To do this, it expanded rapidly in the past decade, and now has a Partnership for Peace with ex-Soviet hopefuls. It also has a Mediterranean Dialogue with Western-oriented Muslim states and Israel (of them, Morocco and Israel are further blessed as “major non-NATO allies”) and the GCC+2 — the Gulf Cooperation Council plus Egypt and Jordan. GCC+2 has been optimistically dubbed the “NATO of the Middle East” in Western media, but then once-upon-a-time so was the ill-fated Baghdad Pact, originally called the Middle East Treaty Organisation (METO). The real “NATO of the Middle East” is of course US+1.

Whatever the US/NATO schemes and their pretexts, the results in recent years have been less than impressive. The communist hordes were soon replaced by the Russian and/or Muslim ones, and, despite the Mediterranean Dialogue and the GCC+2, the Muslim ones are multiplying daily. Even NATOphiles realise something is amiss. The newly appointed secretary general, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, was so eager to transform the organisation he gave up his job as prime minister of Denmark, making him the highest ranking politician to take over NATO. “I want to modernise, transform and reform so that NATO adapts to the security environment of the 21st century.”

Rasmussen points to the bloated bureaucracy, with its more than 300 committees — all requiring decisions by consensus, and 13,000 personnel scattered across Western Europe at NATO’s many military bases. With France rejoining the integrated military structure in April, it had to send 900 military staff to the various NATO commands. “In a rapidly changing security environment, we have to make sure that NATO is able to make rapid moves,” asserts Fogh Rasmussen wistfully.

But his biggest move so far to reform the dinosaur was to appoint an “outsider”, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, to lead a group of 12 experts to work out a new strategic concept. Albright is hardly an outsider, being a key actor in the NATO bombing of Serbia which led to the creation of the first NATO satellite — Kosovo, touted as a great success by NATOphiles, but as a violation of international law and relations by just about everyone else. It remains a basket-case, shunned by the likes of China, India and Russia. So don’t hold your breath that Albright will spearhead a radical reinvention of NATO.

NATOphiles ignore the obvious question about the organisation: why didn’t it just disband when its mission to crush Communism was successful and the Warsaw Pact was dissolved? They also don’t seem to feel it necessary to explain why a northern Atlantic organisation should expand into Eurasia and fight wars in Central Asia; why the UN is not the more appropriate forum for world security issues. The UN, famous for its own bureaucracy, has undergone considerable reform in the last decade and is certainly no more dysfunctional than NATO. It also has the advantage of bringing North, South, East and West together, guaranteeing a modicum of world consensus for any military action.

There is no hint within the NATO fortress that such questions will worry Albright’s experts, or that they will reach consensus towards anything other than making NATO an even greater threat to the diplomatic resolution of world problems.

Others are not twiddling their thumbs, however. The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on. Russia has been picking up the pieces in its foreign affairs since the regional alliance of Soviet days broke up and its place in the world as a counterweight to American diktat was lost. The Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) was formed in 2002, bringing together Russia, Central Asian states Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, as well as Armenia and Belarus, and has been picking up steam in the past year, despite the difficulty of dealing with unpredictable member-dictators.

It is truly a regional pact with a legitimate reason for existing, unlike NATO. It was recognised by both the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and the UN as such in 2007, and there has been talk of it becoming the genesis of a defence arm for the SCO. NATO’s battering in Afghanistan has reduced it to asking for Russia’s — really the CSTO’s — participation in the Afghanistan operation, most obviously as the “northern corridor” transport route from Europe to Northern Afghanistan via CSTO member-states.

The CSTO is now working openly on a UN cooperation declaration similar to the one passed in September 2008 with NATO — behind UN members’ backs — to work together against terrorism, drug and arms trafficking, and as part of peacekeeping missions under UN command. In addition to the UN, the CSTO has relations with the EU and the OSCE.

There is even talk of squaring the circle between the CSTO and NATO. Says Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, “Compared to the previous situation, when NATO did not want even to hear about the OSCE, now many officials and experts say that the CSTO can be a very useful partner.” CSTO Secretary General Nikolai Bordiuzha is less naive: “We proposed to NATO to cooperate in several spheres, including those regarding fighting illegal drug trafficking, but NATO has its own position.” Ironically, NATO’s Partnership for Peace includes all CSTO countries, so NATO has been cooperating with the CSTO by default all along, whether it likes it or not.

In addition to this startling outcome of NATO’s failure in Afghanistan, there are several interesting developments percolating that will soon provide a window into just which direction NATO will go in its latest mutation. Ukraine and Georgia are committed to join NATO, both with leaders swept into power by carefully orchestrated Western-backed campaigns but who are now widely reviled. Does NATO still have the will and the way to snatch them up?

Another development is the recent mutual recognition of Turkey and Armenia, long-time foes. This reconciliation finessed their outstanding differences — Armenia’s occupation of almost 20 per cent of Turkey’s natural ally Azerbaijan, and Turkey’s refusal to accept greater responsibility for the tragedy of ethnic Armenians who died fleeing civil war in 1915-17.

The EU took the credit for bringing the two sides together and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came to the signing ceremony, but it is far from clear which “side” will benefit most. Will NATO-member Turkey help usher CSTO-member Armenia into the Western fold? Or will Russia-friendly Armenia draw Turkey the other way? Will the EU’s spurning of Muslim Turkey and its desire to snag tiny Christian Armenia widen the growing rift between an increasingly independent and pro-Muslim Turkey and the West? Will Azerbaijan join NATO in a huff? Will Turkey dust off its Ottoman past and reinvent itself as a major regional power? The situation is far too complex to make any firm predictions.

Russia’s staunch defence of Iran in the face of Western threats and its increasing assertiveness in the face of NATO expansion are widely admired in the Muslim world, Turkey being no exception. Last year Moscow embraced Ankara ’s proposal for a Caucasus Stability and Cooperation Platform as a mechanism for political dialogue, stability and crisis management in a region covering Russia, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia. Russia noted Turkey’s refusal to assist the US in invading Iraq or to allow a US warship into the Black Sea following Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia last year. Early this year, a Turkish mission visited Abkhazia.

During a state visit to Moscow by Turkish President Abdullah Gul in February, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev made a straightforward proposal to set up a Russian-Turkish axis. “The August crisis showed that we can deal with problems in the region by ourselves, without the involvement of outside powers,” Medvedev told a joint press conference. The Turkish leader effectively agreed, pointing to “substantially close or identical positions” the two countries took on “an absolute majority” of international issues.

But world politics is not all win-lose. Both Russia and the US, as members of the Minsk Group founded by the OECD to resolve the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan, want to see that stand-off resolved peacefully. Making it happen would be a feather in US President and Nobel laureate Barack Obama’s cap and a concrete step in improving relations with Russia. A truly win-win situation.

As NATO continues to flounder and power continues to shift away from the US towards BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) and the SCO, issues like the above will be shaped by a complex of forces, and their outcomes will not be enforced by any one diktat. Just as NATO’s Cold War nemesis unravelled with unpredicted speed, the seemingly immutable Western military alliance could find itself paralysed not only by its infamous bureaucracy, but by countervailing forces on the ascendant outside of its orbit.

All the Kosovos, Georgias and Azerbaijans, all the GCC+2s, Dialogues and Partnerships in the world won’t be able to stave off the inevitable. Indeed, they can only act as a millstone, pulling NATO deeper into the quagmire it itself created during its short post-Cold War life as world policeman.

Three Israel-related events this year have stayed in the headlines, reflecting the importance of Israel in Canadian political and cultural life.

First, Canadian Ambassador to Israel Jon Allen was recently honoured at Canada Park — built on occupied Palestinian land in violation of international law — as one of hundreds of donors who helped establish the park on the ruins of three Palestinian villages. Just north of Jerusalem, it was founded in the early 1970s following Israel’s occupation of the West Bank in the 1967 war. It is hugely popular for walks and picnics with the Israeli public, who are by and large unaware that they are in Palestinian territory that is officially a closed military zone. Former Israeli parliamentarian Uri Avnery has described the park’s creation as an act of complicity in “ethnic cleansing” and Canada’s involvement as “cover to a war crime”. About 5,000 Palestinians were expelled from the area during the war. A plaque bearing Allen’s name is attached to a stone wall constructed from the rubble of Palestinian homes razed by the Israeli army. The Jewish National Fund, treated as a charity for tax purposes, establishes and manages such parks on behalf of Jewish people worldwide. Canada Park is believed to be the only example, outside East Jerusalem, of the JNF becoming directly involved in managing land in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Then there is the wildly popular exhibition, “Dead Sea Scrolls: Words that Changed the World,” at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), a joint project with the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), funded by the Toronto Tanenbaum family dynasty who coincidentally were instrumental in the creation of Canada Park. This exhibition provided a fitting gala premier for the museum’s ultra-modern wing designed by Israeli-American Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind, whose parents were Polish Holocaust survivors, also designed the Berlin Jewish Museum, the Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabruck, Germany, and the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen. The Dead Sea Scrolls, regarded as one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of the 20th century and including what is purported to be the oldest known version of the Old Testament (150BC-70CE), were found by a Bedouin shepherd in caves near Qumran, near the Dead Sea, and later by the Palestine Archaeological Museum (also known as the Rockefeller Museum) in a joint expedition with the Department of Antiquities of Jordan and the Ecole Biblique Française between 1947-1956. The Scrolls were displayed at the Palestine Archaeological Museum in East Jerusalem until 1967, when they were seized and relocated to the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem. Since 1967, additional (illegal) excavations and findings by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) took place in Qumran and the surrounding area, and artefacts continue to be (illegally) appropriated by Israel, under the auspices of the IAA.

Under international law and in accordance with Canada’s and Israel’s obligations as signatories to the 1954 UNESCO protocol for the “Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict”, Israel is not entitled to these artefacts. The repatriation of the Scrolls and millions of other artefacts to Palestine remains a key issue for those seeking peace and justice in the Middle East. In 2005, Canada signed other UNESCO conventions and protocols specifically aimed at preventing the removal and the exhibition of illegally removed artefacts from occupied territories, and adopted domestic Canadian legislation — the Cultural Property Export and Import Act — which makes it a criminal offense to import cultural property in violation of the conventions. The ROM, for its own part, is a member of the Canadian Museums Association whose Ethics Guidelines states that “museums must guard against any direct or indirect participation in the illicit traffic in cultural and natural objects that are: stolen, illegally imported or exported from another state, including those that are occupied or war-stricken.” The 1954 Convention clearly requires Canada to “take into custody cultural property imported into its territory either directly or indirectly from any occupied territory” and “return, at the close of hostilities, to the competent authorities of the territory previously occupied, cultural property which is in its territory.”

Israel not only continues to illegally excavate in occupied Palestinian territory but dismisses international law altogether (despite its UNESCO pledges), using archeology and discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls to reinforce the Zionist national narrative and the colonial project upon which the state was founded. Supposedly a science removed from political, religious, or ideological bias, archeology under the IAA is the very antithesis of this, being rooted in Biblical mythology. Artefacts like the Scrolls are, according to Amos Elon, “almost titles of real estate, like deeds of possession to a contested country”. Like British, French, and German imperialist functionaries before them, Israeli archeologists sift through the many layers of historical evidence in search of what will prove their belief that they are indeed God’s Chosen People, ignoring or rather destroying the intervening layers and interpreting finds to suit their needs. The thousands of years of non-Jewish Arab civilisation don’t matter. Historian Keith Whitelam says in The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian History, the modern state of Israel has “cast its shadow of influence backwards to claim previous periods as its ‘prehistory’.” The IAA is just as much a steamroller, flattening indigenous Palestine, as the Israeli Defence Forces, in their policy of archeological apartheid. Committee Against Israeli Apapartheid (CAIA) activist Ali Mustafa writes that Israeli archeology is explicitly categorised by the IAA as either Jewish/Israeli or Arab/Muslim in a process whereby ancient artefacts that supposedly belong to the Biblical era are actively sought after, while supposedly encouraging Palestinians to do the same concerning later Islamic periods. Following the Oslo peace process, Israel claimed it was prepared to assign jurisdiction of all “Arab” and “Muslim” archeological sites in the West Bank over to the PA; however, the offer was flatly refused, and the PA instead demanded control over all sites, as well as an immediate return of artefacts seized since 1967. The logic is simple: conflate all Palestinian history as Islamic (openly disregarding Christian and secular influences), and apply these reductive and simplistic binary terms to all artefacts ignoring the region’s shared past and overlapping cultural heritage. Despite the overwhelming evidence that the Scrolls should be seized by ROM and the Canadian government under their international obligations and held or handed over to UNESCO until their ownership is determined, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation concluded in June that “the museum feels the scrolls are legally held and both the federal and provincial government have expressed their support of the exhibition.”

The third event is the Toronto International Film Festival’s “City to city Spotlight on Tel Aviv”, in cooperation with the Israeli Embassy and the Canada-Israel Cultural Foundation. Along with the ROM exhibition, this PR scheme was to be the centre- piece of Israeli Consul Gissin’s special Canadian “Brand Israel” campaign, dreamed up in 2008 on his arrival in Toronto, using the same mass marketing techniques of “The Israel Project”, launched in 2002 in the US, to present a more “benign” vision of Israel to the Canadian public. The Israel Project uses “grassroots” encounter groups to hone their propaganda efforts. Canadian partners in the Project’s Canadian spin-off included Sidney Greenberg of Astral Mediaand David Asper of Canwest Global Communications, arguably the most powerful media magnates in Canada, who are funding a million dollar media and advertising campaign aimed at changing Canadian perceptions of Israel.

“Brand Israel” is intended to take the focus off Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and refocus it on achievements in medicine, science and culture. In The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, Frank Luntz explains: “Americans want a team to cheer for. Let the public know GOOD things about Israel … The language of Israel is the language of America: ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, ’security’, and ‘peace’”. Fleshing out how to rebrand Israeli atrocities, Gissin made it clear that his mission was to “make Israel relevant” to Canadians and use Toronto as a test market for the Israel brand during his term. The lessons learned from Toronto would inform the worldwide launch of Brand Israel in the coming years, Gissin said. Official Brand Israel logos and advertising can be found across Toronto in bus shelters, on billboards, on radio and TV. Gissin said the ad blitz would be “an attack on all the senses.” The idea was to see “how to introduce a brand into Toronto” with emphasis on “grassroots” exposure, to promote Tel Aviv as a city of peace, untouched by the wars Israel has waged since 1948, despite the fact that many Palestinian communities were destroyed and Jaffa annexed to make way for the emergence of modern-day Tel Aviv.

But all is not well in the Land of Nod. The Canadian government regularly opines it is assiduously monitoring anti-Semitism despite the absence of anti-Jewish sentiment and despite the pro- Jewish nature of the media in this most laid-back, multicultural of nations. But Canadian “grassroots” are not limited to pro-Israeli marketing groups. Despite mainstream media subservience to Canada’s vigorous and large pro-Israeli lobby, some people have had enough. Zionist propaganda efforts in this “so friendly” country have increasingly met with resistance, and all the Israeli consuls in the world cannot undo the damage that Israeli war crimes have done and continue to do, as the siege in Gaza and the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements continue.

There are now strong citizen groups fighting Canada’s official support of every Israeli government whim. There are many Jewish anti-Zionist groups, such as Jews for a Just Peace, Jewish Voices for Peace, Not in Our Name, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices, and the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAZ). Nonspecific Jewish groups include Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME), Palestine House, Canada Palestine Association, and the above-mentioned CAIA, which has grown rapidly with centres in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Anti-Zionist activists have been holding vigils regularly at the Toronto Israeli Consulate for eight years now. They are organising the sixth Anti-Apartheid Week to be held soon on more than 25 university campuses across the country, and demonstrations and fundraising events on behalf of Palestinians are held regularly. IJAZ has launched a campaign “Divest from Israel: Support the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel”, which includes stickering Israeli products in stores, requesting stores to de-shelve Israeli products, targetting businesses, organisations or government officials that support Israel, “organise a public tachlit service, a ritual that symbolises the casting away of our misdeeds, to spiritually divest from Zionist narratives and mythology and to atone for the ways that we have fallen short in countering them.”

