attacking Libya, along with the USA.

But why attack Ghaddafi if he’s already selling you oil? Why upset the status quo? It’s because on January 25, 2009, Gaddafi declared, "The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalization because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously. Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production."

The countries with oil concessions in Libya are Italy, France, Spain, the US, the UK, Norway, Russia and Germany. See a pattern here? Norway is also in the US-led coalition to attack Libya. It’s noteworthy that France is particularly belligerent this time. In 2003, by contrast, France was vehemently against invading Iraq, since it had much dealing with Hussein and would lose much should he be replaced.

To Francophobes, France’s stance on Iraq proved that it had no backbone, as suspected, that it would fight with its feet and, ahem, make love with its face, as the saying goes, that it wouldn’t stand up to terrorists. Two American congressmen, Robert Ney and Walter Jones, even started a campaign to rename french fries “freedom fries.” What a way to go down in history. To Francophiles, however, France was to be applauded for refusing to be cowed by America, but the truth is much simpler. France didn’t want to lose the billions Hussein already owed it, and the billions it would make if he stayed in power. It came down, as it always does in these situations, to money.

And so it is with Libya. Wanting to gain access to Libya’s oil, the United States is not just helping one side in a civil war, but directing the fight. The rebel’s military leader is a long time CIA asset, Khalifa Hifter. Before returning to Benghazi last week, Hifter spent two decades in Northern Virginia, a five minute drive from CIA headquarters.

The rebels are flying the old flag of the Kingdom of Libya. Some are carrying photos of King Idris. Even the French flag has been displayed, leading French Prime Minister Fillon to proclaim, "There is hope in Benghazi now, the French flag is being waved there, and also the flag of a different Libya which dreams of democracy and modernization." I would not equate flying a monarchical flag and the flag of a country that colonized a good chunk of Northern Africa not that long ago with “dreams of democracy and modernization.” Under King Idris, Libya was also host to American and British military bases. With 4,600 Yanks, Wheelus air base was even dubbed “Little America by the Mediterranean.” Gaddafi ended all that.

Funny, but the same countries that now attack Gaddafi sold him lots of weapons, more than a billion’s worth since 2005. The British Special Air Service even trained Libyan Special Forces, and American war colleges instructed Libyan military officers “to fight terrorists.” From the Libyan government’s point of view, the rebels now supported by America and the rest sure fit that description.

To gain access to oil, all these countries armed a man they now call a mad dog, but Gaddafi didn’t just become a tyrant two weeks ago. He’s been embraced by Tony Blair, feted by Nicolas Sarkozy, visited by John McCain and even had his hand kissed by Silvio Berlusconi, so everything was manageable until he threatened to nationalize Libya’s oil. As he became perfectly sane, at least from the Libyan point of view, as he promised to distribute more oil revenues to his own people, the West decided he must be ousted.

We will see if Obama can stick to his promise of sending no ground troops, but for now, the alliance is fighting strictly from the air. This is macabrely appropriate as Tripoli, Libya was the site of the first air assault in world history. A century ago, during Italy’s invasion, Giulio Gavotti dropped four hand grenades onto an Ottoman Empire encampment. He had no idea how many he killed. Then, as now, it’s impossible to register anyone’s mortality from such a height. In any case, Gavotti landed a hero. Italy’s best known poet at the time, Gabriele D’Annunzio, lauded him, “From your wing you hurl your bomb / On an instant massacre; and it appears / Your live heart is warmed.”

Now, as foreign planes fly over Libya yet again, we are told that the people below are grateful. Thanks for the depleted uranium, Sirs! My children and my children’s children will also thank you. As least in the desert, there won’t be any agent orange raining down. An American pilot had to parachute because his plane malfunctioned. According to Obama, he was greeted by a young Libyan “who came to his aid [and] said, ‘We are your friends. We are so grateful to these men who are protecting the skies.’” What Pentagon perfect diction! Was this young Libyan speaking in English, or did the pilot understand Arabic? Can you spell CIA? Do you smell a fish?






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Colonel Gaddafi goes Mao

Victor Kotsev in Asia Times, 3/31/11:



Muammar Gaddafi's purported Long March from Benghazi to Tripoli, which began on Friday, was cut short on Tuesday as his army routed and then - almost as if carried by inertia alone - chased the rebels back across a few small towns along the Mediterranean coast. The opposition performed so poorly in its advance on his town of birth, Sirte (which it claimed - falsely - to have captured on Monday), that Gaddafi did not even get to use the full gamut of asymmetric warfare tactics he had in store.

As he struggles to hide his considerable forces from increasingly powerful coalition air attacks but nevertheless holds sway on the ground, the Libyan leader is very likely to be spicing up the long hours of hiding by brushing up on legendary Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong's experiences in using mobile warfare against the Kuomintang and the Japanese.

''Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,'' a famous Chinese proverb goes. Even without testimonies, the opposition advance that began on Friday resembled much too much the initial phase of the rebellion that captured much of Libya before crumbling under the strikes of Gaddafi's forces. As first-hand accounts started to emerge from the rebels themselves, this suspicion deepened. ''There wasn't resistance,'' Faraj Sheydani, 42, a rebel fighter interviewed by The New York Times, said on Monday. ''There was no one in front of us. There's no fighting.''

Where did the army go? A few days earlier, it had posed an urgent threat to Benghazi, a city of over 500,000 inhabitants and full of rebel fighters. ''People coming along the coastal road from Sirte said Gaddafi forces were gathered around 60 kilometers outside the city, positioned in trees,'' al-Jazeera reported on Monday.

An army of trees waiting for the enemy - to a civilian, it is an image almost out of Shakespeare's Macbeth. Not that it is something completely unusual - ambush is very much a part of standard military operations - but it certainly signals a shift of tactics for Gaddafi.

Mobile warfare, Mao's specialty, can be loosely interpreted as a cross-breed between positional warfare (defense and conquest of territory, what regular armies usually do) and guerrilla warfare (hit-and-run tactics; small units that melt into the civilian population or disappear into the surroundings).

It is designed for regular units with certain permanent bases, but it draws heavily on guerrilla tactics: battle lines are blurred, the forces use surprise to strike quickly and regroup, exploiting specifically the overextended communication and supply lines of the enemy. To quote one of Mao's speeches in the compilation On Protracted War (1938):

Our strategy should be to employ our main forces to operate over an extended and fluid front. To achieve success, the Chinese troops must conduct their warfare with a high degree of mobility on extensive battlefields, making swift advances and withdrawals, swift concentrations and dispersals. This means large-scale mobile warfare, and not positional warfare depending exclusively on defense works with deep trenches, high fortresses and successive rows of defensive positions. It does not mean the abandonment of all the vital strategic points, which should be defended by positional warfare as long as profitable. But the pivotal strategy must be mobile warfare.