Allen’s support for Canada Park, implicitly condoning Israel’s ruthless ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, has landed him in hot water. He had to deny any personal contribution to Canada Park, an External Affairs spokesperson insisting that he had not made a personal donation and that his name had been included as a benefactor when his parents gave their contribution. Uri Davis, an Israeli scholar and human rights activist who has co-authored a book on the JNF calls Canada Park “a crime against humanity that has been financed by and implicates not only the Canadian government but every taxpayer in Canada.” Canada Park is particularly sensitive for Israel because it lies outside the country’s internationally-recognised borders. The Palestinian inhabitants’ expulsion, Eitan Bronstein, director of the Israeli NGO Zochrot (Remembering), said, was a premeditated act of ethnic cleansing of villagers who put up no resistance.”We have photographs of the Israeli army carrying out the expulsions,” he tells tourists, holding up a series of laminated cards. According to Zochrot, 86 Palestinian villages lie buried underneath JNF parks. Zochrot activists regularly select a destroyed village, taking Palestinian refugees with them as they place a handmade sign detailing the village’s name in Arabic and Hebrew. Within days, the signs are removed. Bronstein said he believes signs erected by official bodies may have a greater impact in opening Israeli minds. “In a recent newspaper interview, a senior JNF official admitted that it would be hard to stop our campaign,” he said. “Slowly we believe Israelis can be made to appreciate that their state exists at the expense of another people. Only then are Israelis likely to be ready to think about making peace.”

With Zochrot’s efforts in mind, Uri Davis joined in an application to the Canadian tax authorities to overturn the JNF’s charitable status and said attempts to rename Canada Park “Ayalon Park” over the past decade suggested that the Canadian authorities were already concerned about the prospect of the country’s involvement in the park coming under scrutiny. In April, before the ROM exhibition opened, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and executives at the ROM were sent letters of protest from senior officials of the Palestinian Authority, including PA President Mahmoud Abbas, declaring that the scrolls were in fact illegally seized by Israel following its occupation and annexation of the West Bank in 1967 and calling for their repatriation. The ROM exhibition inspired a campaign of protest led by the CJPME trying to get ROM officials to adjust the display of the artifacts to reflect the fact that the Scrolls were confiscated from East Jerusalem during Israel’s 1967 invasion and occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, to use “West Bank (Israeli-occupied)” and East and West Jerusalem with 1948 Armistice borders on maps. CJPME’s Thomas Woodley said, “We would like there to be a balanced narrative. The ROM is presenting the scrolls entirely from the Israeli perspective. There’s no discussion about what happened between their discovery and their exhibition today.”

ROM met with CJPME members and initially agreed to make changes and even distribute an additional leaflet to be inserted into the museum’s brochure. Friday pickets were held throughout the summer to inform the public about the theft of the Dead Sea Scrolls. However, a visit by Al-Ahram Weekly to the exhibition revealed that no such changes were made, and the history of their discovery in Jordan and seizure in 1967 was finessed. ROM’s PR spokesperson Marilynn Friedman declined to answer questions about why ROM reneged on promises to accommodate CJPME’s concerns.Woodley said ROM director Thorsell was receptive, and assumes that the IAA vetoed any changes that would detract from the Zionist narrative. Tens of thousands of innocent schoolchildren are being respectfully shepherded through subterranean, darkened halls, and left with the impression that the ancient “Israelis” inhabited the kingdom of “Judea”, that their “descendants” heroically prevented the “pillaging of the Scrolls by Bedouin” and are the rightful owners. The mythical kingdoms of 10th-3rd century BC Palestine — for which there is no conclusive evidence — are carefully delineated and explained in commentaries as if they are actual history. A dazzling success story for the most part for Gissin’s “Brand Israel”.

The dust-up, however, continues to provide a platform for activists to educate Canadians and empowers demonstrators at the nearby Israeli consulate. It has provided a 6-month platform for re-rebranding Israel as the centre of 21st-century apartheid. And no amount of slick PR can undo the fact that merely by continuing to exist, despite all odds, Palestinians endure as testimony to the injustice of “The Israel Project” in all its manifestations. Palestinians only have survival itself as proof of the crimes committed against them, choosing to maintain traditional dress, religious faith (both Christian and Islamic), and the historical memory of the Nakba as their most meaningful and durable expressions of resistance. Though former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir notoriously declared that “there is no such thing as Palestinians,” Palestinian academic Edward Said more accurately explained that, “In the case of a political identity that’s being threatened, culture is a way of fighting against extinction and obliteration.” The battle being waged over the Scrolls is not so much about any particular ethnic, religious, or even cultural-based claim, but more importantly a means of opposing Zionist colonial discourse.

Finally, TIFF’s cozying up to the Israeli propaganda machine blew up into a global scandal, as a spontaneous movement of protest among a few filmmakers turned into an international incident, bringing 1,500 signatures from prominent Israeli public figures and the likes of Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, Alice Walker, Naomi Klein, Guy Maddin, Walter Bernstein, and Harry Belafonte to the now historic “Toronto Declaration”. Leading Canadian filmmaker John Greyson, the catalyst for the declaration, refused to screen his latest film Covered in protest. Egyptian director Ahmad Abdalla withdrew his feature film debut Heliopolis, as did Ahmed Maher (The Traveller). The protesters were denounced in the mainstream media, called “opportunists, hypocrites, fascists, censors, storm- troopers, apartheid-supporters, intolerant totalitarians, a mob of homophobic anti-Semitic terrorist regime supporters” acting “effectively [as] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s local fifth column” by Canadian film producer Robert Lantos. Yet the protest overshadowed the festival itself and was a godsend for educating the wider public, which could not help but hear about the unprecedented protest, despite mainstream media indifference or hostility. Greyson condemned the opportunism of TIFF for its complicity with the Israeli consulate’s “Brand Israel” campaign. “I’m reminded of last year, when the opening night party for Passchendaele featured real soldiers posing on a Canadian Armed Forces tank. Many of us were disturbed by this uncritical collaboration with the Canadian army, currently fighting in Afghanistan. So I have to ask: who is politicising TIFF? Why hasn’t TIFF explicitly explained and repudiated the perceived Brand Israel connection, beyond vague disavowals? What’s the extent of Israeli sponsorship, beyond airfare, receptions, and the Mayor’s presence? Why an exclusive programme of Israeli state-sponsored features, when shorts could have provided critical alternative voices?”

Opponents of Greyson wrote to York University, demanding that he be investigated, fired, even deported. In a delightful irony, the popular 2nd Toronto Palestinian Film Festival opened just a few weeks after TIFF closed. “It feels like the days of the first anti-apartheid struggle back in the 1970s,” enthused one activist. BDS is already a buzzword among politically-aware Canadians. Of course, there was much momentum back then from the successful anti-Vietnam War movement, the Zionist control of mainstream was less stifling, and there was much stronger political awareness in those Cold War years. But the anti-apartheid movement eventually brought everyone on board, even the notorious Margaret Thatcher, who seeing the writing on the wall, joined in. This anti-apartheid struggle phase two is picking up steam, even among Israel’s best friends. In presenting the Toronto Declaration, Greyson explained that he had just returned from South Africa, where he visited the Hector Pieterson Museum, dedicated to the memory of the 1976 Soweto massacre, where over 500 school children and anti-apartheid activists were killed by security forces. Among other things, the museum documents how this event became a turning point for the world, “a line in the sand, a moment when we ostriches finally woke up and expressed our outrage against South Africa’s apartheid regime. During my visit to the museum, the 2008 words of former Israeli Education Minister Shulamit Aloni echoed in my head: ‘Israel practices a brutal form of apartheid in the territory it occupies. Its army has turned every Palestinian village and town into a fenced-in, or blocked-in, detention camp.’” Greyson was overwhelmed by the outpouring of protest at TIFF and predicted that “Gaza represents a similar turning point to Soweto, a similar line in the sand. A moment when it’s imperative to speak out against the outrages of the Occupation.”

It’s getting to the point that it’s hard to tell who is the biggest opponent of Obama’s plans to bring peace to AfPak: the Taliban, the Pakistani government, or the Nobel committee. Oh yes, or virtually the entire world beyond the Washington beltway.

As the world marked the eighth anniversary of the US invasion of Afghanistan on 7 October, the Taliban were stronger than ever – their forces have increased nearly fourfold since 2006. “We fought against the British invaders for 80 years,” Mullah Mohammad Omar reminded the world on the Taliban’s website. “If you want to colonise the country of proud and pious Afghans under the baseless pretext of a war on terror, then you should know that our patience will only increase and that we are ready for a long war.” A statement from the leadership insists, “We had and have no plan of harming countries of the world, including those in Europe. Our goal is the independence of the country and the building of an Islamic state.” They call for the immediate withdrawal of foreign troops as the only solution.

So far, there is no hint that Obama is even considering this no-brainer. On the contrary, the war is now being fought on two fronts, with the US and Britain starting an extensive training programme for Pakistan ’s Frontier Corps (FC) in Baluchistan, the new battleground.

It is part of the Obama administration’s massive military aid package to AfPak – Pakistan will get $2.8 billion over the next five years in addition to $7.5 billion in civilian aid, but only if it satisfies US benchmarks by making progress in “anti-terrorism and border control”. The Pakistani government and army are furious, not to mention the 60 per cent of Pakistanis who see the US as the greatest threat to Pakistan – with good cause. In the past few months, US forces have stepped up their aerial bombardments of villages in the northern tribal areas. According to the Pakistani press, of the 60 cross-border US drone strikes between January 2006 and April 2009, only 10 were able to hit their targets, killing 14 Al-Qaeda leaders and 687 civilians. Even official US policy (to kill no more than 29 civilians for every “high-value” person) is being violated. At least 23 Al-Qaeda leaders should have been killed, nine more than the actual 14. This assassination campaign is a more ruthless version of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, and can only spur the Taliban and Al-Qaeda’s recruitment efforts.

True, Taliban control of the Pakistan frontier province SWAT was brought to a brutal end during the past six months by the Pakistani army, though civilian corpses continue to be dumped, with accusations of revenge and official terror labelled at the army. And the almost complete lack of reconstruction aid by the Pakistan government – with winter approaching – means the Taliban will probably regain SWAT. Local opposition to the war against both Afghanistan and Pakistan’s frontier region, especially Baluchistan, continues to grow, with the long-simmering Baluchi campaign for independence gaining new life daily.

Obama’s war plans have reached a critical stage. In an arrogant gamble, much like General MacArthur’s challenge to president Harry Truman in 1951 over the Korean war, General Stanley McChrystal recently demanded publicly that Obama provide 60,000 more troops for Afghanistan, boldly stating the war would be lost without them. Faced with a similarly outspoken MacArthur, Truman just as publicly fired him.

McChrystal is said to have offered the Commander in Chief several alternatives “including a maximum injection of 60,000 extra troops”, 40,000 and a small increase. Common in military planning is to discuss three different scenarios in order to illustrate why the middle option is preferable, though this is usually done privately. But the Obama administration faces growing hurdles within his Democratic Party if he decides to go with even the middle option.

Obama’s review of AfPak is now centring on preventing Al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan – a narrower objective that could require fewer, if any, new American troops. Obama-Biden no longer see the primary mission in Afghanistan as completely defeating the Taliban or preventing its involvement in the country’s future, a policy strongly opposed by Defence Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates-Clinton have a point: once the Taliban are acknowledged as legitimate players who are of no strategic danger to the US, then the horror of the past eight years becomes excruciatingly clear. The defeat of the whole criminal project becomes inevitable and will be just as devastating for the US as the Soviet defeat was for the USSR.

But the Gates-McChrystal super-surge is just about impossible in any case. The Institute for the Study of War reported recently that the US military has only limited troops ready for deployment, meaning that forces might not reach the warzone until the summer of 2010. There are only three Army and Marine brigades – 11,000-15,000 troops – capable of deploying to Afghanistan this year. Troops are plagued by a severe lack of helicopters and all-terrain vehicles.

Whatever Obama decides – 60,000, 40,000 or 2 – the troops will have little time after they arrive to turn things around. Even super-loyal Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper just reaffirmed that Canadian troops will under no circumstances stay in Afghanistan after 2011. Any plans for the indefinite occupation of Afghanistan as touted by some NATO and US officials are fantasy; Canada’s retreat will be part of a flood. Canadian government support for the war, like that of its bigger brothers the US and Britain, has all along been motivated by Afghanistan’s untapped resource potential. The TAPI gas pipeline – so named for its 1680 kilometre path from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and eventually India – is slated to be constructed starting next year on the very soil that Canadian and US troops now occupy in southern Afghanistan.

Harper’s best-case scenario is for the pipeline to go ahead with Canadian participation and for a miracle to occur – the Taliban’s sudden and unexpected defeat, allowing Canadian troops to come home, the pipeline and other resource deals signed, and assuring him of a Conservative majority in the next election.“ Canada has the potential to beat rivals because it has such an uncheckered history in that part of the world,” argues Rob Sobhani, president of Caspian Energy Consulting. “People like Canadians, Canadians are apolitical.” Even if the miracle doesn’t happen and the pipeline deal collapses, Harper realises his political goose is cooked unless the troops come home, so he is forced to wash his bloody hands of this betrayal of Canada’s traditional international role of peacekeeper.

Obama needn’t rely on the Taliban as advisers on how to end the war. Deputy-general of the China Council for National Security Policy Studies Li Qinggong reflected official Chinese thinking on 28 September in Xinhua: The United States should first put an end to “the anti-terror war” and “end its military action. The war has neither brought the Islamic nation peace and security as the Bush administration originally promised, nor brought any tangible benefits to the US itself. On the contrary, the legitimacy of the US military action has been under increasing doubt.” Obama should take advantage of international opinion to withdraw troops immediately. This is no doubt also the hope of the Nobel committee that put its own credibility on the line by awarding him the Peace Prize. The UN Security Council permanent members should “draft a roadmap and timetable”, including deployment of an international peacekeeping mission.

The delicious irony of the US invasion and occupation of Afghanistan (and Iraq) is that it is China, the US ’s real international rival, that has benefited most. Chinese investments (and workers) have been pouring in to both US warzones. The main effect of George W Bush’s two wars and Obama’s AfPak has been to promote Chinese business interests, leaving the US bankrupt and its army in tatters.

There have been rare glimmers of protest — the German and French refusal to back the invasion of Iraq, and the grassroots Czech campaign against the Star Wars base. Germany’s Die Linke is the only party to call for immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and has surged past the Greens to 14 per cent, but it will be kept out of any future government. Messy coalition politics (in the worst case, the safe “grand coalition”) allows the US to bully weak little countries into keeping “defense” policy bi-tri-partisan. “Kick the bums” out, as happened last in Poland in 2007, did not mean an end to the unpopular missile base plans there, nor an end to Polish troops in Afghanistan, though 81 per cent want the troops home now.

Only the nasty Soviets dared stand up to the US, forcing it at the height of detente — the nadir of US empire — to sign the ABM treat in 1972. 9/11 provided an all-too convenient excuse to tear that treaty up. The remnants of the Soviet Union, the “authoritarian” Russians (read: still the bad guys) managed to sort-of stand up to the bully, threatening to put nuclear missiles in Kaliningrad and offering him carte blanche in Afghanistan in exchange for keep Star Wars out of Russia’s backyard. The desperate need by the US for Russian cooperation in fueling the slaughter in Afghanistan may have actually slowed the juggernaut, with rumours that the Poles and the Czechs will just have to do without.