It is hard not to see the similarities with what is currently happening in Libya:

The rebel pick-up truck cavalcade was first ambushed, and then outflanked by Gadhafi's troops. The advance stopped and government forces retook the small town of Nawfaliyah, 120 km (75 miles) east of Sirte. (Reuters, March 29)

Several [rebels] also described a ruse in which pro-Qaddafi forces stationed about 12 miles west of Bin Jawwad waved white flags to lure them close and then opened fire. (The New York Times, March 28)

Fighting is ongoing at Nawfaliya, about 180km east of Sirte, where opposition forces say they have come upon a heavily mined road. Pro-Gaddafi forces have dug into positions near the front line, and are shelling opposition fighters … The speed of the rebel advance has stretched lines of communications and created logistical problems, said [Al Jazeera's correspondent] Bays. One problem is a lack of electricity, which means that petrol pumps do not work ... ''At petrol stations they're using plastic bottles on strings down into the tank below the station to pull up fuel," said Bays. (al-Jazeera, March 28)

Strategically, Gaddafi faces a broadly similar challenge to Mao's in 1938: he has a considerable force at his disposal and can achieve local superiority on the ground, but nevertheless he is confronted with superior fire power and, for the moment being, is unable to achieve victory in a decisive confrontation.

The Libyan leader, moreover, has a long background in both positional and guerrilla warfare: the commander-in-chief of a standing army for the last four decades, he also supported actively numerous rebel movements that took the latter tactics to extremes of violence across Africa. According to some reports, prior to his attack on Benghazi 10 days ago, he was able to plant undercover forces and hide equipment, even tanks, in the city. By all accounts, he understands mobile warfare very well and is well prepared for it.

In Libya, there are some peculiar twists: firstly, the rebels on the ground are hardly a match for Gaddafi's army. Patrick Graham, writing from the ground for Foreign Policy, describes them as a disorganized and undisciplined group of mostly ''young volunteers'':

It is not much clearer who is running the rebel army - or even who is in it ... As courageous as they are undisciplined, the fighters' simple tactic is to make quick, abortive jabs at Qaddafi's forces, drawing fire from various kinds of artillery. At the front, it is rare to come across anyone who presents himself as a commander, let alone an officer ... A real military is unlikely to be organized by the rebels for some time ...

On the other hand, the powerful air campaign currently compensates for this weakness. The American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization onslaught on Gaddafi is intensifying, featuring strategic air strikes and what looks suspiciously like close air support. According to a report by think-tank Stratfor:

[One March 28-29] Coalition airstrikes continued unabated, with individual military operations being flown against targets in Tripoli, Tajoura, Surman, Sirte, Sabha, Harawa, Garyan, Mizdah, Misurata, and the mountain area west of Tripoli. In addition, U.S. forces attacked three Libyan ships firing at merchant vessels in the port of Misurata.... An unnamed top U.S. military official said March 29 that in addition to the A-10C Thunderbolt IIs, which specialize in close air support and targeting armor on the ground, U.S. Air Force AC-130 gunships - devastating and increasingly precise platforms for attacking ground targets - were employed over the weekend of March 27-28. Despite the increased use of aircraft tailored for the close air support role, U.S. Vice Adm. William Gortney denied that the United States is coordinating attacks with the opposition.

Air power, nevertheless, is subject to tactical and political limitations - in this case, the mandate ''to protect civilians'' given by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973. The administration of US President Barack Obama and its international allies has already gone a long way in interpreting the text selectively to justify a wider mandate than specified, and this has produced some international backlash. To unleash a massive bombing campaign on a city where the population supports Gaddafi, just so that the rebels can capture it, is pretty clearly a gross violation of the resolution, and would cause a storm at the United Nations.

Thus, when Gaddafi fights ''on his own turf',' the efficiency of the air strikes against him is reduced, and this has a similar effect to that of overextended supply lines in ground operations. It is pretty clear, moreover, that the Libyan leader has a ''turf'': in a recent report, Reuters quotes rebel fighters as saying that residents of the town of Nawfaliyah had fired at them, and that the population of some towns near Sirte had formed local militias allied with the government forces.

Besides, even strikes on Gaddafi forces laying siege on rebel cities have their limitations. They worked for now in Benghazi (the attackers withdrew), but have not had much success in the third-largest city of Libya, which is in the Gaddafi-dominated western part of the country. In the past few days, the government army captured large parts of the city despite the continuing air campaign.

Intelligence-analysis website Debka File interprets Gaddafi's withdrawal as a signal to the West, and underscores that the Libyan leader has other options left in store:

Qaddafi offered Washington a way out. By pulling his troops out of the eastern towns, he gave the Americans a chance to chalk up a rebel victory - or at least a standoff - and leave it at that.
…
However, should the Obama administration decide to persist in its active military support for the rebellion, the Libyan ruler may consider three counter-steps: One, to carry out the threat he made prior to the coalition campaign against his regime to strike back at American, British and French targets in the Middle East and Europe; Two, to activate Libyan undercover terrorist networks in Europe against US targets as well as local ones; Three, to retreat along with his family to a secret sanctuary among loyal Saharan tribes and from there to fight for his survival against both the Americans and al-Qaeda which he accuses of penetrating the opposition and turning his people against him.

Despite that Debka is known for occasionally publishing wild rumors, this analysis makes a lot of sense, and different parts of it concur with the observations of other experts; the three ''counter-steps'' outlined could as well be right out of Mao's handbook. Whether the coalition intends to settle for a standoff, however, is another matter.

[...]



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France's noble gesture resonates in midst of crisis

Japan Times, 3/30/11:


It has been said that in times of crisis, people show their true colors.

Some rise to the occasion and respond to the call through duty or compassion, while others fail to meet the test and are exposed as lacking fortitude or sensitivity.

Didier Gailhaguet, president of the Federation Francaise des Sports de Glace (French Ice Sports Federation), met the supreme standard last week when he offered to let Japan hold the 2012 world championships after it was forced to withdraw as this year's host in the wake of the devastating Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and the ensuing nuclear crisis.

Next year's event was scheduled to be held on the Cote d'Azur in the beautiful city of Nice, but in a gallant gesture Gailhaguet said his country would step aside.

"We all have a heart and we stand in solidarity with Japan, the Japanese people and the Japanese Skating Federation in these cruel times that strike them and which have prevented them from organizing the 2011 world championships," he said in a statement last week. "The solution that we propose to the ISU (International Skating Union) would give the (Japanese) federation enough time to prepare and allow them the possibility of recovering from the current serious events."

[...]




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Is Robert Fisk a Psychologist?

Kim Petersen in Dissident Voice, March 21st, 2011:


Much of what journalist Robert Fisk writes strikes a congruent cord with me; however, there are patches of his writing where he brays discordantly. In his recent article,1 Fisk launched into an ad hominen-laced tirade against Libyan Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Writes Fisk, “Gaddafi is a fruitcake and … he probably does occasionally chew carpets as well” and “Gaddafi is completely bonkers, flaky, a crackpot on the level of Ahmadinejad of Iran and Lieberman of Israel…” Yes, Fisk did add in Lieberman, but the implication is that Arab rulers are flakes while flakes do not become rulers in Israel.