But not to worry. Already, others are offering to fill the breach, notably, Turkey, Israel and the latest darlings, Kosovo and Georgia. And who needs glaringly permanent bases anyway? Mobile missile launchers can do the trick. Boeing announce it “is eying a 47,500-pound interceptor that could be flown to NATO bases as needed, erected quickly on a 60-foot trailer stand.” The fixed-site ground-based interceptor deployment planned for Poland was politically risky and the mobile interceptor could “blunt Russian fears of possible US fixed missile-defense sites in Europe.” Yes, substituting a mobile missile launcher “globally deployable within 24 hours” instead of missiles permanently stationed at a location known to Russia will no doubt reassure them.

This new fad of mobility is part of the latest US military strategy for global domination, and an acquiescent Europe is the centerpiece. The Obama administration has requested $600 million in funding for the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), a joint US-German-Italian-NATO interceptor missile “blanket”. Whether or not the Czech and Polish bases go ahead, the German and Italian people will no doubt be forced to drink their cup of MEADS. After all it will provide a nifty transportable system allowing the deadly missiles “to accompany expeditionary ground forces to wherever they are deployed.”

In any case, the US will soon have its Prompt Global Strike system to “provide the US with the capability to strike virtually anywhere on the face of the earth within 60 minutes” and the hypersonic Falcon missile-launched vehicle that could hit targets anywhere on earth within 35 minutes. This gives America the “forward presence it requires around the world without the need for bases outside the US” whatsoever. Even if the US alienates every last country, it can still destroy the world in 35 minutes. That’s a relief.

In case you still think all this has something to do with North Korea or Iran, vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General James Cartwright in a moment of rare candor boasted: the US has the “capability to take on 15 inbound intercontinental ballistic missiles simultaneously using 30 GBIs [ground-based interceptors]. That’s a heck of a lot more than a rogue nation could fire.”

This dance of death, whether populated by wallflower or mobile missiles, is not new. It was going on even as the dust was settling after WWII.. One of the chief purposes of the founding of NATO in 1949 — before the Soviet Union had the atomic bomb — was to allow the US to station its nuclear weapons in Europe. Although Washington’s arsenal of nuclear warheads in Europe was reduced after the end of the Cold War, hundreds of American nuclear weapons remain on the continent. Is it any wonder Russia, having long ago taken all its nuclear toys home, balked at letting the US station its Star Wars bases, an integral part of its first strike world nuclear “umbrella”, next door in Poland and the Czech Republic? Now we’re back to square one. Imagine we are living in 1946, “fresh” from Hiroshima, with the US Star Wars system deployed not just in Europe but around the world as integral to a US first-strike nuclear weapons strategy. Where is the Euro voice of reason?

But this complicity is not limited to bombs. The bombs are now launched by computers and require secure information delivery systems. To ensure no nation loses its sense of security due to cyber attacks, incapacitating its now electronically controlled military hardware, China and Russia have called for a treaty, along the lines of the successful chemical weapons treaty, to stop the current cyber arms race. Russia’s proposed treaty would ban a country from secretly embedding malicious codes or circuitry that could later be activated from afar in the event of war, ban attacks on noncombatants and the use of deception (anonymous attacks), and require broader international oversight of the Internet.

The US argues that a treaty is unnecessary. It instead advocates improved “cooperation” among international law enforcement groups. The peaceful Europeans to the rescue. US State Department officials hold out as a model the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime, which took effect in 2004 and has been signed by 22 nations, including the US but not Russia or China. Russia objects that the European convention on cybercrime allows the police to open an investigation of suspected online crime originating in another country without first informing local authorities, infringing on national sovereignty.

US “logic” is to second guess your “enemy” and outdo him technologically. Oh, and call for “cooperation”, that is, get everyone you can to provide information for you. That’s fine for a subservient Europe, but just doesn’t fly for Russia or China. The US notoriously refuses treaties, or neglects to have them ratified by the Senate, as with the Law of the Sea, Conventions for the Protection of Persons from Enforced Disappearance, Rights of the Child, Cluster Munitions and Mines, to name just the most relevant. Other nations are not to be trusted, and it’s best to develop the lethal stuff yourself first. A treaty merely hampers your efforts to defend yourself. A psychologist might point out that this obsessive distrust is because the patient subconsciously realizes he is untrustworthy and projects his own untrustworthiness onto others.

The US could dictate an end to nuclear weapons and bring peace to the world overnight, but it must reject its imperial NATO strategy in favour of a truly multilateral UN strategy. Must the world wait for the US empire to burn itself out, like a star, expanding as its energy runs out, before imploding? Europe, the only world actor that can get a sympathetic hearing in the US, has a moral obligation to try to make the bully see reason.

Is there any chance of this? Nikolai Trubetskoi, in Europe and Man (1920), argues that Euro-centrism is really no different than the Prussian nationalism that was behind WWI and would reach its apogee in WWII, the only difference being that European cosmopolitanism cloaks itself in universality in order to draw in converts from non-European civilizations. Having rebuilt itself on the ruins of its imperial past, Europe is the main beneficiary of the current US imperial world order, and would face a fate similar to the US if the latter collapsed. Whether or not a lot of “wogs” are killed in colonial outposts in its defense is neither here nor there. Whatever the US needs to maintain the status quo is agreed to with no worries about morals or ethics. Hence the deafening silence.

What is the result of the Ossetia fiasco? Did Russia “win” or “lose”? Has it put paid to NATO expansion? What lessons did Saakashvili and his Western sponsors learn? Analysts have been sifting through the rubble over the past few weeks.

Some, such as Professor Stephen Blank at the US Army War College, dismiss any claim that Russia was justified in its response, that “even before this war there was no way Georgia was going to get into NATO.” He insists that Russia lost, that its response showed Russian military incompetence and weakness, resulting in huge economic losses, with the EU now seeking alternative energy sources and the US continuing to resist Russian sensitivities in its “near abroad”. Georgetown University Professor Ethan Burger compared the situation to “Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia”, with the US playing the role of plucky Britain facing the fascist hordes. Apparently Burger sees the Monroe Doctrine as a one-way street. Tell that to the Hondurans.

Indeed, the Russian military is a shadow of its former Soviet self, as is Russia itself, having been plundered by its robber barons and their Western friends over the past 20 years. Although the Georgian army fled in disarray, “major deficiencies in operational planning, personnel training, equipment readiness and conducting modern joint combat operations became evident,” though “it proved that it remains a viable fighting force,” writes Vladimir Frolov at russiaprofile.org.

And the West, angry at the de facto Russian “win” in Ossetia, pulled out many stops to undermine the Russian economy afterwards. Beside the $500 million military operation itself, “capital flight” reached $10 billion and currency reserves decreased by $16 billion. Overall, it is estimated that the war cost Russia $27.7 billion.

Other analysts, such as German Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) analyst Alexander Rahr, see the war as a blip in East-West relations. “The West has forgotten the Georgian war quickly. Georgia and Saakashvili are not important enough to start a new Cold War with Russia. The West needs Moscow’s support on many other issues, like Iran. The West is not capable of solving the territorial-ethnical conflicts in the post-Soviet space on its own. The present status quo suits everyone.” He even predicts that if Moscow decides to stay in Sevastopol after 2017, “there will be no conflict over this issue with the West.”

Sergei Roy, editor of the Russian Guardian, notes that the conflict produced “greater clarity or, to use a converse formula, less indeterminacy both in the international relations and domestically.” He recalls that Putin tried to reach Bush on the hotline established for precisely such crises. “There simply was no response from the other side. Dead silence,” a definite sign of that other side’s “direct complicity in Saakashvili’s bloody gamble.” Roy mourns that superpower rivalry is alive and well, though “Russia, has done everything it realistically could (ideologically, politically, militarily, economically, culturally) to embrace and please the West. Everything, that is, except disappearing entirely. But disappear it must.”

Roy is referring to the overarching US/NATO plans to promote instability and disintegration throughout the former Soviet Union (and not only).The strategy is Balkanisation of the Caucasus (Dagestan, Chechnya and other autonomous regions), with the same strategy applicable to Iran, Iraq and China. The principle being, “Don’t fight directly, use secessionist movements within your adversary to weaken him.” Though on the back burner as a result of the Ossetia setback, the US has been perfecting this strategy for decades now, most infamously in Yugoslavia, sometimes by direct bombing and invasion, sometimes by bribery, NGOing and colour revolutions.

While Western media accuses Russia of doing this in Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia are best viewed as stop-gap entities asserting Russian hegemony in a world of US-sponsored pseudo-democracies. A new, more sober Georgian political regime which recognises the situation for what it is and establishes a pragmatic, even cooperative relationship with Russia could probably negotiate some kind of compromise within the Commonwealth of Independent States, though according to leader of the Georgian Labour Party Shalva Natelashvili, “Dozens of Latin American states, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Honduras, Ecuador and others, intend to recognise Abkhazia and so-called South Ossetia. While our poor president is busy preserving his throne, Georgian disintegration continues and deepens.”

The war certainly destroyed any prospects of Georgia’s membership in NATO (which were very real, despite Blank’s denial). However, NATO plans for Georgia and Ukraine stubbornly proceed apace. Ex-deputy assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Matt Bryza brought Saakashvili $1 billion as his parting gift to rebuild tiny Georgia’s military in conformity to NATO specifications. Oh yes, and to train Georgian troops bound for Afghanistan. In other words, to prepare Georgia for incorporation into US world military strategy, whether or not as part of NATO. After all, Colombia isn’t part of NATO and is getting the same red carpet treatment, a conveniently placed ally in the US feud with Venezuela. Perhaps NATO’s Partnership for Peace can do the trick with Georgia.

The new Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Tina Kaidanow, explained her qualifications for US-sponsored Balkanisation in April: “I worked in Serbia, in Belgrade and in Sarajevo, then in Washington, and I went back to Sarajevo and am now in Kosovo.” Andrei Areshev, deputy director of the Strategic Culture Foundation, warned on PanArmenian.net that her new appointment “is an attempt to give a second wind to the politicisation of ethnicity in the North Caucasus with the possibility of repeating the ‘Kosovo scenario’.” The US will simply continue its double standard of recognising Kosovo’s secession while arming Georgia and Azerbaijan to overturn the independence of Abkhazia, Nagorno Karabakh and South Ossetia — none of which “seceded” from anything other than new post-Soviet nations they never belonged to.

All this petty intriguing masks a much more important result of the Russian response to last summer’s provocation. Very simply, Russian resolve prevented a 1914-style descent into world war. This time, quite possibly a nuclear war, especially in light of Russia’s much taunted military weakness in relation to the US. A desperate nation will pull out all the stops when backed to the wall, which is where the US and its proxy NATO have positioned Russia. “Had Russia refrained from engaging its forces in the conflict, the nations of the northern Caucasus would have serious doubts about its ability to protect them. This would in turn lead to an array of separatist movements in the northern Caucasus, which would have the potential to start not only a full-scale Caucasian war, but a new world war,” according to Andrei Areshev.

Plans for carving up Russia by employing Yugoslav-style armed secessionist campaigns were laid out in 1999 when the conservative Freedom House thinktank in the United States founded the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, with members including Zbigniew Brzezinski and neocons Robert Kagan and William Kristol, according to Rick Rozkoff at globalresearch.ca. This frightening group has now morphed into the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus “dedicated to monitoring the security and human rights situation in the North Caucasus.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently confirmed that plans around last August’s war were on a far larger scale than merely retaking South Ossetia and later Abkhazia, that Azerbaijan was simultaneously planning for a war against Armenia, a member of the Russian-sponsored Collective Security Treaty Organisation. NATO-member Turkey could well have intervened at that point on behalf of Azerbaijan, and a regional war could have ensued, involving Ukraine (it threatened to block the Russian Black Sea fleet last summer) and even Iran. Ukraine has long had its eyes on pro-Russian Transdniester. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this tangled web could come unstuck in some Strangelovian scenario.

Just as the origins of WWI are complex, but clearly the result of the imperial powers jockeying for power, the fiasco in Georgia can be laid squarely at the feet of the world’s remaining imperial superpower. The mystery here is the extent of Russian forbearance, the lengths that Russia seems willing to go to accommodate the US bear. Over the past decade, Russia watched while the US and NATO attacked Yugoslavia, invaded Afghanistan, set up military bases throughout Central Asia, invaded Iraq, assisted regime collapse/change in Yugoslavia, Georgia, Adjaria, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, and schemed to push Russia out of the European energy market. The question is not why Russia took military action but why it hasn’t acted more decisively earlier.

And, now, why it has given the US and NATO carte blanche in Afghanistan. The US continues to strut about on the world stage and, with its Euro-lackeys, to directly threaten Russia with war and civil war, taking time out to sabotage its economy when it pleases. Its plans for Afghanistan as a key link in its world energy supplies (which could, of all goes well, exclude Russia) are well known. The Russians are also not unaware of evidence of US complicity in the production and distribution of Afghanistan’s opium, even as the US piously claims to be fighting this scourge. Sergei Mikheev, a vice-president of the Centre for Political Technologies, said, “NATO’s operation in Afghanistan is dictated by the aspiration of the US and its allies to consolidate their hold on this strategically and economically important region,” which includes Central Asia. He criticised Russian compliance with US demands for troop and materiel transport. According to Andrei Areshev, “Russia’s position on this issue has not been formulated clearly.”

More ominous yet, writes Sergei Borisov in Russia Today, the operation in Afghanistan is “a key element of the realisation of the project of transforming the alliance into an alternative to the UN.” While the original invasion of Afghanistan was rubber-stamped by the UN, it was carried out by the US and NATO, and the UN has been merely a passive bystander ever since. NATO is being transformed from a regional organisation into a global one: “If the norms of international laws are violated, then with time the Afghan model may be applied to any other state.”

Perhaps it’s a case of “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” While a direct attack like that of last August simply had to be met head-on, Russia has to be careful not to unduly provoke the US, which can unleash powerful forces against Russia on many fronts — economic, geopolitical, military, cultural — picking up where it left off in 1991 with the destruction of the Soviet Union. Russians are not cowards, but realists, and appear to be pursuing a holding action, hoping to wait out the US, counting on its chickens coming home to roost. Meanwhile, as Roy urges, Russia can use the current breathing space it have gained from pushing back the NATO challenge to “lick its armed forces into shape” and prepare for the next unpleasant surprise.

This triumph of “democracy” has “made in USA” written all over it. In 200, Moscow laid out two alternate pipelines, bypassing Ukraine and Poland — the North Stream under the Baltic Sea into Germany, and the South Stream under the Black Sea into Bulgaria and on to Europe. The government in Sofia, though a member of the EU and NATO, nonetheless signed energy agreements with Moscow in 2008. This and the gas crisis between Ukraine and Russia in January 2009 made regime change in Bulgaria essential, and the services of the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy — they helped overthrow the Bulgarian government in 1990 — were clearly made excellent use of. Just a week after elections marred by vote buying (despite or due to the NED?), Bulgaria’s new PM cancelled the Russian deal.

Borisov went to Ankara a week later to sign on to the EU Nabucco pipeline. Democrat Richard Morningstar, US special envoy for Eurasian energy, and Republican Senator Richard Lugar (note the bipartisanship) joined him in Ankara on 13 July for the signing ceremony. If all goes according to plan, the Nabucco project will upstage South Stream, bringing gas from the Caspian region and Middle East to Central and Western European markets, with possible suppliers Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Iran and Iraq.

Senator Lugar said — with a straight face — the Nabucco agreement signed in Turkey “is a signal to the rest of the world that partner governments will not acquiesce to manipulation of energy supplies for political ends. It also has the potential to build new avenues for peaceful cooperation.” Obama served up more such tripe during his “Moscow speech” on 7 July: “In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonising other countries. The days when empires could treat sovereign states as pieces on a chess board are over.”

However, Azerbaijan may have problems providing enough gas to make Nabucco feasible, as it initialed a deal in June with Russia’s Gazprom for gas from the Shah Deniz field — the same field Nabucco needs for its pipeline. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is caught in this competition between Russia and the West, with a bottom line — who will pay the highest price? Even if Nabucco strikes a deal to buy Azeri gas at the price already agreed with Gazprom, according to F William Engdahl, there just ain’t enough to go around. And there are problems with all the other potential suppliers as well.

Senator Lugar told the Senate — again, with a straight face: “Ideally, in the way of the world, the natural gas — and maybe in due course oil supplies — coming out of a united Iraq might provide this kind of capital, which would be a miraculous happening and a wonderful ending to a very tragic period in their history.” If, of course, Iraq acquiesces to its US-client status. Even so, Iraqi gas to Turkey would pass through Kurdish areas, a hotbed of separatism against both Turkey and the current Iraqi government. The other main source of gas would be Iran.

For all the Obama hype, his advisers are really playing the same geopolitical game as Cheney and Bush. It is a clash of “civilisation”, with the US the so-called civiliser and everyone else the to-be-civilised. But Iran and Russia are not as easy to “dominate or demonise”, to borrow a bit of Obama-speak, as certain other countries. It will take an invasion of Iran to change Washington’s dynamic with that country. And all the hot air coming from Washington will not dissipate the Russian cloud of suspicion caused by the missile bases and NATO’s vow to swallow Ukraine and Georgia.

The degree of “civilisation” in the latter two countries is far from clear at present. The Georgian opposition continues to call for Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili’s resignation in the wake of his disastrous war against Russia last summer. Counting on Georgia in its present mess as a key link in the Nabucco pipeline project is quite a gamble.

In Ukraine opinion polls reveal something quite remarkable. “If we were to fantasise, and pretend that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would run for the post of Ukrainian president, then according to opinion poll results he would win right off,” says Alexei Lyashenko, an analyst at Kiev’s Research & Branding (R&B) polling institute. “His only serious competitor would be Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.” This is not new according to Lyashenko. Putin’s rating was over 50 per cent even during the 2004 “Orange Revolution”. Opinion poll results published in May indicate that 58 per cent of Ukrainians have a positive attitude toward Putin, and 56 per cent approve of Medvedev. The pro-Russian head of the opposition Party of Regions Viktor Yanukovych currently enjoys a 30 per cent approval rating, and Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko 15 per cent. A shade more than five per cent of Ukrainians would vote for the anti-Russian President Viktor Yushchenko in the upcoming elections in January of 2010. According to Kiev International Institute of Sociology (KIIS) President Valeri Khmelko, “The main reason why Medvedev and Putin score so high is the endless conflicts and score-settling in Ukrainian politics, which make the Russian politicians look good.” “The Ukrainian preference for Russian state-controlled television and the desire for strong leadership in the times of crisis also play a role,” said R&B’s Lyashenko.

A KIIS poll found that 25 per cent want full unification with Russia, and 68 per cent want an EU-style border-free regime with Russia, with Russia and Ukraine being “independent but friendly states” without a visa regime or custom controls. Polls consistently show more than half of Ukrainians are opposed to joining NATO, for which a referendum must be held in any case. “Over 90 per cent of people in Ukraine have a positive attitude toward Russia, and it has become even better over the past year,” KIIS President Valeri Khmelko noted. Nor do Ukrainians have much sympathy for Yushchenko’s friend Saakashvili. According to Lyashenko, 45 per cent have a negative opinion of Saakashvili, and only 11 percent have a positive one.

Washington is still officially supporting NATO membership for both Ukraine and Georgia, as Vice President Joe Biden travels to Georgia and Ukraine this week. “Our efforts to reset relations with Russia will not come at the expense of any other countries,” Biden’s national security adviser, Tony Blinken, said. “Our hope is these leaders will live up to the promise of the revolution and make the hard choices to work together,” Blinken said, referring to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. He said the Obama administration — like the Ukrainian people, we might add — was concerned about the “political paralysis” in Kiev. Concerning NATO, he said it was up to Ukraine and Georgia to decide whether they wanted to join the alliance. Given US reliance on Russia for transit of its troops and arms to Afghanistan, Blinken’s less than ringing rhetoric — and Obama’s virtual silence — suggests that this will not happen any time soon.

Yes, it’s clear now that Obama must have winked at Putin at the Moscow summit when the subject of Ukraine, Georgia and NATO came up. That was the only way he could get his troops through Russia to the killing fields in Afghanistan. But the Nabucco pipeline success surely irks Russia, as do continued NATO “exercises” in the Black Sea and the close ties between NATO and all the Black Sea countries — except Russia. And Poland has boldly announced its first missiles are expected this year.

Faced with these games, Moscow will have to be sure not to “blink” first, avoiding any diplomatic faux pas which could provide fuel for Washington hawks. In any case, Obama’s senior Russian adviser Michael McFaul’s derisive “We don’t need the Russians” prior to Obama’s Russian summit is simply not true. Washington’s Bulgarian-Ukrainian-Caucasus intrigues could easily unravel — in the twinkling of an eye.

Last week’s riots in Urumqi, resulting in 180 deaths, recall similar protests in Tibet last year, though only 19 people were killed there. Both Uighur and Tibetan exiles demonstrated during the Chinese Olympics, to little effect. Both regions, remote from the heart of Han China, were taken over under the communists, and are important strategically and as storehouses of mineral wealth to feed the new capitalist China’s voracious appetite. They remind us that old-fashion colonialism is alive and well. Neither the Uighurs nor the Tibetans have any hope of independence, but they rightly would like the Han to be less greedy and invasive.

Like Tibet, it is the flood of Han immigrants and the wholesale destruction of the local culture that is the problem. The massive recent influx of Han Chinese, who now make up more than 50 per cent of the population (70 per cent in the major cities Urumqi and Kashgar), has reduced Uighurs to a minority in their homeland, ominously called “Xinjiang” (New Frontier) in Chinese. The use of “Eastern Turkistan”, the traditional name for this region, is outlawed, along with the blue star-crescent Uighur flag. Ethnic Han Chinese dominate nearly all big businesses in the region. All Uighurs must study Chinese, and very few Uighurs can dream of going to university.

Like the Kurds, they have no official state, only a hollow autonomous region, along with large diaspora communities in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and the West. They number 8-10 million worldwide. There are Uighur neighbourhoods in Beijing and Shanghai. Their history is the story of an obscure nomadic tribe from the Altai Mountains rising to challenge the Chinese empire, founding their own in the 8th century, which stretched from the Caspian Sea to Manchuria. Because of their strategic location on the Silk Road, they thrived on trade. They came under Han sovereignty only in the 17th century, but after numerous revolts expelled Qing officials in 1864 and founded an independent Kashgaria kingdom, recognised by the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Great Britain, which even had a mission in the capital, Kashgar. As usual British support depended on its imperial schemes and when the Chinese attacked in 1876, fearing Tsarist expansion, Great Britain supported the Manchu invasion forces. The Brits (excuse me, the Manchus) “won” and East Turkestan became Xinjiang.

The Soviets established the Revolutionary Uighur Union in 1921, but dissolved the organisation in 1926 when Stalin abandoned dreams of world revolution. Undeterred, Uighur independence activists staged several uprisings, briefly in 1933 and then in 1944. In 1949, East Turkestan’s revolutionaries agreed to form a confederacy within Mao’s People’s Republic of China; however, on the way to Beijing to negotiate the terms, the Chinese plane crash, killing all the leaders. The Chinese army immediately invaded what is now Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. As with the Tibetans a decade later, East Turkestan Republic loyalists went into exile.

Uprisings occurred through the 1990s, supported by exiles in the West and Western governments, who are happy to use disgruntled expatriates from countries such as Iraq, Iran, China and Russia as geopolitical pawns, promoting unrest and calling for independence. The World Uighur Congress (WUC), based in Munich, and the Uighur American Association work hand-in-glove with the US government-funded National Endowment for Democracy.

The Uighurs and Tibetans have old and unique cultures which the Chinese would do well to respect and nurture within greater China. But supporting the independence struggle is part of a cynical geopolitical chess game, and merely worsens the Uighurs’ plight. We are reminded of Britain’s scheming there in the 19th century. If Britain had stood by the Uighurs then, there would probably be an Uighuristan today.

Instead, the destruction of Urumqi and the Old City in Kashgar continue. The latter will soon be a theme park where Uighurs will dress up and sell Han tourists plastic souvenirs. Classic colonialism.

However, Chinese colonialism — Veni, vidi, vici — pales in comparison to the US/ British variant in nearby Afghanistan — We came, destroy, and murder in the name of freedom. It is galling for Western media to take such delight in exposing China’s dirty linen, as it slavishly hails US neo-imperial ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Uighurs riot, US drones massacre hundreds of innocent Afghans and Pakistanis, and Obama sends thousands more troops to Afghanistan in a mission that makes China’s arrogant encroachment on Eastern Turkistan look like an act of selfless generosity.

With huge new bases in Afghanistan and 90,000 troops, the death toll on both sides is skyrocketing as Afghans prepare to “elect” the hated — by both Afghans and Americans — Hamid Karzai on 20 August. The new US strategy is designed to reduce civilian casualties, according to General Stanley McChrystal, the new commander of NATO forces in the country, though “a price worth paying”, he assures us.

But civilian deaths are increasing. 22 Afghans were killed in the central Ghazni province in an air strike last week. And crime knows no borders, as 59 “militants” were killed just last week in neighbouring South Waziristan by US drones, just days after a US missile strike there killed 16. The airstrikes are said to be aimed at militants, but Pakistani media say only one in six have target Taliban insurgents in the country. More than five hundred Pakistanis — most of them civilians — have been killed over the past year in the US drone strikes. In any case, the terms civilian and militant are meaningless, as most so-called militants are local boys fighting the infidel invader, as they have every right to do. It would be more accurate to call them resistance heroes or martyrs. Their deaths are just as criminal as the deaths of little girls and women.

McChrystal’s boys are also dropping like flies with his new strategy. There were 82 Taliban attacks in June, compared with 24 in June 2007, killing 23 troops. On one day — 6 July, seven American troops were killed, the highest casualty rate recorded since the invasion. British fatalities since 2001 reached 184 last week when eight British soldiers were killed in 24 hours, surpassing the new US record. This compares to the 179 British deaths during the six-year military campaign in Iraq.

There are a few voices of sanity, if retired and hence powerless. Drones are described by retired British lawmaker Lord Bingham as “so cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance” and should be outlawed along with cluster bombs and landmines. But current Western “leadership” stands firmly behind the Bush wars. Despite whatever good intentions Obama may harbour, the slaughter is in fact accelerating under him.

What unites China and the US these days, is how they justify their respective crimes by blaming them on Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a bogeyman that was created by the US itself during its earlier anti-communist phase, and who many commentators argue is still an extension of US covert operations. Uighur “terrorists” at Guantanamo were finally released, but China insists they are devotees of this bin Laden and wants them back.

Both the support of secessionists and the creation of the likes of bin Laden are examples of the infiltration of the enemy to subvert it from within — an age-old tactic. And bin Laden is not the only terrorist accused of being in league with the West. The Pakistani Taliban leader Mehsud’s ex-comrade Qari Zainuddin, critical of Mehsud’s policy of blowing up mosques and schools, accused Mehsud of being an American and Mossad agent. “These people are working against Islam,” he said last week, shortly before he was assassinated. Where does Mehsud get his sophisticated arms?

Afghanistan’s unending torment is very useful to the US, bringing Europe and Russia into line, as Obama’s triumphal summit in Moscow revealed. Initially after 2001, all of Central Asia and Russia were in thrall to America’s “Operation Enduring Freedom” though there have been snags. Under Obama, things are back on track. Now even isolationist Turkmenistan has agreed to allow US military to use its airbases. With its new lease to the US of Manas airport, Kyrgyzstan is back on board the US gravy train to Afghanistan.

Is all this part of a new Great Game, this time directed not against Russia, but even using Russia as part of a long-term strategy to contain the rising powerhouse China? The Chinese point the finger for the recent unrest at the WUC, Washington-based Rebiya Kadeer and the spread of rumours over the internet to incite and coordinate riots. President George W Bush lauded Kadeer more than once as an “apostle of freedom”. Whatever its claims to be supporting the cause of freedom etc, the US clearly assists the expatriates to foment unrest and destabilise China. This was and is being openly done in the case of Iraq and Iran. It most certainly will backfire for the poor Uighurs, who can only expect more repression. Any sincere attempt to help preserve Uighur culture and civil rights — in particular the destruction of the Old City of Kashgar — should be carried out through, say, UNESCO, not covertly to incite civil war. The best scenario for an easing of the Uighurs’ plight of course would be if the US operated on a policy of promoting peace and of not threatening and intriguing against other nations. Alas.

Perhaps the Chinese and Russians are tolerating US meddling in Central Asia in line with the age-old strategy of playing off your enemies against each other — in this case, the Americans and the Taliban. This strategy was used by the US in the 1930s, building up both the fascists and communists to fight each other in Europe. Recall Truman’s famous quip: “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible, although I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances.” It can just as well be used against the Americans today.

So Russia’s agreement, announced at Obama’s summit in Moscow 6-8 July, to ferry primarily US troops and arms through Russian land and air space to Afghanistan to accelerate the slaughter there – without any reciprocation on other outstanding issues – comes as a bit of a surprise. Obama faces a reservoir of resentment among Russians who believe that the US has rarely followed through on its occasional peace gestures. “At this point, there is a little bit of hope and a lot of distrust,” said talk show host Vladimir Pozner on Channel One.

If the object is to stem the flood of opium, there is lots of evidence that the current Afghan government and the US occupiers themselves actually benefit from this lucrative business, and that the only conceivable endgame which the US can salvage there – a secular military dictatorship propped up by the US – will never deal with this albeit serious problem for Russia. True, Russia also fears the catalysing effect of a Taliban victory on its Muslim Central Asian neighbours. It apparently wants any kind of secular government in Afghanistan, come hell or high water.

But the humiliation of so directly supporting the US military campaign in Afghanistan after the earlier US-sponsored campaign there which destroyed the Soviet Union and led to the deaths of 15,000 Soviet soldiers is surely not lost on the Kremlin. And to drop this plum in Washington’s lap as it continues to insist that Ukraine and Georgia will soon join NATO and that Poland will have its missiles looks too good to be true from the US perspective. Maybe the Kremlin is deriving some satisfaction from abetting the US in what it sees as a losing battle in Afghanistan, letting the Taliban give US troops some of the medicine inflicted on Soviet troops in yesteryear?

In addition to his meetings with President Dmitri Medvedev, Obama met Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, though he publicly scolded him prior to the summit. “It’s important that even as we move forward with President Medvedev, Putin understands that the old Cold War approach to US-Russian relations is outdated … I think Putin has one foot in the old ways of doing business and one foot in the new, and to the extent that we can provide him and the Russian people a clear sense that the US is not seeking an antagonistic relationship but wants co-operation on nuclear non-proliferation, fighting terrorism, energy issues, that we’ll end up having a stronger partner overall.”

This is diplo-speak for “Take us or leave us.” Special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian affairs on the National Security Council Michael McFaul made the point less nicely when he said, “We don’t need the Russians.” This taunting of Putin was formalised by a US suggestion to establish a Biden-Putin working group to renegotiation the START treaty which expires in December, named after the Gore-Chernomyrdin task force that negotiated the 1991 treaty when Al Gore was VP and Viktor Chernomyrdin was Russian PM. That suggestion was immediately brushed aside. “I am not a vice president,” said Putin coldly.