Fisk avers that seldom do fruitcakes rule in Europe: “The Middle East seems to produce these ravers – as opposed to Europe, which in the past 100 years has only produced Berlusconi, Mussolini, Stalin and [Hitler] …”

Fisk acknowledges that “there is a racist element in all this.”

And for Fisk, the apple does not fall far from the tree, as he describes Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, as “crazed” and states the father-son “should meet their just rewards, along with their henchmen?”

Did Fisk ever write that Bush Sr and Bush Jr “should meet their just rewards, along with their henchmen?” Does Fisk ever describe the mercenaries2 of the US, UK, Canada, etc. as “henchmen?” Is this not tendentious reporting, if not racist?

When did Fisk become a psychologist?

What makes western rulers such as George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Stephen Harper saner than Gaddafi? Was aggressing Iraq on a contrived pretext and slaughtering upwards of a million Iraqis and forcing millions more to become refugees sane?

Can mass murders be sane? Is not mass murder the apical quintessence of sociopathology? Meanwhile, the killing continues under Obama whose sanity Fisk has never called into question.

Fisk’s entire piece is tinged with bias and demonization. For example, he writes of “Gaddafi’s tanks,” but would he write of “Blair’s tanks,”3 Cameron’s planes, or Obama’s warships?

What are readers supposed to deduce from Fisk’s superfluous ad hominem? Has he lost a journalistic marble or two?

That Arabs are saddled with authoritarian rulers is immensely due to western states foisting such rulers upon the people, as Fisk well knows.

Instead of rabbiting on about the mental delusions of Arab or Iranian rulers, Fisk might define sanity for his readers and what makes western rulers such as Bush, Blair, Cameron, Obama sane versus Middle Eastern rulers. Otherwise, he is casting stones from a glasshouse.

Fisk realizes that the invasion of Libya now is “a Nato force committed to regime-change…”; however, he does not delve much into the more important matter of whether regime change is legitimate or sane.

He does address whether “we” should be the ones to invade. In doing so he neglects recent history when he writes: “However bad our behaviour in the past, what should we do now?” He finds such a question is too late. Late or not, surely a retreat into a distant past is unnecessary when invasions/occupations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and succor to coups in Honduras and Venezuela are current history. And there is the decades-old, ongoing western — overt and tacit — support for the dispossession of, discrimination against, and killing of Palestinians.

Gaddafi may well be mentally unbalanced, but he is not launching insane massive invasions of far-flung countries. Criticizing his long tenure as a “leader” in Libya is also fine; however, this criticism should be applied equally to other countries. There is virtually no US criticism of the unelected Abdullahs in Jordan or Saudhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifi Arabia, the unelected king Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa in Bahrain, nor was there of the despotic ruler of Egypt — Hosni Mubarak.

[...]





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Cost of Libya Intervention $600 Million for First Week, Pentagon Says

ABC, March 28:

One week after an international military coalition intervened in Libya, the cost to U.S. taxpayers has reached at least $600 million, according figures provided by the Pentagon.

U.S. ships and submarines in the Mediterranean have unleashed at least 191 Tomahawk cruise missiles from their arsenals to the tune of $268.8 million, the Pentagon said.

[...]


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The initial attack force of Odyssey Dawn includes:

United States: 11 warships and submarines firing Tomahawk cruise missiles against Libyan anti-aircraft positions. F-15 and F-16 fighter jets and B-2 stealth bombers have also been deployed.

France: Aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is carrying 20 planes, including Rafale and Super Etendard strike fighters. They are escorted by destroyers and submarines.

Britain: One nuclear submarine firing Tomahawks, two frigates, Typhoon and Tornado jet fighters and surveillance aircraft.

Italy: As well as deploying Tornadoes and F-16s, Italy has deployed the Giuseppe Garibaldi aircraft carrier and offered use of its bases in Sardinia and Naples.

Spain: Four fighter jets landed in Sardinia at the weekend. A Frigate and a submarine are ready to be deployed.

Canada: Canada is participating with six CF-18 fighters and a frigate.

Belgium: Belgium is participating with six F-16 fighter jets and a mine-hunting boat.



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When the Fukushima Meltdown Hits Groundwater

Dr. Tom Burnett in Hawai'i News Daily, 3/27/11:

Fukushima is going to dwarf Chenobyl. The Japanese government has had a level 7 nuclear disaster going for almost a week but won’t admit it.

The disaster is occurring the opposite way than Chernobyl, which exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactions are getting worse. I suspect three nuclear piles are in meltdown and we will probably get some of it.

If reactor 3 is in meltdown, the concrete under the containment looks like lava. But Fukushima is not far off the water table. When that molten mass of self-sustaining nuclear material gets to the water table it won’t simply cool down. It will explode – not a nuclear explosion, but probably enough to involve the rest of the reactors and fuel rods at the facility.

Pouring concrete on a critical reactor makes no sense – it will simply explode and release more radioactive particulate matter. The concrete will melt and the problem will get worse. Chernobyl was different – a critical reactor exploded and stopped the reaction. At Fukushima, the reactor cores are still melting down. The ONLY way to stop that is to detonate a ~10 kiloton fission device inside each reactor containment vessel and hope to vaporize the cores. That’s probably a bad solution.

[...]




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In 2009 Gaddafi Proposed Nationalizing Libya’s Oil

Kurt Nimmo in Infowars.com, March 29, 2011:

The Coalition of Globalists are not interested in sheltering the Libyan people from Muammar al- Gaddafi. The no-fly zone and attacks on the Libyan military by NATO and U.S. have nothing to do with democracy and free elections.

It’s about oil – and who owns it.

In 2009, Gaddafi uttered the “N” word – nationalization. Not only for Libya’s oil, but all oil in the region. For the globalists, this made Gaddafi a dangerous mad dog renegade who needed to be replaced.

“The oil-exporting countries should opt for nationalization because of the rapid fall in oil prices. We must put the issue on the table and discuss it seriously,” he declared. “Oil should be owned by the State at this time, so we could better control prices by the increase or decrease in production.”

Predictably, Gaddafi’s pronouncement set off alarm bells at Anglo-Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, ExxonMobil, Hess Corp., Marathon Oil, Occidental Petroleum and ConocoPhillips, the Spanish Repsol, Germany’s Wintershall, Austria’s OMV, Norway’s Statoil, Eni and Canada’s Petro Canada.

The year before, the Libyan state oil company, National Oil, prepared a report on the subject in which officials suggested modifying the production-sharing agreements with foreign companies in order to increase state revenues, according to a report posted on the Pravdawebsite.

After implementing contract changes, Libya gained 5.4 billion dollars in oil revenues.

Gaddafi’s plan was reported on by Reuters and the corporate media.

In addition to calling for nationalization, the Libyan leader called for support of his proposal to dismantle the government and to distribute the oil wealth directly to Libya’s 5 million citizens.

State bureaucrats, however, rejected the idea because they feared for the loess of their cushy jobs and also feared the wrath of transnational oil corporations and the banks that own them.

Prime Minister al-Baghdadi, Ali al-Mahmoudi and Farhat Omar Bin Guida, of Libya’s Central Bank, told Gaddafi the measure would wreck the country’s economy in lead to “capital flight,” in other words the globalists pulling their money out of the country.