Obama also visited Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev. None of the three presidents gave any ground on the missile bases, including Gorbachev, who told talk-show host Pozner the missile bases are aimed at creating a situation that makes it possible for NATO to be first to launch a nuclear strike while staying under its own shield. “There is a need for a common European security, which was written at a conference in Paris in 1990.” The USSR was preparing its answer to Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative, Gorbachev said. “I did not agree then and do not agree now with the opinions that it is a bluff and that one should not pay attention to it.”

The Obama camp may not be as united on the missile issue as the Russians are. Obama acknowledged “Russian sensitivities” in a Novaya Gazeta interview but made clear he would not link arms-control talks to missile defence. Grasping at straws, Medvedev said, “The current administration is prepared for discussions. I think we are smart enough to find a reasonable solution here. Really, to get this problem solved, one must not necessarily cross out the decisions made earlier.”

Obama threw him a bone by reiterating his readiness to draw a line between offensive and defensive weapons, something that Bush had refused to do since America withdrew from the 1972 ABM Treaty in 2001. The sides agreed to limit their nuclear arsenals to 1,500-1,675 warheads with the cap on the number of delivery vehicles set as low as 500-1,100 units.

No public mention was made of Georgia and Ukraine actually joining NATO, with Obama stressing, “NATO seeks collaboration with Russia, not confrontation.” But he nonetheless sent (allowed?) Vice President Joseph Biden to fly directly from Moscow to Georgia and Ukraine after the summit. “We’re not going to reassure or give or trade anything with the Russians regarding NATO expansion or missile defense,” warned McFaul.

Here again, the US administration is not united, with Obama having made no firm commitment to further NATO expansion. Just how much say he actually has in such strategic decisions is a moot point.
Obama was hoping to throw the Russians another bone by assuring them admission to the World Trade Organisation. But Putin unexpectedly suspended Moscow’s membership bid in June, deciding to approach the issue jointly through a customs union with Belarus and Kazakhstan, without the need for US “help”.

After years of increasing strain, Moscow clearly did its best to ensure the summit was a success, giving Obama lots of rope. But Obama’s apparent attempt to drive a wedge between Putin and Medvedev will not bear fruit. If the US pushes ahead with its missile bases, it is unlikely that even a cowed Moscow will go along with START II, despite its own desire to rid itself of costly, useless weapons. Maybe McFaul’s crack about not needing the Russians means the US really doesn’t give a damn about START.

The new Russian WTO plan, in light of the recent BRIC and SCO summits in Russia, suggests that the Russian government is more concerned about putting flesh on its project of creating a multipolar world than with confronting the US directly anymore. Perhaps planners are willing to let the US continue its Afghan gambit, gambling that it will merely sap US strength while helping to fill Russian coffers, a kind of poor man’s revenge on Russia’s Cold War enemy. Analyst Fyodor Lukyanov sees the establishing of a customs union with Russian neighbours as part of Russian plans to “transform itself into a centre of integration.”

There has indeed been a significant change in Russia’s relations with the rest of the world in the past few years, but it is not necessarily the one Washington would like. It’s not so much a question of Russia ceding to US hegemony, as Obama’s hawks think, but of acknowledging that Russia is not the powerful player that the Soviet Union was, and that the best Russia can do is help usher in a non-US centric multipolar world, which will include disparate allies from all but the North American continent and act to limit the US empire’s wilder plans.

It’s one of realism on the Kremlin’s part, faced with an array of tinpot “democracies” around it, ready to sell out to what they see as the highest bidder. The most glaring example of this is Kyrgyzstan’s President Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who played Russia and the US off against each other over its Manas airbase, first telling the US to get lost when Russia promised $2.15 billion in aid, and then last month reversing the decision and allowing the US to stay, tripling the rent and extracting other goodies in the process. Even Russophile Lukashenko in Belarus plays the same game with Russia and Europe. And then there’s Uzbekistan’s President Islam Karimov, who said yes and then no an agreement on the Collective Rapid Reaction Forces, not to mention Turkmenistan, Georiga, Armenia, Azerbaijan or Lithuania, and on and on. “A game of chance has developed in the post-Soviet space: Who can swindle the Kremlin in the coolest way?” wrote analyst Aleksandr Golts when news of the Manas decision broke.

Russia cannot compete with NATO, certainly not without strengthening the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), and certainly not with Afghanistan a black hole threatening to suck in its Central Asian neighbours. The CSTO is important less as a counterbalance to NATO than as a viable guarantor of regional security and it’s only a matter of time for Russia’s neighbours to realise this.

It looks like Washington has won this stand-off with Moscow, getting its Afghanistan yellow-brick road and its Polish cake. The market value of allying with flashy but fair-weather Washington outshines the more reliable but less alluring Moscow for the present. But US support is for local elites willing to do its bidding. Local populations will gain nothing, and they are wiser than their leaders, with fond memories of their Russian bulwark. The US may have won the battle. Let the US and NATO play out their lethal games in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. “Progress must be shared,” Obama said in his “Moscow speech” to university students. Let’s see what fruits his policies bear that we can divvy up.

Holding the two meetings together meant that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh attended the SCO for the first time. The SCO, Russian and China ’s Eurasian security organization, has become a key counterweight to US hegemony in the world, and Russia and China are eager to have India upgrade its position of observer to member. This summit appeared to have coaxed India a step closer, as the SCO security agenda has shifted its emphasis to the growing security threat from Afghanistan, which satisfies the more pro-US India.

But the headline-stealer was the BRIC summit. While the US plays its tiresome geopolitical games on Russia ’s eastern borders, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev was busy charting a new economic and political reality in the heart of Eurasia. “The artificially maintained unipolar system,” he lectured, is based on “one big center of consumption, financed by a growing deficit and . . . one formerly strong reserve currency.” At the root of the global financial crisis, he concluded, is that the US makes too little and spends too much. Especially upsetting for Russia is its continued military largesse to Georgia , the missile shield in Eastern Europe and its invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. “The summit must create the conditions for a fairer world order,” he read out, as Presidents Hu Jintao of China, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil and the Indian prime minister looked on approvingly.

China backs Russia’s two big gripes with the US: “The security of some states cannot be ensured at the expense of others, including the expansion of military-political alliances or the creation of global or regional missile defense systems,” the joint Chinese-Russian statement says. Chinese leader Hu Jintao also joined Medvedev in denouncing US plans to militarize outer space: “Russia and China advocate peaceful uses of outer space and oppose the prospect of it being turned into a new area for deploying weapons . . . The sides will actively facilitate practical work on a draft treaty on the prevention of the deployment of weapons in outer space, and of the use of force or threats to use force against space facilities.”

Iranian President Ahmadinejad, fresh from trouncing his pro-Western rival in presidential elections, dotted the “I’s at the SCO meeting, taking a leaf from Venezuela ’s Hugo Chavez: “The international capitalist order is retreating. It is absolutely obvious that the age of empires has ended and its revival will not take place.”

But there was more than colorful rhetoric in all this, despite the pooh-poohing of Western pundits, who deride the SCO and BRIC as a collection of misfits and wannabes. The BRICs have put the US dollar on notice, and are already finding alternatives as a means of clearing accounts. Medvedev called for the IMF to include the Russian ruble and the Chinese yuan in the basket of currencies used to value its financial products. But that is just for starters. Chinese Central Bank governor Zhou Xiaochuan says the goal is now to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations.”

Even more ominous for the threadbare dollar, though perfectly sensible in the computer age, is the revival of stone-age barter on a big scale, which bypasses the need for any reserve currency at all. Brazil ’s biggest trading partner, once the US, is now (surprise) China , and they are using barter deals to settler their accounts, bypassing the dollar altogether. Two weeks ago China reached an agreement with Malaysia to denominate trade between the two countries in yuan.

As dollars are the world’s default reserve currency today, the US government can churn them out at will to paper over its massive foreign debt and budget deficit, effectively letting it steal other countries assets legally and forcing countries everywhere to finance its military spending. China , Russia , Brazil and now India are well aware of this, have had enough, and have the international heft to do something about it. For them, the US is the ultimate rogue nation. How else to characterize a country that insists other countries follow one set of laws — on war, debt repayment and treatment of prisoners — but ignores them itself? The US is now the world’s largest debtor yet has curiously avoided the pain of “structural adjustments” that the IMF imposes on other debtor economies, refusing to cut its bloated military budget or increase taxes meaningfully. “The world economy should not remain entangled, so directly and unnecessarily, in the vicissitudes of a single great world power,” said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil’s minister for strategic affairs.

The US can never “repay” the $4 trillion debt it owes foreign governments, their central banks and the wealth funds set up precisely to dispose of the global dollar glut. “ America has become a deadbeat — and indeed, a militarily aggressive one,” notes Michael Hudson. The problem is how to contain it. Rumblings are coming not only from fringe peaceniks. Yu Yongding, a former Chinese central bank advisor now with China ’s Academy of Sciences, advises US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner that the US should save by cutting back on its military spending. “US tax revenue is not likely to increase in the short term because of low economic growth, inflexible expenditures and the cost of ‘fighting two wars’.”

The BRICs are trying to organize their affairs so that they are no longer the unwilling recipients of dollars. No matter what they think of the US, they hasten to insist they don’t want to see the US dollar collapse, since they hold most of their own reserves in dollars. But they are beginning to withdraw the life-support system the US has been relying on since Nixon completed the transition from a gold-based reserve currency to a purely paper one in 1971.

Just to emphasize how serious the situation is, according to the Financial Times, the top 5 financial institutions by market capitalization in 1999 were, in order, Citigroup (US), Bank of America (US), HSBC (UK), Lloyds TSB (UK), Fannie Mae (US). The top 5 as of 2009 are Industrial & Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, Bank of China, HSBC (UK), and JPMorgan Chase (US). From 0:3 to 3:1 for China, now officially the world’s second largest economy after the US — a rout.

Just as countries are beginning to rediscover age-old barter, fixed, pegged and dual exchange rates are also being considered, mechanisms once derided as passé. In the face of continued US overspending, de-dollarization will force countries to return to nationally determined fixed exchange rates and dual exchange rates — one exchange rate for commodity trade, another for capital movements and investments.

The world is discarding its sixty-year old framework, though the historic meetings in Yekaterinburg elicited only a collective yawn from most media. “Between the BRIC countries, there is really little in common,” said Yevgeni Yasin, head of research at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. “Each of them has its own destiny, its own special character, and it will be much more difficult for them to agree among themselves than separately with Western countries.” China depends on manufactured exports to the US and Europe. Russia sells oil, natural gas and other natural resources. Brazil relies on agricultural exports, while India’s growth has been largely based on its domestic market.

However, Jeng Fengin at the Chinese Institute of Modern-Day International Relations is less blasé: “The financial crisis has given a much-needed boost to the fledgling partnership between Brazil, Russia, India and China and helped our voice to be heard everywhere.” President of the Brazil-Russia Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Tourism Gilberto Ramos warned skeptics that the BRIC countries are all powers of a truly continental scope and have very much in common, both geographically and macro economically.

In case Obama hasn’t noticed, Eurasia is coalescing, not around littler Georgia and big brother Poland, with their pretensions as forward bases for the mighty US empire, but around China, Russia and India. He would do well to remember Yekaterinburg is not only famous for its Russian past, but for Gary Powers, the US spy shot down in 1960, a fitting metaphor for how Russia and China are taking aim at the US-dominated international financial order.

Rumblings about the impossibility of closing Guantanamo were being heard even as Obama took office. It appears there’s no place to send the prisoners, most of whom are innocent of anything other than fighting invaders, if that. Congress does not want to allow them to come to stay in equally notorious US jails, where overcrowding, violence, drugs and AIDS are endemic. Nor is Congress willing to fork over any money to close Guantanamo. Of course this is nonsense. Venezuela’s president offered to take them all, but Obama dare not accept any favors from someone so principled, lest his house of cards come tumbling down.

As for the tribunals, Obama faces two deadlines: his 120-day review of the tribunals has now ended, and on 27 May the trial of Ahmed Al-Darbi, a Saudi accused of plotting to attack a ship in the Strait of Hormuz, was scheduled to begin, and it appears it now will, but under slightly improved conditions, including restricting hearsay evidence. The tribunals now must move quickly in a race against the clock before Guantanamo is scheduled to be closed next January. If the prison is indeed closed and the trials are still going on then, the detainees will have to be brought to the US, where they will receive greater legal rights.

About 20 of the 241 detainees currently at Guantanamo will now be tried by military tribunals along with 13 already in the works. The rest of the detainees must either be released, transferred to other nations or tried by civilian prosecutors in US federal courts. It’s also possible that some could continue to be held indefinitely without trial as prisoners of war, though government officials insist they will now receive full Geneva Conventions protections.

The decision to persist with the tribunals was immediately attacked by critics. “It’s disappointing that Obama is seeking to revive rather than end this failed experiment,” said Jonathan Hafetz of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s no detainee at Guantanamo who cannot be tried and shouldn’t be tried in the regular federal courts system.”

How did this sorry state of affairs come about so soon after all the fanfare?

Obama stressed to families of victims of the USS Cole attack when he met them in February that he would not free “potential jihadists”, but when Binyam Mohamed, suspected in a plot to set off a “dirty bomb” inside the US, was repatriated to Britain and released, this was greeted by a hysterical outcry in the US, ignoring the fact that Mohamed was determined to be innocent by the world’s oldest upholder of due process. The pressures on Obama to hold the Bush course are immense, with former vice president Richard Cheney brazenly attacking him as a wimp on US television.

Then there’s Obama’s decision to block the court-ordered release of more torture photos. He was for the pictures being released before deciding last week he was against it, apparently convinced by military officials the photos would increase danger for US troops.

Dawdling, of course, just confirms the view of the rest of the world, especially among Muslims, that Obama is not the principled liberal they were led to expect, that he is afraid to make a clean breast of the past atrocities, that he is merely a politically correct Bush lite. The irony being that, contrary to Cheney’s ravings, it is his very indecisiveness that increases the danger for US troops.

The legal intricacies of Guantanamo vs. US incarceration and jurisdiction are less sensational than the torture pictures. But the likelihood of many Muslims actually seeing the latest shots of US troops in Iraq sodomizing those who resist them is remote. In any case, the pictures were originally intended for possible publication by the torturers themselves. This startling revelation was made by Seymour Hersh in 2004 when he exposed the logic behind the officially-condoned US strategy of sexual torture. The idea was to use blackmail to encourage victims to work for the occupiers as spies, threatening to publish the photos unless the victims agreed to collaborate with the occupiers. A government consultant revealed to Hersh, “I was told that the purpose of the photographs was to create an army of informants, people you could insert back in the population.”

The strategy, of course, failed spectacularly, and the photos — old and new — are being consumed primarily by jingoistic Americans reveling in such scenes of violence inflicted on the “enemy”, inured to the monstrosity of this by their regular diet of media violence and Islamophobia. Already the “blocked” photos are being leaked all over the net, making Obama’s last minute efforts a fool’s errand.

How such unconscionable behavior became official US policy is fascinating. American pilots were trained during the “first” Gulf War by watching pornographic films, according to the Washington Post at the time. In order to better subjugate Arab Iraq, according to Joseph Massad, “American imperial military culture super-masculinizes not only its own male soldiers, but also its female soldiers who can partake of the feminization of Iraqi men.” The pornographic pictures are merely the logical outcome of this strategy to subdue the so-called enemy, constructed by diabolical Pentagon strategists. The 2003 invasion updated this strategy, though with unintended consequences, as new technology allowed simple soldiers to produce their own DVDs of their sadistic frolics.

This stark reality is inverted in Washington, as interpreted by Obama’s envoy of peace to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about US media efforts in Pakistan: “Concurrent with the insurgency is an information war. We are losing that war.” Rather than acknowledging past sins, however, he advocates even more TV and radio propaganda supporting the US wars. Holbrooke is referring to the $100 million propaganda campaign launched by the Bush regime in Iraq in 2005 by a Washington-based PR firm to plant administration propaganda in the Iraqi news media and to pay Iraqi journalists to write favorable stories about the occupation.

So it appears withholding the Abu Ghraib photos is really part of the US government media war, just as the question mark over Guantanamo is really part of the military plans to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan come hell or high water. And that these policies are not up for discussion. The reversal of Obama’s key policies after only a few months does not bode well for him or the US.

Perhaps withholding the photos is also connected with the appointment of Stanley McChrystal as head of the military in Afghanistan, which should brace itself for more Abu Ghraib-style action. McChrystal cut his teeth in Iraq, where he directed the Joint Special Operations Command’s special operation teams, which carry out assassinations and terrorize local populations opposed to the occupation. McChrystal was a favorite of Rumsfeld and Cheney. He was a direct participant in overseeing torture, according to a report by Esquire and Human Rights Watch in 2006.

Just about everyone but the US officials conducting their war on terrorism realize by now that it is this very policy that is producing more and more jihadists, and will continue to produce them until Obama, or some future less timid president, declares an end to this campaign of terror being conducted by the US itself, with its allies dragged kicking and screaming behind it.

This is no time for Obama to be indecisive. Guantanamo must be closed and remaining prisoners must be tried in US courts or repatriated. If that’s a problem, he can always take up Chavez’s offer. And patch up relations with him and Castro in the process. Hell, why not give back Guantanamo to Cuba as a peace offering while he’s at it? The important thing is not to blink while he’s doing what’s right, or else the jackals of war will chew him to shreds.

The latest fear among Democrats is that the gulf between them and the Republicans is widening, even as Democratic policies are gaining support among the people. Huh? They should take a leaf from FDR’s book, to fear nothing but fear alone. Let the Republicans march into the wilderness. Take control of US politics for the next two decades by following truly popular, socially just policies. Americans are not imperialists at heart. They will follow you. And be sure to close Guantanamo.

The games were greeted by Georgian troops with a coup attempt against their beleaguered President Mikheil Saakashvili, though there is speculation that this was something dreamed up by the Georgian president himself (he has done stranger things, like declaring war on Russia). This latest bizarre twist, the argument goes, gives him ammunition in his battle with protesters — they have been demanding his resignation for over a month and vow to keep protesting till he’s gone. Lucky for Saak, riot police are still loyal to him and broke up an anti-NATO rally by thousands converging on parliament on the eve of the games.

According to Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin, Saakashvili “has long been aiming to bring Georgia’s domestic conflict to the international level. It’s for this reason that he shot down our military — to draw us into the August war. It’s for this reason that he wanted American marines to come to Georgia, to draw Americans into that war. This man is dangerous for the world,” Rogozin said. In support of the US darling, Democratic Senator John Kerry and Republican Congressman David Dreier (note the bipartisan unity) are calling for a free trade agreement with Georgia.

NATO is busy as a bee these days. Apart from its centerpiece, Afghanistan, where deaths of both Afghans and occupiers are increasing daily, and practicing for God-knows-what in Georgia, it was recently flexing its naval muscle in neighboring Turkey, where delegates from 27 countries just wrapped up NATO’s annual Maritime Commanders Meeting (MARCOMET 2009). Its theme this year was “The Future Security Environment — Implications for Navies” and was focused on terrorism, piracy and conflicts deriving from energy and resources issues. No doubt it will be deploying forces on the Horn of Africa soon pursuing those pesky pirates.

Prague is also a hive of activity these days. It hosted a meeting of the Eastern Partnership (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova) 7 May, followed by a summit dubbed “Southern Corridor — New Silk Road of European and Central Asian countries,” seeking a non-Russian route for gas imports from Central Asia. The summit participants included Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey. The Czech EU official said that after years of wavering, Europe had no time to lose in securing alternatives to Russian gas.

If the intent in all this is to make Russia mad, it is working. On the first day of the Georgian military exercise, Russia expelled two NATO envoys. Rogozin stated that his country would not attend a NATO military meeting planned for this week. Russian lawmaker Sergei Abeltsev has floated the idea of a response to the NATO move that would entail Cuba and Venezuela taking part in “large-scale drills” in the Caribbean Sea on 2 July. Nicaragua intends to buy Russian aircraft and helicopters for its armed forces, and will be sure to join in.

The battleground between East and West these days thus includes not only Georgia, but the Czech Republic, Poland and the Baltics. Not only is US President Barack Obama continuing Bush’s policy of provoking Russia in Georgia, but he made no indication in his first 100 days that he would reverse the planned Star Wars missile bases in the Czech Republic and Poland. Fortunately grassroots Czech opposition to the proposed base resulted in the defeat of the conservative government and it looks like the Czech base will not go ahead. Strong opposition in Poland has so far not managed to make a similar political inroad.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov accused the US of using the Iran issue as a pretext to set up its missile shield in Russia ’s backyard. “The way it is designed has nothing to do with Iran’s nuclear program. It is aimed at Russian strategic forces, deployed in the European part of the Russian Federation,” Lavrov told Euronews. “We are being very frank about this with our American colleagues and hope that our arguments are heard. Iran’s nuclear program is a separate issue. We approach it according to a key principal — preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.”

As if the Czech government’s anti-Russian conferences and the war games aren’t enough, the Czech air force are now “protecting” the airspace of the three Baltic NATO members, the first time that the Czech military’s tactical air force has been deployed in a foreign operation since the end of WWII. The Czech aircraft will be ready to take action in case of a military threat to the Baltic countries and to provide them with help.

But what “threat” is there in the Baltics, other than one invented by trigger-happy NATO planners playing yet more war “games” with Russia?

This scheming has not gone unnoticed by Moscow. “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a new Cold War, but we don’t want one,” Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said recently. In The Grand Chessboard (1997), Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that the only countries Russia could convince to join a defense pact might be Belarus and Tajikistan. But the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) founded in 2002 in reaction to NATO expansion eastward now includes not only Belarus and Tajikistan, but Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.

It, along with the Eurasian Economic Community (EurAsEC), the Russia-Belarus Union State and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are natural developments by countries concerned about what the US and NATO are really up to. Russian General Leonid Ivashov, vice-president of the Academy of Geopolitical Science, says there is a need “to neutralize the spread of NATO’s influence not only to Central Asia but also to East and Southeast Asia,” adding that this “won’t be of an aggressive or offensive nature; it will be a deterrent.”

Relations with the SCO are developing, and just a few months ago, it was reported that the CSTO will have its own Joint Rapid Reaction Force which could be used to protect its members from military aggression, defend critical infrastructure and fight terrorism and organized crime. Russia and Kazakhstan are the key movers in the CSTO and managed to obtain a 25 per cent growth in this year’s budget.

There are problems. First, the standoff between Armenia and Azerbaijan, with the latter inching towards NATO membership in reaction to Russian support for the former. And then there’s Uzbekistan. President Islam Karimov was initially very pro-US and anti-Russian, but after being spurned by the West over the brutal suppression of demonstrations in 2005, he quickly made up with Russia and even joined the CSTO in 2006. However, human rights have never interfered with US strategic thinking in the past, and there are signs that Karimov is flirting with the West once again. He has also signed a military cooperation agreement with Azerbaijan, and is withdrawing from EurAsEC, adding to the confusion.

What Moscow would really like is for Ukraine to join the CSTO. And why not? If such pacts are truly defensive, then this makes perfect sense. What conceivable role does NATO play so far from the Atlantic, except as a forward base for the US ? Ukraine in the CSTO would give it clout where it counts — with its big and vital neighbor. Ukraine in NATO can only be a serious cause of tension with Russia. As Egyptians say, “Your neighbor is closer than your mother.”

While things look grim these days from Moscow, the EU/NATO machinations are far from yielding results. Euro “partners” Armenia and Azerbaijan are in a state of war; Belarus and Moldova leaders have no illusions about Euro intentions and did not attend the EP fest in Prague, despite the 600 million euros being thrown around. And signs of reaction to NATO’s nosiness are setting in. In a poll by the US government funded International Republican Institute (IRI) only 63 percent of Georgian respondents back NATO accession, down from the 87 percent the IRI recorded last September. Keep in mind the bias of an organization like the IRI and imagine likely statistics if such a poll were carried out by a real NGO like, say, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament or StopNATO. What is telling in the IRI poll is the massive shift away from NATO membership in the past six months.

And then there’s Ukraine. The district council of its second largest city, Kharkov, has just called for a ban on all NATO-related organizations and activities pending a nationwide referendum on Kiev’s membership in the alliance. A statement circulated by the council last week denounced any violations of Ukraine’s bloc-free status. The protest by the deputies followed the opening in April this year of a Euro-Atlantic cooperation (read: NATO) centre at Economics and Law University in Kharkov.

Obama has yet to make any of the hard choices he faces. He caved in to the bankers, and his health plan is being vetted by the health insurance industry to prevent the single-payer system, by far the cheapest and most comprehensive. He appears to be letting the Bush torturers off the hook and continuing their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he can’t finesse Russia so easily. Russia will not cooperate on Afghanistan or arms treaties if he continues the foolish and dangerous meddling in Eastern Europe under the pretense of supporting “democracy and freedom.” The current games can only be interpreted by Moscow as a replay — hopefully farcical — of the Nazis in Georgia in WWII, which will strengthen their resolve to keep the enemy at bay.

It’s as if Hitler and his henchmen arranged for compliant lawyers to produce legal opinions arguing that what the Gestapo was doing was OK so German leaders would not fear prosecution later. The lawyers would be let off the hook because they were just issuing legal opinions, not committing the actual brutality and murder, and the lowly Gestapo functionaries were, of course, just following orders. The question then becomes: is America any different?

The torture trail starts and ends in the White House, beginning with Bush deciding in February 2002 that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions did not apply to Al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees. This is confirmed again and again in the OLC memoranda, a newly declassified report of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), yet another one by the Senate Intelligence Committee (SIC), and finally a May 2002 document Attorney General Eric Holder just released showing CIA-White House coordination in the approval of the torture techniques that Cheney protégé John Yoo promoted at the time as the “Bush Program.” Holder in effect points the finger at then-attorney general John Ashcroft, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, legal adviser to the National Security Council (NSC) John Bellinger, and counsel to the president Alberto Gonzales (who achieved his greatest notoriety later as attorney general). It is impossible that Bush was not involved.

The SIC report shows that dissenting legal views about the use of torture were brushed aside repeatedly. The SASC report, the result of a two-year investigation begun after the Democrats regained a majority in the Senate, details direct links between the CIA torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, in Afghanistan and at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. The report found that Rumsfeld, Rice, and other former senior Bush administration officials were directly responsible for the torture used at Guantanamo and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The report is “a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse . . . to low-ranking soldiers,” SASC Chairman Carl Levin told reporters. It confirms that the Bush administration began preparing for what came to be known as “enhanced interrogation” techniques just a few months after 11 September 2001, before the memos approving such practices and despite warnings from experts that such methods were likely to yield “less reliable” results than less aggressive methods. Rice personally conveyed the administration’s approval for waterboarding of Zubaydah to then-CIA director George Tenet in July 2002. Last year, Rice acknowledged to the SASC only that she had attended meetings where the CIA interrogation request was discussed, omitting her direct role in approving the program in her written statement to the committee.

Former US secretary of state Colin Powell himself has repeatedly noted that the National Security Council was the center of activity with respect to the introduction of torture and has urged those pursuing the issue to press for full disclosure of NSC materials. This would put him at the center of the inquiry as well, suggesting the battle over Bush’s legacy has begun with a vengeance, so to speak. All this threatens to upstage Obama’s legislative program, but quashing the growing outrage and preventing a thorough independent inquiry would be a dangerous sign to the world that the Bush legacy is alive and well.

There is now no question that Bush and company are guilty before the world of enthusiastically embracing a policy of torture in defiance of US law and the Geneva Conventions. Cheney’s counterattack is to argue it works, despite the Pentagon’s own Joint Personnel Recovery Agency arguing in July 2002 that it would produce “unreliable information” and “could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured US personnel.” It produced the “proof” of collusion between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda that led to invasion of Iraq and an orgy of torture. In case anyone has forgotten the now legendary photos from there, on 28 May the Defense Department will release hundreds more pictures depicting abuse of prisoners by US personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A former senior US intelligence official said that Cheney and Rumsfeld were “demanding proof of the links between Al-Qaeda and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there. They were told repeatedly that, “no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.” The madness did not end with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Former US Army psychiatrist Charles Burney, told Army investigators as late as 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility were under “pressure” to produce evidence of ties between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. It should be remembered that Cheney avoided the draft through repeated deferments during his salad days and has no military experience — other than launching wars and promoting torture.

Obama will have a hard time burying the issue. Former officials other than Powell and Burney and many anonymous ones are coming out of the woodwork. The highest ranking official so far to have taken any rap, Army Reserve Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq when the infamous torture photographs were taken, was reprimanded and demoted to colonel for her failure to properly supervise the prison guards. In a recent interview, she said, “I just find it incredible that the system — the Pentagon and the Judicial System — can continue to keep those soldiers in jail when there are simply volumes of documents and information that is emerging, and continues to emerge, that says exactly what one, in particular, Graner, was saying all along: that he was ordered to do these things by the Military Intelligence people and the interrogators … And it’s been substantiated through an investigation that these torture practices were developed and implemented down in Guantanamo Bay and then they were imported to Abu Ghraib . . . directed by the highest level of this administration.”

The same anger sweeping America has taken hold in Britain, where the chief justice ordered the government to obtain the release of classified information about the torture of a British resident imprisoned at Guantanamo. Efforts to bring to trial US officials are underway in Spain and will no doubt be launched elsewhere.

Pressure on Obama will continue to mount to follow the course of justice in the US itself. “The last administration justified torture, presided over the abuses at Abu Ghraib, destroyed tapes of harsh interrogations,” said Senator Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “How can we restore our moral leadership and ensure transparent government if we ignore what has happened?” Any decision not to prosecute CIA agents who used torture is a violation of international law, said UN special rapporteur on torture Manfred Nowak, since the US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute those who engage in it. Diane Feinstein, chair of SIC has requested the Obama Administration to withhold decisions on prosecution until the committee is able to conduct a thorough investigation.

Obama originally said no prosecutions would be undertaken. He now says that he would support a congressional investigation over the issue if it were conducted in a bipartisan manner. House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers will be sure to take him up on this. His committee just issued a report proposing extending to 10 years the statute of limitations on war crimes, torture, domestic surveillance and other crimes. “To be clear, torture is currently banned under US laws (under the anti-torture statute, the War Crimes Act, the Geneva Conventions, and the Detainee Treatment Act),” states the Congressional report firmly.

A commission will be required to declassify and publish the still hidden documents concerning the NSC process and what went on in the Justice Department, the Pentagon, and the CIA. A special prosecutor will then have to decide who should be charged for criminal wrongdoing. Cheney has laid down the gauntlet with his self-serving claims that “torture works” and requests for making public two CIA briefs that support his case. Obama should pick it up.

Last week, a coalition of 30 organizations presented 250,000 petition signatures to Holder requesting that he appoint a special prosecutor. The neocons — apart from Cheney — are trying to calm the waters. New York Times journalist Roger Cohen says this is “no time for retribution . . . that it’s time for America to move forward.” Obama says he doesn’t want prosecutions to slow down his agenda. But if the criminals aren’t prosecuted now, when will they be? Not acting is effectively giving them amnesty and cementing the popular view that the US condones torture and that Obama is merely Bush-lite, which his support of rendition already suggests.