“The Administration has failed and the state’s economy has failed. Enough is enough. The solution is for the Libyan people to directly receive oil revenues and decide what to do with them,” Gaddafi said in a speech broadcast on state television. To this end, the Libyan leader urged a radical reform of government bureaucracy.

The government, however, voted to reject Gaddafi’s plan to turn ownership of the country’s oil over to the people. 64 ministers from a total of 468 Popular Committee members voted for the measure.

“My dream during all these years was to give the power and wealth directly to the people,” said Gaddafi in response to the rejection.

In 1953, the United States and Britain plotted to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had promised to nationalize the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and give the profits to the Iranian people. Mosaddegh attempted to negotiate with the AIOC, but the company rejected his proposed compromise.

In order to sell a coup, Britain persuaded Secretary of State John Foster Dulles that Iran was going over to the Soviets. Then president Truman was cool to the idea, but in 1953, when Dwight D. Eisenhower became president, the UK convinced him to a joint coup d’état. The CIA was dispatched to destabilize the country, get rid of Mosaddegh, and install the brutal dictator Mohammad-Reza Shah Pahlavi and his secret police, the SAVAK.

For the mistake of suggesting oil profits be returned to the Libyan people, Muammar al-Gaddafi is now suffering a likewise fate.

[...]




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Obama's Seduce and Switch: The Mendacity of Hope

A flashback from June 28, 2008. Pham Binh on Obama, as published in CounterPunch:




"Change we can believe in."

"Yes we can!"

"Change the world."

For hundreds of millions of people, the slogans of the Obama campaign are not the focus-group tested products of marketing gurus and professional campaign strategists. They're not empty words printed on cheap plastic yard signs, on banners, or on the podium from which Obama speaks.

To them, these slogans and Obama's candidacy are what the 2008 elections are all about. Somewhere around 85 percent of the country thinks things are going in the wrong direction. It's gotten so bad that even Black Republicans are thinking of voting for Obama.

The question is: will Obama deliver?

Of course, electing a black man to the throne of the American empire would make history, given that America is the land of the free and the home of the slave. But the millions, especially in the black community, who look to Obama for change don't simply want a black man in the White House. They want real, substantial change. Health care coverage for all. Reform of the criminal justice system and out-of-control police brutality both of which have devastated black and hispanic communities. Debt relief for homeowners. Halting the three decade decline in working-class living standards and the skyrocketing price of food and energy. Fixing the dysfunctional two-party system. Steps to finally overcome centuries of racism. An end to the war in Iraq.

That's a tall order for one man to live up to. Unfortunately, I don't think Obama has any intention of delivering on these lofty goals.

For example, take his position on Iraq. According to conventional wisdom he is the candidate who will get U.S. troops out of there, as opposed to old man McCain who is more than happy to keep them there for 100 years. But Samantha Power, one of Obama's foreign policy advisers (who resigned after she called Hillary Clinton a "monster"), made it clear that Obama has no intention of being bound by anything he says on the campaign trail.

Obama's criticism of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is a similar case of mendacity. Behind the scenes one of his advisers told Canadian officials "not to be worried about what Obama says about NAFTA." Translation: don't worry, Obama is just telling voters what they want to hear. Given the free-market ideologues he has surrounded himself with, lying about NAFTA shouldn't be a surprise.

However, I don't think Obama is a bad person, that his lying is some kind of personal flaw, or that it's a compulsion that he has no control over (as it seems to be for President Bush).

Rather, it's because Obama has made a series of political choices, the cumulative effect of which is real change we can believe in because we can see it before our very eyes. He might have set out to change the system, to change the way politics is done in this country, but it is the political system that has changed him.

The first and foremost example of this has been the way he threw his pastor of two decades under his campaign bus. The thought police - er, I mean the corporate media - focused with laser-like intensity on Reverend Wright's suggestion that AIDS was the product of a government conspiracy to rid the country of blacks (as if AIDS only infected them). They exploited this remark to villify Wright and distract people from the content of what he said about U.S. foreign policy. When he spoke up in his own defense, Obama severed all ties to him, proving without a doubt that Obama is indeed a conventional politician. As Wright himself put it, "politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls."

The corporate media forced Obama to choose between his pastor and a shot at the presidency, between principles and power. After some hesitiation, Obama chose the latter.

Obama faced the same choice on the issue of Israel and Palestine. He could either continue saying "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people," or he could stop worrying about them and learn to love Israel for ensuring American dominance of the Middle East. (One Major General said Israel is worth "5 CIAs" and that it would cost $125 billion a year to maintain an American force in the region the size of Israel's, making the $5 billion a year the U.S. gives to Israel every year an amazing bargain).

The day after clinching the Democratic Party nomination, Obama told the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee that Jerusalem should be the undivided capital of Israel, i.e. that the Palestinians had no claim whatsoever over the Holy City. That put him to the right of Bush and the Israeli government, both of whom pay lip service to Palestinian aspirations and say that the city's final status is subject to "future negotiations." He said he would do "everything" in his power to defend Israel. Over time Obama chose the Israeli Goliath over the Palestinian David.

Apparently he didn't see the irony of the first black President-to-be calling for Jerusalem to be a Jews only city and pledging to preserve Israeli apartheid by any means necessary. Malcolm X had a term for politicians like Obama. Hint: it wasn't field negro.

People may not want to hear it, but "change we can believe in" is a lie almost as big as Iraq's WMD or Saddam Hussein's connection to Al-Qaeda.

If Obama represents some kind of watershed or fundamental break with the past, why is his panel of foreign policy advisers dominated by officials from the Clinton administration? If Bill Clinton's Secretary of State Madeline Albright, the woman who said killing half a million Iraqi kids through sanctions was "worth it," is giving Obama foreign policy advice, how many Iraqi and American lives will be "worth it" because he refuses to withdraw all U.S. troops from Iraq? If he represents such a dramatic break with Bush's policies, why is he open to keeping Bush's Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon? Is it because Gates is secretly a big fan of Cindy Sheehan, or is it because Obama and Gates want to mend, not end, the occupation of Iraq and American domination of the oil-rich Middle East?

Even Obama's call for ethanol to replace gasoline as a fuel source is disingenuous. He opposes importing Brazilian ethanol derived from sugar which is cheaper, cleaner, and produces more energy than the domestically produced ethanol derived from corn. Why? Could it be because Archer Daniels Midland and other American agribusiness corporations that produce corn ethanol have close financial and personal ties to his campaign and his advisers?

Like McCain, Hillary Clinton, and every politician on both side of the aisle, his positions on every issue are heavily conditioned by what big business is willing to tolerate. That doesn't mean he won't talk a good game on the campaign trail and ride the intense desire for change that's gripped the country all the way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

However, it does mean that progressives (or The Left, if you prefer) need to wake up and take advantage of the rising expectations generated by Obama's campaign. Both the hunger for real change and the elite's determination to block it have never been greater.



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Obama to neocons: "Done deal!"