Is Obama waiting for an even greater groundswell to justify “moving forward” — that is, with the prosecutions? This could lead to impeachment of Bush (to disqualify him from future office or from his presidential perks) — the first time a president and his underlings are impeached over a serious political policy issue since Lincoln’s vice president and successor Andrew Johnson was impeached over attempts at reconciliation with the South. Recall Watergate was about election shenanigans and Lewinskygate was over sexual peccadilloes. This could be the defining moment in Obama’s presidency. By boldly leading the charge and routing the criminals who tore up the Constitution, he will provide a warning to others eager to dismantle America ’s civil society.

In attendance for the first time were top US and NATO officials, including US Deputy Assistant Secretary for South and Central Asian Affairs Patrick Moon and NATO Deputy Secretary General Martin Howard, as well as UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Secretary General of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Mark Perrin de Brichambaut. Among the 36 countries participating were representatives from the G8, the European Union and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The unanimously adopted Joint Action Plan underlined the SCO’s importance “for practical interaction between Afghanistan and its neighboring states in combating terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime.”

The Moscow Declaration upstaged the UN Conference on Afghanistan held four days later, coming down hard on Pakistan with a call for more effective means to combat terrorism, including denying sanctuaries to the resistance. Coming just over a month after Kyrgyzstan announced the closing of the US airbase on its territory, the conference reiterated the SCO’s position that it is opposed to the expansion of US military interests in Central Asia, but is willing to expand cooperation with the US and NATO in Afghanistan, short of sending troops. Interestingly, Obama announced a shift in US policy emphasis on the same day as the SCO summit, promising greater consultation with Afghanistan ’s neighbours.

It also declared support for the efforts of the Karzai government, which is openly criticized as weak and corrupt by US officials. Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Alexei Borodavkin warned against creating a power vacuum in Afghanistan in the run-up to the presidential elections later this year. Russia also came out against negotiating with the Taliban.

The Russians believe that Afghan drug trafficking is the most serious threat to the security of Russia and Central Asia. Russia’s anti-drug chief Viktor Ivanov last week called the coalition’s anti-drug policy a fiasco, nothing that opium production in Afghanistan had soared since the deployment of US and NATO troops in the country. Afghan narcotics, he said, kill 30,000 people in Russia every year, twice as many as the Soviet Union lost during its decade-long military intervention in Afghanistan. The Action Plan calls for joint SCO-Afghan operations in combating drug trafficking and organized crime, including training of drug agencies, combating laundering of drug money and improving border controls.

The Plan reads like a roadmap for bringing Afghanistan into the SCO fold, a move which India’s envoy approved of. The idea of Afghanistan joining the SCO would clearly be anathema to the US, however, and Obama’s proposal to create a NATO-dominated Contact Group with Afghanistan is clearly a way to contain the growing influence of the SCO. But with NATO allies reluctant to back Obama’s surge strategy, major concessions will have to be made, affecting virtually all US foreign policy.

Russia has approved rail transit of non-military supplies to Afghanistan, and suggested this could include military cargo as well, though such approval is surely conditional on US actions affecting Russia, primarily its plans for missile bases in Eastern Europe and its campaign against Iran. Russian analyst Alexander Lukin says cooperation with the SCO offers the US and NATO an acceptable format to bring Iran into the dialogue. Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister Mehdi Akhundzadeh sat across the table from the US envoy at the Moscow Conference.

Iran is a dilemma for the SCO. Just as Georgia is being put on hold in NATO, Iran’s application to join the SCO was put off again. “The admission of new members to the SCO should strengthen the organization, but not cause new problems,” SCO Secretary General Bolat Nurgaliyev said last month. Full membership would provide Tehran with a mutual assistance guarantee similar to that provided NATO members. Just as NATO’s expansion plans brought the world perilously close to war last summer over Georgia, so would a US-Israeli attack on Iran if it were a full member. This will be addressed at the next SCO summit, which will be held in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in June.

In 2003, Iran indicated to the Bush administration that it was no friend of the Taliban and was willing to cooperate in stabilizing the situation in Afghanistan, but its overtures were spurned and the invasion of Iraq put paid to any such plans. The hysterical campaign against Iran since has only made the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan harder — there are reports that Iran may even be burying the hatchet with the Taliban. But its enthusiasm for the SCO and continued support from China and Russia in its standoff with the West make this possibility unlikely.

Iran is also suffering from the exploding drug trafficking from Afghanistan that the US invasion facilitated, plus a surge of Afghan refugees. Russia in no doubt delighted with the Iranian police chief Esmaeel Ahmadi-Moghadam’s announcement last week that Iran was ready to train Afghan police. The Germans have botched this and the Iranians could hardly do worse. If the US were serious about containing the huge heroin problem it created, it would take their offer seriously.

But Obama will be unlikely to capture this moment, given his timidity so far in dealing with the mess he was bequeathed. He needs to build a new coalition and endgame strategy that would avoid the humiliation the US suffered in Vietnam, and fast. There are many adjustments to be made — nixing the Bush-Brzezinski strategy of surrounding Russia with NATO members for starters. And winding down the campaign against Iran, which will include reining in Israel. US policymakers who want to reverse the reckless saber-rattling of the Bush years can actually take solace in the rise of the SCO, which was founded in 2001 and whose growing prominence is a direct result of the Bush years. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO’s self-proclaimed status as world policeman in the past two decades, Russia and China were more or less forced to form their own “NATO”. After all, nature abhors a vacuum.

Ironically, as the attempt to surround Russia sputters, it is Afghanistan that is now surrounded by SCO members and observers, notably Iran, anxious to contain drug trafficking. In this context, US-Israel threats to attack Iran are more and more like the boy who cried “Wolf!” The Bush Afghanistan/Iran policies in shambles and there is little indication so far that much is being done to improve the situation.

Can NATO and the SCO become allies in Afghanistan, or are they fated to be enemies? Council for Foreign Relations analyst Evan Feigenbaum, until recently the State Department’s deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, says the SCO conference “offers an opportunity for the US to try to turn what are ostensibly common interests [in Afghanistan] into complementary polices,” but he’s not optimistic. He pointed to the SCO call in 2005 for a timeline for a US withdrawal from military bases in Central Asia, which “attracted a lot of notoriety,” and asks just what the SCO could actually do in Afghanistan. Good question. How can Chinese and Russian support save the totally discredited Karzai regime? How would their “help” be greeted by Afghans? Clearly some accommodation with, if not total surrender to the Taliban is the dead end the US has reached, and SCO involvement can change this.

Feigenbaum makes another telling observation: “We really don’t understand what the SCO is … Is it a security group? Is it a trade bloc? Is it a group of non-democratic countries that have created a kind of safe zone where the US and Europeans don’t talk to them about human rights and democracy?” Indeed, there is little uniting the suspicious and uneasy SCO members other than fear and perhaps loathing of the US and Taliban, and a desire to staunch the drug smuggling which the US is failing so spectacularly to deal with. If NATO were to disband or at least retract its claws, the SCO might well collapse. Expanding it to include, say, Iran, let alone Pakistan and India, would paralyze it.

The most likely cooperation would be in containing the drug flow, if the US is indeed serious about this and not part of the problem, as some analysts — in the first place Russian — contend. The prospects of establishing a stable, popular political regime opposed to the Taliban is a fantasy apparently shared by both NATO and the SCO. But Russia and China are hardly going to have more success in destroying the Taliban than the US. Any attempt by either Russia or China to contribute to the slaughter now taking place will only backfire among their own restive Muslim minorities, which all SCO members have.

It appears that Russia genuinely wants the US to succeed in bringing Afghanistan to heel. Russia’s Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin said recently, “We want to prevent the virus of extremism from crossing the borders of Afghanistan and take over other states in the region such as Pakistan. If NATO failed, it would be Russia and her partners that would have to fight against the extremists in Afghanistan.” Rogozin proposes using the NATO-Russia Council to establish a security order stretching “from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Perhaps NATO could develop into PATO, a Pacific-Atlantic alliance.”

Whether this is merely Rogozin being flippant is not clear. Surely such an organization belongs as part of the UN, which is perhaps what he meant. In any case, Rogozin is back on the warpath, or rather the peacepath, calling NATO’s month-long war games in Georgia scheduled for 7 May a “provocation” and calling for them to be canceled. If they go ahead, Russia will “take appropriate measures”, one of which already has been taken with the cancellation of a meeting of Russian and NATO general staff commanders this week. There are lots more aces up the Russian sleeve, including SCO and Afghan ones. If Obama persists in Bush-era belligerence, it will only make resolving the many problems he faces all the more difficult.

Even if he can keep the SCO onside, it is no life jacket for NATO in Afghanistan. The best the two “security” organizations can do is to let it go its own way, “containing” it until it recovers from the trauma of all the “help” it has been force-fed over the past three decades.

Saakashvili’s allies are abandoning him in droves, with former parliamentary speaker Nino Burjanadze one of the protesters. Arrests last month of members of her Democratic Movement for a United Georgia, accused of seeking to overthrow the government by force, burned any remaining bridges for her. Reflecting the broad sentiment, she said Saakashvili lost all credibility as president when he launched war against Russia last August and that any negotiations would be only over the transition of power. Former Prime Minister Zurab Noghaideli’s Movement for a Just Georgia organized a protest in his hometown of Batumi.

After brutally quashing demonstrations in 2007, the president is now forced to play to his US/EU patrons. Saakashvili addressed the nation 10 April, piously emphasizing his efforts in “protecting, ensuring, and defending the people’s fundamental right to demonstrate peacefully” shortly before the opposition deadline for him to step down expired, which he chose not to mention. The Interior Ministry stayed in the background, though a “cleaning crew” sent to the main square Saturday morning tore down their banners and ripped up their computer cables. Opposition leaders described them as a 50-strong mob which attacked them. Considering Saakashvili’s unpopularity, any bono fide cleaners would surely have joined the protesters instead of threatening them. Of course, the Interior Ministry denied any knowledge of the cleaners.

Yet another defector from the Saakashvili camp, former foreign minister Salome Zurabishvili, said: “From Monday a new wave of protests will start…No one should try and frighten us it won’t work in any case.”

The man to watch now is businessman Levan Gachechiladze, another former supporter of Saakashvili who broke with him months after the 2003 coup, accusing him of corruption in the privatization of an aircraft factory. He joined opposition activists staging a hunger strike during the 2-7 November protests in Tbilisi and was injured during the police crackdown on the rally. “Grechka” (buckwheat in Russian) garnered 27 per cent to Saakashvili’s disputed 52 per cent in last year’s presidential election and his widespread popularity has put him on the path to replace his nemesis. Whatever happens in the next few days, he will remain the chief thorn in Saakashvili’s side until he finally departs –- his term officially ends in 2013.

Georgian “democracy” has not had a smooth path, to put it mildly. The first post-Soviet president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was overthrown in a violent uprising in 1992, as was his successor Eduard Sheverdnazde in Saakashvili’s rose coup in 2003, though without violence (just lots of US-EU-sponsored NGOs). Now he too is yesterday’s man following the ruinous war with Russia that even the most nationalistic Georgian realizes was a conflict that the country could not win.

All this just days after triumphal celebrations of the 60th anniversary of NATO in Strasbourg, where support for Georgia’s entry into this club was reaffirmed. But the vow was empty, and everyone present knew it. Georgia must meet the NATO bottom line — no outstanding conflicts with its neighbors or foreign troops on its territory and compliance with member-nations’ military regime. Independent Abkhazia and South Ossetia put off any Georgian membership indefinitely. Thank you, Mr. Saakashvili.

It will not be easy for Obama to let go of Georgia, which is the US beachhead in the pursuit of its war in Afghanistan, according to analyst Rick Rozoff. The momentum for this plan began long before Obama pledged his allegiance, long before the ill-fated war against Ossetia last summer, and continues apace. It is a plan laid down by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 Foreign Affairs article, pursued enthusiastically by Bush/Cheney, and Obama is unlikely to disagree, considering Brzezinski is his close patron and adviser.

Recent evidence of the continued importance attached to Georgia includes the US-Georgia Charter on Strategic Partnership signed in the fading days of the Bush regime in January. In February, the Georgian Defense Ministry released Vision 2009, outlining the plan to make Georgia’s military compliant with NATO standards. In early March, Georgian Defense Minister David Sikharulidze said Georgia’s military was now being rapidly rebuilt with US aid and that “our capabilities and tactics will be designed to meet a considerably superior force . . . As NATO seeks alternative routes to Afghanistan, we understand our strategic responsibility as gateway to the East-West corridor. Georgia will provide logistical support to NATO, opening its territory, ports, airfields, roads and railroads to the alliance.”

The American warship the USS Klakring docked in the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi 30 March, as part of its tour “participating in theatre security cooperation activities which develop both nations’ abilities to operate against common threats,” according to the US military. General James Cartwright, vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the festivities, and was reminded by Saakashvili of Georgia’s troop commitments to Kosovo and Iraq (there were 2000 in Iraq till last summer) and promise to send 300 to Afghanistan. He then demanded a quid pro quo: “Our struggle continues and it will end after the complete de-occupation of Georgia’s territory and expelling the last soldier of the enemy from our country.” Cartwright added some nonsense words of his own: “I want to say that you have a very good army and we know what they have done.” Saakashvili has even offered to turn the Sachkhere Mountain Training School into a permanent NATO Partnership for Peace Training Center, where it will host the annual NATO South Caucasus Cooperative Longbow/ Cooperative Lancer exercises on 3 May with troops from 23 nations.

Former Indian diplomat MK Bhadrakumar says the US plans to move materiel to Afghanistan via the Black Sea port of Poti in Georgia through Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. “The project, if it materializes, will be a geopolitical coup — the biggest ever that Washington would have swung in post-Soviet Central Asia and the Caucasus. At one stroke, the US will be tying up military cooperation at the bilateral level with Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan,” drawing these countries closer into NATO’s partnership programs.

While very clever, this plan must overcome the Bush/Cheney legacy of intrigue and chaos. Attempts to sneak Georgia and Ukraine in NATO’s back door have backfired. Continuing on this path so clearly anathema to Russia will only make access to Afghanistan more and more unpredictable. Trying to juggle all the “stans” is a perilous act. Georgia is already a weak link, soon to be weaker. When the inevitable happens and “Grechka” or someone else with a modicum of common sense takes over, they will rush to make up with Russia and try to salvage something from the morass Saakashvili bequeaths them.

Obama has vowed to improve relations with Russia. With the arrival of the Klakring, Russia decided it officially had had enough, and sent a strong warning 2 April to the US about its plans to rebuild Georgia’s military following last year’s war. The Foreign Ministry said helping arm Georgia would be “extremely dangerous” and would amount to “nothing but the encouragement of the aggressor”.

The US needs Russia, but could lose it along with Georgia as its grab for control over Central Asia and the Muslim world lurches forward, forcing it instead into a humiliating retreat from this cauldron. With Americans increasingly focused on their domestic crises — the other Bush/Cheney legacy – such a retreat, if done without provoking WWIII, could be Obama’s greatest legacy, be it one that will be remembered as another Vietnam for the US.

Nobody (except a few Saakashvilis) wants the US as the world’s leader anymore. The EU and the BRICs are going their own way, and the Georgias are dangerous toys best left alone. Obama should be intelligent enough to realize this and acquiesce to the inevitable. By continuing to support, however unenthusiastically, failed Bush policies such as the Caucasus gambit, he merely makes any accommodation of America with the other major powers all the more difficult, weakening his hand in the long run.