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The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC

March 15, 2011

Dear President Obama:

Regrettably, the international community has yet to take serious action to prevent a moral and humanitarian catastrophe in Libya and the Libyan opposition is now on the defensive. As forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi push eastward, we are concerned that the brutal and indiscriminate tactics of government forces could lead to additional civilian casualties.

On Saturday, the Arab League endorsed Libyan opposition calls for a no fly zone. We call on you to urgently institute a no fly zone over key Libyan cities and towns in conjunction with U.S. allies. We also call on you to explore the option of targeted strikes against regime assets in an effort to prevent further bloodshed. The United States should also immediately recognize the Libyan National Transitional Council and take all necessary actions to support their efforts to unseat the Qaddafi regime.

In your inaugural address two years ago, you said this: "And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more."

Today the United States and its allies should stand with the men, women and children of Libya who seek a future of peace and dignity. The situation in Libya in the coming days will not just impact the Libyan people. As protests continue against repressive regimes around the world, the message currently being conveyed by our inaction is that killing and repression will go unpunished and are the best option for despots seeking to postpone reform.

For the sake of our security as well as America’s credibility with people who seek freedom everywhere, we ask you to act as quickly as possible to ensure that the people of Libya – and the world – know that we are willing to back up our principles with action.

Sincerely,



Fouad Ajami [Outspoken supporter of the Iraq War, the nobility of which he believes there "can be no doubt"]

Ash Jain [Former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Staff]

Randy Scheunemann [President of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq]

Stephen E. Biegun [Has served since 1986 as a foreign policy advisor to Republican members of the United States Congress]

Ken Jensen

Gary J. Schmitt [Executive director of the Project for the New American Century]

Max Boot [Who once described his ideas as "American might to promote American ideals"]

Robert Kagan

Dan Senor

Ellen Bork [Deputy Director at the Project for the New American Century]

Lawrence Kaplan [Distinguished Visiting Professor at the U.S. Army War College and former senior editor at The New Republic]

Henry Sokolski

Paul Bremer [U.S. Administrator of occupied Iraq]

David Kramer

Whit Stillman

Scott Carpenter

Irina Krasovskaya

William Taft [Served under Bush fils as chief legal advisor to the United States Department of State]

Elizabeth Cheney [Daughter of Dick Cheney, she is politically active on behalf of he Republican Party and is a co-founder of Keep America Safe]

William Kristol [American neoconservative political analyst and commentator. He is the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel]

Marc Thiessen [Speechwriter for George W. Bush]

Eliot Cohen [member of the Project for the New American Century and Counselor to the United States Department of State under Secretary Condoleezza Rice from 2007 to 2009]

Tod Lindberg

Daniel Twining

Seth Cropsey [Assistant to the Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Deputy Undersecretary of the Navy for Reagan and Bush]

Michael Makovsky

Kurt Volker

Thomas Donnelly

Ann Marlowe

Peter Wehner [Served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations prior to becoming deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush in 2001]

Michele Dunne

Cliff May [Chairman of the policy committee of the Committee on the Present Danger]

Ken Weinstein

Eric Edelman [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for Bush II]

Joshua Muravchik [In 2006, wrote "Bomb Iran--Diplomacy is doing nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear threat; a show of force is the only answer"]

Leon Wieseltier [Served on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq]

Jamie Fly

Michael O'Hanlon

Rich Williamson

Reuel Marc Gerecht

Martin Peretz

Damon Wilson

William Inboden

Danielle Pletka

Bruce Pitcairn Jackson [Chairman of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and as chair of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq (CLI). He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.]

John Podhoretz [American neoconservative columnist for the New York Post]





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A CIA Commander For Libyan Rebels

Patrick Martin in World Socialist Website, 3/28/11:


The Libyan National Council, the Benghazi-based group that speaks for the rebel forces fighting the Gaddafi regime, has appointed a long-time CIA collaborator to head its military operations. The selection of Khalifa Hifter, a former colonel in the Libyan army, was reported by McClatchy Newspapers Thursday and the new military chief was interviewed by a correspondent for ABC News on Sunday night.

Hifter’s arrival in Benghazi was first reported by Al Jazeera on March 14, followed by a flattering portrait in the virulently pro-war British tabloid the Daily Mail on March 19. The Daily Mail described Hifter as one of the “two military stars of the revolution” who “had recently returned from exile in America to lend the rebel ground forces some tactical coherence.” The newspaper did not refer to his CIA connections.

McClatchy Newspapers published a profile of Hifter on Sunday. Headlined “New Rebel Leader Spent Much of Past 20 years in Suburban Virginia,” the article notes that he was once a top commander for the Gaddafi regime, until “a disastrous military adventure in Chad in the late 1980s.”

Hifter then went over to the anti-Gaddafi opposition, eventually emigrating to the United States, where he lived until two weeks ago when he returned to Libya to take command in Benghazi.

The McClatchy profile concluded, “Since coming to the United States in the early 1990s, Hifter lived in suburban Virginia outside Washington, DC.” It cited a friend who “said he was unsure exactly what Hifter did to support himself, and that Hifter primarily focused on helping his large family.”

To those who can read between the lines, this profile is a thinly disguised indication of Hifter’s role as a CIA operative. How else does a high-ranking former Libyan military commander enter the United States in the early 1990s, only a few years after the Lockerbie bombing, and then settle near the US capital, except with the permission and active assistance of US intelligence agencies? Hifter actually lived in Vienna, Virginia, about five miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, for two decades.

The agency was very familiar with Hifter’s military and political work. A Washington Post report of March 26, 1996 describes an armed rebellion against Gaddafi in Libya and uses a variant spelling of his name. The article cites witnesses to the rebellion who report that “its leader is Col. Khalifa Haftar, of a contra-style group based in the United States called the Libyan National Army.”

The comparison is to the “contra” terrorist forces financed and armed by the US government in the 1980s against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scandal, which rocked the Reagan administration in 1986-87, involved the exposure of illegal US arms sales to Iran, with the proceeds used to finance the contras in defiance of a congressional ban. Congressional Democrats covered up the scandal and rejected calls to impeach Reagan for sponsoring the flagrantly illegal activities of a cabal of former intelligence operatives and White House aides.

A 2001 book, Manipulations africaines, published by Le Monde diplomatique, traces the CIA connection even further back, to 1987, reporting that Hifter, then a colonel in Gaddafi’s army, was captured fighting in Chad in a Libyan-backed rebellion against the US-backed government of Hissène Habré. He defected to the Libyan National Salvation Front (LNSF), the principal anti-Gaddafi group, which had the backing of the American CIA. He organized his own militia, which operated in Chad until Habré was overthrown by a French-supported rival, Idriss Déby, in 1990.

According to this book, “the Haftar force, created and financed by the CIA in Chad, vanished into thin air with the help of the CIA shortly after the government was overthrown by Idriss Déby.” The book also cites a Congressional Research Service report of December 19, 1996 that the US government was providing financial and military aid to the LNSF and that a number of LNSF members were relocated to the United States.

This information is available to anyone who conducts even a cursory Internet search, but it has not been reported by the corporate-controlled media in the United States, except in the dispatch from McClatchy, which avoids any reference to the CIA. None of the television networks, busily lauding the “freedom fighters” of eastern Libya, has bothered to report that these forces are now commanded by a longtime collaborator of US intelligence services.

Nor have the liberal and “left” enthusiasts of the US-European intervention in Libya taken note. They are too busy hailing the Obama administration for its multilateral and “consultative” approach to war, supposedly so different from the unilateral and “cowboy” approach of the Bush administration in Iraq. That the result is the same—death and destruction raining down on the population, the trampling of the sovereignty and independence of a former colonial country—means nothing to these apologists for imperialism.

The role of Hifter, aptly described 15 years ago as the leader of a “contra-style group,” demonstrates the real class forces at work in the Libyan tragedy. Whatever genuine popular opposition was expressed in the initial revolt against the corrupt Gaddafi dictatorship, the rebellion has been hijacked by imperialism.

The US and European intervention in Libya is aimed not at bringing “democracy” and “freedom,” but at installing in power stooges of the CIA who will rule just as brutally as Gaddafi, while allowing the imperialist powers to loot the country’s oil resources and use Libya as a base of operations against the popular revolts sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.




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Egypt's Revolution: Creative Destruction for a 'Greater Middle East'?

F. William Engdahl, February 5, 2011:


Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as "creative destruction."

The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.

Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.

No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. No one can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.

What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt's Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the mildersounding "New Middle East."

As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations
across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That
conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.2

The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller's friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.

Egypt rising?

The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington's longterm strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.

Washington 'soft' revolutions

The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia's Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as "spontaneous" as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.3

At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran's Ahmedinejad in 2009.

The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.

April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers' call for a strike on April 6, 2008.

According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, "Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process." 4

Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei's National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.5

Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood.

ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to
Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.6 Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

Kefaya—Pentagon 'non-violent warfare'

Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei's candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to "enough!" Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means "enough!"

Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp's misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as "non-violence as a method of warfare." 8

The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.

The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood.9 Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.10

RAND and Kefaya

No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was "sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community." 11

A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.

In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt's Kefaya:

"The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.

However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country." 12

RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name "swarming," the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.13

Washington and the stable of "human rights" and "democracy" and "non-violence" NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated "spontaneous" nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:

"The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions." 14

The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other "reform" movements:

"The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

"Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers." 15

As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the "RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.

The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes "research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements." 16

In May 2009 just before Obama's Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another "human rights" Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in USsponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month "fellowship" organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.17

Freedom House and Washington's government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world.

They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring "democracy" and "liberal free market" economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.

[...]




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Obama Raises American Hypocrisy to Higher Level

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS in CounterPunch, 3/29/11:

What Does the World Think Now?

What does the world think? Obama has been using air strikes and drones against civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and probably Somalia. In his March 28 speech, Obama justified his air strikes against Libya on the grounds that the embattled ruler, Gadhafi, was using air strikes to put down a rebellion.

Gadhafi has been a black hat for as long as I can remember. If we believe the adage that “where there is smoke there is fire,” Gadhafi is probably not a nice fellow. However, there is no doubt whatsoever that the current US president and the predecessor Bush/Cheney regime have murdered many times more people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia than Gadhafi has murdered in Libya.

Moreover, Gadhafi is putting down a rebellion against state authority as presently constituted, but Obama and Bush/Cheney initiated wars of aggression based entirely on lies and deception.

Yet Gadhafi is being demonized, and Bush/Cheney/Obama are sitting on their high horse draped in cloaks of morality. Obama described himself as saving Libyans from violence while Obama himself murders Afghans, Pakistanis, and whomever else.

Indeed, the Obama regime has been torturing a US soldier, Bradley Manning, for having a moral conscience. America has degenerated to the point where having a moral conscience is evidence of anti-Americanism and “terrorist activity.”

The Bush/Cheney/Obama wars of naked aggression have bankrupted America. Joseph Stiglitz, former chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, concluded that the money wasted on the Iraq war could have been used to fix America’s Social Security problem for half a century. Instead, the money was used to boost the obscene profits of the armament industry.

The obscene wars of aggression, the obscene profits of the offshoring corporations, and the obscene bailouts of the rich financial gangsters have left the American public with annual budget deficits of approximately $1.5 trillion. These deficits are being covered by printing money. Sooner or later, the printing presses will cause the US dollar to collapse and domestic inflation to explode. Social Security benefits will be wiped out by inflation rising more rapidly than the cost-of-living adjustments. If America survives, no one will be left but the mega-rich. Unless there is a violent revolution.

Alternatively, if the Federal Reserve puts the brake on monetary expansion, interest rates will rise, sending the economy into a deeper depression.

Washington, focused on its newest war, is oblivious to America’s peril. As Stiglitz notes, the costs of the Iraq war alone could have kept every foreclosed family in their home, provided health care for every American child, and wiped out the student loans of graduates who cannot find jobs because they have been outsourced to foreigners. However, the great democratic elected government of “the world’s only superpower” prefers to murder Muslims in order to enhance the profits of the military/security complex. More money is spent violating the constitutional rights of American air travelers than is spent in behalf of the needy.

The moral authority of the West is rapidly collapsing. When Russia, Asia, and South America look at Europe, Australia and Canada, they see American puppet states that contribute troops to the aggressive wars of the Empire. The French president, the British prime minister, the “president” of Georgia, and the rest are merely functionaries of the American Empire. The puppet rulers routinely sell out the interests and welfare of their peoples in behalf of American hegemony. And they are well rewarded for their service. One year out of office former British prime minister Tony Blair had a net worth of $30 million.

In his war against Libya, Obama has taken America one step further into Caesarism. Obama did Bush one step better and did not even bother to get congressional authorization for his attack on Libya. Obama claimed that his moral authority trumped the US Constitution. The hypocrisy reeks. How the public stands it, I do not know:

“To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and--more profoundly--our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different. And as president, I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.”

This from the Great Moral Leader who every day murders civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia and now Libya and who turns a blind eye when “the great democracy in the Middle East,” Israel, murders more Palestinians.

The American president, whose drones and air force slaughter civilians every day of the year went on to say Libya stands alone in presenting the world with “the prospect of violence on a horrific scale.” Obviously, Obama thinks that one million dead Iraqis, four million displaced Iraqis, and an unknown number of murdered Afghans is just a small thing.

The rest of Obama’s speech showed a person more capable of DoubleSpeak and DoubleThink than Big Brother and the denizens of George Orwell’s 1984.

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Fred Reed on Joe Bageant,

3/27/11:



Bageant Moves On

We don't last, and there's no warranty

Jocotepec, Mexico -- Joe lived awhile down the lake. We would visit him of an afternoon, Vi and I, and find him, a bear of a man, bearded mountain Buddha, writing on the porch of his one-room place in Ajijic. Always he wore his old fishing vest, in which I suspect he was born, and sometimes he carried a small laptop in one of its pockets. Usually we adjourned to the living room, which was also the bedroom, dining room, and salon. He would fetch bottles of local red, or make the jalapeño martinis he invented -- there was a bit of mad chemist in him -- and we would talk for hours of art, music, the news, politics, and people. Especially people. Sometimes he grabbed one of the guitars from the wall and sang blues, at which he was good. I guess growing up dirt poor in West Virginia puts that kind of music in you.

Joe could fool you. He talked slow and Southern, lacked pretensions, and you could talk to him for weeks without realizing how very damned smart he was.
 One day we dropped in and he said he had just found that he had cancer. It went fast. He died Saturday.

Most who have heard of him have done so through his books, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War, and Rainbow Pie: A Redneck Memoir. Deer Hunting is a curious work, a sleeper, that you can read the first time without noticing that it deserves a high place in American letters. He tells of that huge class of unnoticed people in America, the white underclass of a thousand small towns and countryscapes, of Winchester, Virginia where he lived and by implication to Waldorf, Maryland and King George, Virginia and, well, all over the Carolinas and the Cumberland Plateau and … everywhere. America thinks it is a middle-class country. It isn’t. Joe knew.

You wouldn’t see it at first as sociology. Sociology is supposed to be written in drab, repetitive, half-literate, numbingly narcotic prose that would make an anvil beg for mercy. Joe was more Twain. Never eat cocktail weenies out of the urinal, he said, no matter how high the betting gets, while talking of people working whole lives in jobs without benefits or retirement and generally getting screwed. He had no patience for smug commentators in Washington who talked at half a million bucks a year of how America was a land of opportunity if only you worked hard. It isn’t. He knew it. So did I, having grown up in rural King George County, Virginia, where the same people lived. He was exactly right.

He lived largely, coming out of the mountains and spending a year at the Corcoran School of Art, and drifting west where his immense talent had him spending a lot of time with Hunter Thompson and the giants of the era and writing for all manner of publications. He believed deeply in booze and recreational drugs, which in those years was perhaps not a view unique to him. Shortly before his death he told Vi and me about having met some local Mexican folk here of Indian antecedents and going up in the hills one night to do mushrooms, and lying out half the night watching the stars swirl and dance. He lived for years on an Indian reservation without electricity, worked as an editor for Military History magazine, likewise for an agribusiness magazine flogging pesticides, and told horrendous stories about what we actually eat. He was miserable at Military History, but needed to live.

He went to the internet, driven to write for whatever reasons drive people to write, and got found by Dan Greenberg, the literary agent. Agents, and publishing houses in New York, are generally characterized by a lack of knowledge of writing, writers, America, and books, but Greenberg was lax in observing the traditions of his trade. He asked Joe to write a book. Which Joe did.

The consequences were odd. Deer Hunting became immensely popular in … Australia. It sold well in … England. It was translated into Spanish, twice, in Spain and … Argentina. Argentina? Joe was invited to 10 Downing Street, did countless radio interviews in Australia, a book tour in Italy. Rainbow Pie would go into German and Italian. It was by comparison ignored in America. Something is very wrong somewhere. I’m not sure what.

Maybe New York just doesn’t like rural people, or doesn’t know that there are any. And there was certainly a rural flavor to the man. Seeing a young woman with piercings in her nose and ears and God knows whereall, he commented that she seemed to have fallen face-first into a tackle box. His politics may have confused the chattering classes. Joe was the least racist guy who ever lived, but he wrote about the white poor, whose very existence runs against hallowed doctrine. He was also explicitly in favor of the Second Amendment, noting that ninety pounds of dressed venison matters a whole lot to many families. These are families that reviewers of books have never heard of.

Joe described himself as a redneck socialist, and he was. He was profoundly concerned with the fate of the people he wrote about, those who worked hard all their lives and ended up with nothing. Funny: I’ve never met a socialist who didn’t care about others, or a capitalist who did. The truth is that a great many decent people are on the wrong side of the intelligence curve, don’t come from families that send their young to university,and can’t protect themselves from the corporate lawyers and bought legislatures.

It wasn’t a pose. He really and truly, honestly, demonstrably and implausibly, had no interest in money. He lived for some time in Hopkins Village in Belize, a seaside community of black, downscale Garifuna and, when some money began to come in from Deer Hunting, regularly gave it away to help the locals. He didn’t have a sainthood complex. He just didn’t care. He wanted books, a guitar, friends, internet, wine, and occasional substances not approved of by DEA. No pretenses. Drop acid, not names.

When he had to choose between horrible surgery of dubious prospect, and just saying, “Nah,” he said “Nah.” Joe was going to start Spanish lessons with Vi once he got past the paperwork of Rainbow Pie, but I guess that’s not going to happen. We’ll miss the throaty blues and mountain ballads, the discovery that Edward Hopper was our favorite painter, the jalapeño martinis barely drinkable though they were, and swapping tales of wild times and odd places. And the sheer good-hearted intelligence of the man.

It was great, brother. Hope to see you again in a few years.




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The Price of the Ticket: The US, Libya and Oil

CONN HALLINAN in CounterPunch, 3/25/11:



Cynicism is not a healthy sentiment, and as the late Molly Ivins pointed out, it absolutely wrecks good journalism. But watching events in the Middle East unfold these days makes it a pretty difficult point of view to avoid.

Let's take the current U.S bombing of Libya. The rationale behind United Nations Security Council Resolution 1973 is to protect civilians from being beaten, shot up, and generally abused.

But while this applies to Libya, it does not apply to Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, or Yemen, where civilians are also being shot up, beaten, and generally abused. Is this because Moammar Gadhafi is uniquely evil? Crazier and odder, certainly, but being in the "opposition" in any of those countries is not a path to easy retirement. Civil liberties don't exist, prisons are chock full of political prisoners, and getting whacked if you don't like the leader is an operational hazard.

So what's it all about? Okay, here is the cynical joke: "Is it all about oil? Nope. Some of it is about natural gas."

Too simplistic? Maybe, but consider the following.

1) In 2009, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted that world oil reserves had "peaked" and that over the next several decades supplies would drop and prices would rise. There is some controversy over the study, but there is general agreement that easy-to-get petroleum sources are getting harder and harder to find.

2) Approximately 65 percent of the world's remaining oil reserves are in the Middle East, as well as considerable amounts of natural gas. Iran has the second greatest reserves of gas outside of Russia.

3) The U.S.—with the largest economy in the world—uses around 21 million barrels of oil per day (bpd). Since it produces only 7.5 million bpd domestically, it imports two thirds of its oil. Its major sources are (in descending order) Canada, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela, and Iraq.

4) China—the world's number two economy—uses about 8 million bpd, a demand that is projected to rise to 11.3 million bpd by 2015. Since it only produces 3.7 million bpd domestically, it too relies on imported oil. It main suppliers are (in descending order) Saudi Arabia, Iran, Angola, Russia, Oman and Sudan.

It is estimated that, sometime between 2030 and 2050, China will surpass the U.S. and become the world's number one economy—provided that it can secure enough energy for its growing industrial needs. Insuring access to oil and gas is a major focus of Chinese foreign policy, particularly because Beijing is nervous about how it currently obtains its supplies. Some 80 percent are transported by sea, and all of those routes involve choke points currently controlled by the U.S. The U.S. Fifth Fleet based in Bahrain controls the Hormutz Straits, through which Saudi Arabian, Iranian, and Omanian oil passes. The Fifth also dominates the straits of Bab el-Mandab that control access to the Red Sea and through which Sudan's oil is shipped into the Indian Ocean. In addition the Malacca Straits between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula is the major transit point for oil going to China. The U.S. Seventh Fleet controls that choke point.

China's nervousness over its sea-based oil supplies is one of the major reasons behind Beijing's crash naval program, its construction of ports in South and Southeast Asia, and its efforts to build land-based pipelines from Russia, Central Asia, and Pakistan.

The Chinese are also trying to cope with the fact that Iran, its second largest supplier of oil and gas, is currently under international sanctions that have reduced production and cut into China's supplies. Beijing has invested upwards of $120 billion to upgrade Iran's energy industry, but recently has had to cutback investments because its banks could end up being sanctioned for helping out the Teheran regime.

The Chinese are not the slightest bit cynical about why the U.S. is bombing Libya and not challenging Bahrain and Yemen: Bahrain hosts the U.S. Fifth Fleet, and Yemen's port of Aden dominates the Red Sea. China can play chess.

As for Libya. The U.S. doesn't get oil from Libya, but its allies in Europe do. And the current crisis is African Command's (Africom) coming out party. Up to now the record of the spanking new military formation has been less than impressive. First, no one would host it, because the U.S. military in Africa makes the locals nervous. So it is still based in Germany. Then it coordinated the absolutely disastrous Ethiopian invasion of Somalia that ended up turning most of the country over to the extremist Shabab.

But Libya is a fresh slate for Africom, and that is making the Chinese even more nervous (and explains why they have been so cranky about civilian casualties in Libya). When Africom was in its infancy it war-gamed a military intervention in the Gulf of Guinea in case "civil disturbances: caused any disruptions in oil supplies. Angola, China's other major African supplier, is in the Gulf of Guinea. It hardly seems like a coincidence that, at the very moment that African oil supplies become important, the U.S. creates a new military formation for the continent. Africom is currently advising and training the military forces of 53 countries in the region.

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Some May be More Dangerous Than Radiation: Deconstructing Nuclear Experts

Chris Busby in CounterPunch, 3/28/11:

Since the Fukushima accident we have seen a stream of experts on radiation telling us not to worry, that the doses are too low, that the accident is nothing like Chernobyl and so forth. They appear on television and we read their articles in the newspapers and online. Fortunately the majority of the public don’t believe them. I myself have appeared on television and radio with these people; one example was Ian Fells of the University of Newcastle who, after telling us all on BBC News that the accident was nothing like Chernobyl (wrong), and the radiation levels of no consequence (wrong), that the main problem was that there was no electricity and that the lifts didn’t work. “ If you have been in a situation when the lifts don’t work, as I have” he burbled on, “you will know what I mean.” You can see this interview on youtube and decide for yourself.

What these people have in common is ignorance. You may think a professor at a university must actually know something about their subject. But this is not so. Nearly all of these experts who appear and pontificate have not actually done any research on the issue of radiation and health. Or if they have, they seem to have missed all the key studies and references. I leave out the real baddies, who are closely attached to the nuclear industry, like Richard Wakeford, or Richard D as he calls himself on the anonymous website he has set up to attack me, “chrisbusbyexposed”.

I saw him a few times talking down the accident on the television, labelled in the stripe as Professor Richard Wakeford, University of Manchester. Incidentally, Wakeford is a physicist, his PhD was in particle physics at Liverpool. But he was not presented as ex- Principle Scientist, British Nuclear Fuels, Sellafield. That might have given the viewers the wrong idea. Early on we saw another baddy, Malcolm Grimston, talking about radiation and health, described as Professor, Imperial College. Grimston is a psychologist, not a scientist, and his expertise was in examining why the public was frightened of radiation, and how their (emotional) views could be changed. But his lack of scientific training didn’t stop him explaining on TV and radio how the Fukushima accident was nothing to worry about. The doses were too low, nothing like Chernobyl, not as bad as 3-Mile Island, only 4 on the scale, all the usual blather. Most recently we have seen George Monbiot, who I know, and who also knows nothing about radiation and health, writing in The Guardian how this accident has actually changed his mind about nuclear power (can this be his Kierkegaard moment? Has he cracked? ) since he now understands (and reproduces a criminally misleading graphic to back up his new understanding) that radiation is actually OK and we shoudn’t worry about it. George does at least know better, or has been told better, since he asked me a few years ago to explain why internal and external radiation exposure cannot be considered to have the same health outcomes. He ignored what I said and wrote for him (with references) and promptly came out in favour of nuclear energy in his next article.

So what about Wade Allison? Wade is a medical physics person and a professor at Oxford. I have chosen to pitch into him since he epitomises and crystallises for us the arguments of the stupid physicist. In this he has done us a favour, since he is really easy to shoot down. All the arguments are in one place. Stupid physicists? Make no mistake, physicists are stupid. They make themselves stupid by a kind of religious belief in mathematical modelling. The old Bertie Russell logical positivist trap. And whilst this may be appropriate for examining the stresses in metals, or looking at the Universe (note that they seem to have lost 90% of the matter in the Universe, so-called “dark matter”) it is not appropriate for, and is even scarily incorrect when, examining stresses in humans or other lifeforms. Mary Midgley, the philosopher has written about Science as Religion. Health physicists are the priests. I have been reading Wade Allison’s article for the BBC but also looked at his book some months ago. He starts in the same way as all the others by comparing the accidents. He writes:

More than 10,000 people have died in the Japanese tsunami and the survivors are cold and hungry. But the media concentrate on nuclear radiation from which no-one has died - and is unlikely to.

Then we move to 3-Mile Island: There were no known deaths there.

And Chernobyl:

The latest UN report published on 28 February confirms the known death toll - 28 fatalities among emergency workers, plus 15 fatal cases of child thyroid cancer - which would have been avoided if iodine tablets had been taken (as they have now in Japan).

This is breathtaking ignorance of the scientific literature. Prof. Steve Wing in the USA has carried out epidemiological studies of the effects of 3-Mile Island, with results published in the peer-review literature. Court cases are regularly settled on the basis of cancers produced by the 3-Mile Island contamination. But let us move to Chernobyl. The health effects of the Chernobyl accident are massive and demonstrable. They have been studied by many research groups in Russia, Belarus and the Ukraine, in the USA, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Japan. The scientific peer reviewed literature is enormous. Hundreds of papers report the effects, increases in cancer and a range of other diseases. My colleague Alexey Yablokov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, published a review of these studies in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2009). Earlier in 2006 he and I collected together reviews of the Russian literature by a group of eminent radiation scientists and published these in the book Chernobyl, 20 Years After. The result: more than a million people have died between 1986 and 2004 as a direct result of Chernobyl.

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