But then a few cracks began to appear in the shiny facade. The Poles, especially, carped about just about everything — the thought of giving up their precious zloty (boy, are they sorry now), the EU farming rules, the lack of Euro-support for US wars, and the Euro-cowardice in facing down the Russian bear. They and the Czechs revealed Fortress Europe for what it was by welcoming US missile bases, provoking the Russians into threatening to make Europe once again the world’s nuclear battlefield. Kosovo managed to divide even the big boys, with Spain refusing to recognize this latest US-German plaything, and ratcheting up the tensions between Serbs, Croats — even the Slovenes. The Balkan cauldron is as hot as ever.

The world financial meltdown was the proverbial straw that has left the Euro-camel paralyzed. The collapse of the government of the Czech Prime Minister — the Euro-president himself — was a fitting symbol for the collapsing house of cards. No doubt someday there will be a musical about this Euro-Camelot, this once-and-never-land.

The comeuppance of Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek was not the result of his recent snub of US President Barack Obama (he called Obama’s stimulus spending “a way to hell” that will “undermine the stability of the global financial market”). Rather it was the modest but unflagging campaigning by the Czech Nonviolent Movement (CNM), which has been fighting the installation of the US missile base outside Prague for two years now. They mounted an ongoing series of nonviolent actions — petitions, hunger strikes, rallies, protests, electioneering — building a grassroots campaign uniting the 70 per cent of the Czech population who oppose the base, nibbling away at the right-centre majority till it finally fell.

CNM organizer Jan Tomas called for “all invading armies to withdraw from all occupied territories” (you can fill in the blanks), and for nuclear disarmament. “Now in the Czech Republic a new chapter of our struggle begins.”

Topolanek is welcoming Obama to the G20 meeting in London as the European president and hosting Obama a few days later at a US-EU summit in Prague. Obama will then go to Strasbourg for NATO celebrations. Topolanek’s undiplomatic remark actually represents the EU consensus and is surely not so far from the mark. Obama’s ad hoc measures to deal with the crisis have been praised by almost no one but the bankers, who are being treated to trillions of dollars with no assurance that this massive bill will do any good whatsoever — except of course for the bankers. One-third of his stimulus package is in the form of tax cuts and is unlikely to have any long-term effect.

Not that the Eurocrats are coming up with anything more likely to succeed. The EU is a hodge-podge of very different states with radically different governments and economies, with no parallel Europe-wide budget to allow for fast and broad stimulus measures. The US budget deficit will be 10 per cent of GDP this year and the next and the next. This is impossible for the EU, which has a 3 percent limit per country and which, unlike the US, cannot print its currency as if there was no tomorrow.

Much of the trillions that Obama is spending is in fact seeping into Europe, adding to the steady US dollar inflow over the past half century, leaving Europe awash in dollars. For Europe to notch up the euro-printing press would be foolhardy in the extreme. The EU counts on exports as a stimulus to the economy, like Asia, something the US abandoned long ago. Though the subprime craze infected Europe too, its financial woes stem primarily from the US with its unbridled consumerism and wars, and will never be solved until the US puts its own house in order, balancing its budget and its trade, something that Obama has made no hint of doing.

Adding the eastern non-economies to the EU merely compounded its problems. European institutions invested very heavily in these “emerging markets” and the financial crisis has led to a withdrawal of capital from such regions back to the center, exposing investors to large losses. It’s no coincidence that the US dollar rose over the past six months, despite the terrible shape the US economy is in, or that the European leaders are unwilling and unable to commit to major stimulus measures for the EU as a whole. What was touted even a year ago as a joyous community, a big happy family, is now a dysfunctional one, complete with sibling rivalry, spoiled brats and marital strife.

This year’s G20 inspired protests across Europe. Tens of thousands marched through Berlin, Vienna, Paris and other European cities to demand action on poverty, job losses and climate change. In London, 35,000 protesters gathered to Put People First on 28 March, bringing together more than 100 trade unions, aid agencies, religious groups and environmental organizations to call on world leaders to commit to real reforms. “Never before has such a wide coalition come together with such a clear message for world leaders,” said Brendan Barber, the general secretary of the Trade Union Congress. “The old ideas of unregulated free markets do not work and have brought the world’s economy to near-collapse, failed to fight poverty and have done far too little to move to a low-carbon economy.” The protests culminated on 1 April — Financial Fools Day — with a movement called “Storm the Banks” focusing on the Bank of England.

In Paris, demonstrators dumped a pile of sand outside the city’s stock market to mock the use of island tax havens. Whether or not the G20 leaders took note, the only real progress at the G20 was in fact a concerted attempt to address this practice, though the havens are resisting fiercely. The Swiss foreign minister called German Finance Minister Peer Steinbruck a “Nazi henchman”, and the Sunday Times revealed that Lord Myners, the minister in charge of the British government’s “assault” on tax havens, has 250,000 pound sterling in an offshore shelter in Jersey. Myners recently met Jersey officials who now say they have “nothing to fear” from any tax haven crackdown. Past attempts to take on the tax havens failed, and it is far from certain that this one will succeed.

The G20 is ignoring the urgent issue of global warming, but the demonstrators did not. Organizers of the largest group, Camp for Climate Action, compare carbon trading to the subprime boondoggle. Important decisions about climate change are being left to the market despite the fact that it is controlled by the biggest polluters teaming up with the same financiers who brought economies crashing down, argues Peter McDonell in The Ecologist.

These voices of protest are the ones showing the way out of Europe’s present chaos, not the voices mouthing the same old tired platitudes at the G20, the special US-EU Summit or the upcoming NATO celebrations. Topolanek can badmouth Obama as much as he likes. It makes no difference. He would do well to leave behind his 500 retainers and together with his Czech nemesis step outside their armed fortresses, dispense with their tear gas and tazers, and spend a night camping out with Climate Action or at least listening to the likes of Tomas and Barber.

The world was shocked — or rather embarrassed — this week when Canadian Immigration and Citizenship Minister Jason Kenney announced he was banning Galloway from entering Canada, as a “security risk.” Well, sort of. Kenney’s Director of Communications Alykhan Velshi explained that it was really the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA). Kenney merely chose not to overturn their decision, taken, no doubt, after long and costly sleuthing by Canada’s ace security forces. No official reason was given.

Is Galloway planning to enter Canada as part of some top-secret global terrorist operation? The more likely explanation is because of his outspoken and eloquent opposition to the war in Afghanistan and his success in breaking the siege of Gaza with the historic Viva Palestina convoy last week. He is being accused of supporting Hamas, which Canada officially considers a terrorist organization. However, his only weapon is his fiery oratory, a fine example of — to paraphrase the old saw — words are mightier than white phosphorus bombs.

The Conservative government is on shaky ground these days. It is only because the opposition is split almost equally three ways that the united right can pretend to govern. Conservative strategists obviously feel that Galloway is not an issue that the opposition will rally around. After all, the new Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff supported the war in Iraq and the Liberal government under Prime Minister Jean Cretien provided troops for Afghanistan as early as 2002. The socialists and separatists are not happy with the war but are afraid to say so too openly, considering who controls the media and hence politicians’ fate in any elections.

Galloway’s host Toronto Coalition to Stop the War coordinator James Clark said: “We will not accept this ban, and we plan on challenging it.” Galloway stated that the government’s action merely proves that “unjust wars abroad will end up consuming the very liberties that make us who we are.” The obvious violation of Canada’s traditional tolerance and freedom of speech is in fact a windfall for the peaceniks.

Plans are going ahead for the speaking tour, which will start 30 March in Toronto, after which it goes on to Mississauga (home of many Afghan refugees), Montreal and Ottawa. Organizers are encouraging the public to continue buying tickets to show their support for free speech. “One way or another, we will bring George Galloway to Canada,” vowed Laith Marouf, coordinator of Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights. “We’re currently planning a delegation of MPs, lawyers and activists to escort Mr Galloway from the US across the Canadian border.”

Like last week’s attack on Chas Freeman in the US, this attempt to disrupt the support for the beleaguered Palestinians is backfiring. After a campaign by the Israeli lobby that Freeman said plumbs “the depths of dishonor and indecency,” he was forced to withdraw as Obama’s nominee for chairman of his National Intelligence Council, causing a furor that still resonates. The Galloway ban is giving much greater exposure to Canadians of his withering critique of Canada’s failed war: “Flagwaving, or in the case of Canada, shroud-waving of the brave Canadian soldiers who gave their lives for this failed policy of the Canadian government [in Afghanistan] is despicable beyond words.”

The decision to deny Galloway entry stands in stark contrast to the warm welcome the Conservative government and the Canadian media gave former US president George W Bush last week. Only a hardy band of 500 protesters braved the Calgary cold to throw shoes as close as possible to a man who many believe should not have been granted entry for his role in perpetuating crimes against humanity.

How unfortunate for Harper that this clumsy faux pas merely makes him and Canada look foolish around the world. Just about the only praise for Harper comes from the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which represents all 50 of the Israeli lobby groups in the US, and is arguably even more powerful than AIPAC. They honored Harper and the entire Conservative government last year by awarding them their very first International Leadership Award for his support of Israel.

The Galloway gaffe is not all the Conservatives have been up to. Immigration Minister Kenney just announced he was cutting funding for social programs provided by the Canadian Arab Federation for new Muslim immigrants (including many Afghans) because it openly criticizes the current government’s strongly pro-Israel stance in the Middle East.

Kenney has also been busy deporting another five US war resisters, including Kimberly Rivera, the first US woman Iraq war resister to go to Canada. Rivera, her husband and three children, including her six-week-old daughter, were forced to leave before parliament reconvened last month, when an angry opposition, smelling blood, could have overturned the heartless ruling. Kenney is on record saying the refugee claims of war resisters are “bogus”, that he “has no sympathy for them.” This is the same Canada that was a haven for 125,000 US Vietnam war resisters in the 1960-70s, the largest migration from the US to Canada since the American Revolution.

Curiously, Kenney’s 24-year-old yes-man, Alykhan Velshi, is a self-styled “moderate Muslim” who described Galloway as an “infandous street-corner Cromwell.” “We’re not going to seek to overturn that [CBSA] assessment in order to let into the country someone who … is, in a sense, a popinjay for those Taliban fighters who are trying to kill Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan.”

Though denying the charge that he financially supports Hamas, Galloway is otherwise treating the matter tongue-in-cheek. In a press release, he pointed out: “In 2006 [Kenney] addressed a rally of the so called People’s Mujahideen of Iran, a Waco-style cult, banned in the European Union as a terrorist organization . . . Being banned by such a man is like being lectured on due diligence by Lord Conrad Black, a Kenney ally, now breaking stones in the hot sun.”

Concerning his views of the Taliban, as a young Labour backbencher he told prime minister Margaret Thatcher that she “had opened the gates to the barbarians” and that “a long, dark night would now descend upon the people of Afghanistan.” He calls the current policy “equally a profound mistake … worse than a crime, as Talleyrand said, it’s a blunder.”

The irony of refusing to allow Galloway to come to Canada after he managed to break the two-year siege of Gaza by the Israelis was apparently lost on Kenney and Velshi. Galloway has spoken in Canada before about the Middle East without setting off any alarm bells.

Galloway recalled another such attempt to prevent free speech across the US-Canada border, when “Paul Robeson was forbidden to enter Canada not by Ottawa but by Washington, which had taken away his passport. But he was still able to transfix a vast crowd of Vancouver’s mill hands and miners with a 17-minute telephone concert culminating in a rendition of the Ballad of Joe Hill. Technology has moved on since then. And so from coast to coast, Minister Kenney notwithstanding, I will be heard one way or another.”

Unlike cabinet positions, the NIC chair is not subject to Senate approval, but when Freeman was subjected to a campaign of slander led by AIPAC functionary Steve Rosen, joined by a chorus of senators, Freeman withdrew, relating in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) the “libelous distortions of my record,” the “efforts to smear me and destroy my credibility . . . by unscrupulous people with a passionate attachment to the views of a political faction in a foreign country.”

Jews have more of a tradition of being liberals and supporting Democrats. But nowadays, more important than shades of pink are the Zionist colors one flaunts, and no US politician, left or right, dares to buck the Zionist tide. Whether or not Freeman — or any other US public figure — is Jewish is now a moot point. So it is not really so important to point out that Obama’s closest advisers are Jewish, such as his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, his veepee’s chief of staff Ron Klain, senior advisor David Axelrod, and his domestic cabinet members Timothy Geithner, Lawrence Summers, Paul Volker, Peter Orszag, and Jason Furman and Jamie Rubin. It is more to the point to emphasize that they are Zionists one and all, including his WASP veepee Joseph Biden (“You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist”) and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The waning of Jewish liberalism and the growing irrelevance of tribal affinity in American politics began with the rise of the neocons under president Ronald Reagan and is reflected in Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman’s endorsement of Republican John McCain for president in 2008. That Lieberman was not expelled, and managed to retain his chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee, shows who’s in control.

Zionists are the essential second leg that Obama stands on, along with his imperial support. As Democratic Caucus chairman, Emanuel helped make sure that 60 percent of Democratic congressmen and virtually all the senators will continue to support the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, with the possibility of an attack on Iran still on the table, despite that fact that 60 percent of Americans (80 percent of Democrats) are against such policies. Emanuel served in the IDF during the 1990 Gulf war, which would have resulted in his arrest and the end of his political career if he had been involved in any other country’s war as a foreign soldier. His father was a member of the terrorist organization Irgun and no doubt murdered dozens of Palestinians fighting to protect their homeland. “Rahm-bo” also knocked on doors for AIPAC as a student in the 1980s in AIPAC’s successful effort to unseat former Republican congressman Paul Findley just because he was for balance in US Middle East policy.

Ironically Zionism has become a bit of a dirty word around Washington, and the Jewish press prefers to brag — in the words of former president Clinton counsel Abner Mikvner — that “Barack Obama is the first Jewish President.” Whatever epithetic is used, Israeli political leaders, too, brag about their clout at the highest levels of US politics. Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert crowed about his telephone call to president George W Bush in January 2009 — interrupting him in the middle of a speech — to insist that secretary of state Condoleezza Rice vote against her own Gaza ceasefire motion in the UN Security Council. Jewish chutzpah celebrates the November 2008 US elections, where more Jews were elected than ever — 10 percent of congressmen, four times their proportion in the population. This leaves aside the fact that more than 90 percent of congressmen and senators vote for all motions concerning Israel that are approved, if not formulated, by AIPAC.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, inspired by the Zionists and their stranglehold on politics and media, have led to mounting frustration, allowing occasional, if carefully modulated criticism to trickle down into the mainstream media. Time columnist Joe Klein, who supported Bush’s war against Iraq and considers himself “a strong supporter of Israel,” wrote (in a lowly blog) that the “fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives — people like Joe Lieberman and the crowd at Commentary — plumped for this war [in Iraq], and now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of divided loyalties.” Within a day, Abraham Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, accused Klein of espousing “age-old anti-Semitic canards about a Jewish conspiracy to control and manipulate government.”

Other brave souls include Norm Finkelstein, author of Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, Jimmy Carter (Palestine: Peace not Apartheid), Mearsheimer and Walt (The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy). Whether or not their efforts mark the beginning of a decline in the Zionists’ hegemony is yet to be seen.

That their power is still formidable was brought home by the Freeman debacle. “The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth. The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views,” writes Freeman.

The Zionists made no mention of the real reason for scuttling his nomination, instead inventing the charge that he was a lobbyist for Saudi and Chinese interests. A career diplomat, he was president Richard Nixon’s personal interpreter during the first meetings with Mao Tse Tung. Since 1997, he has presided over the Middle East Policy Council, a nonprofit organization that is partly funded by Saudi money. “There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments . . . by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government — in this case, the government of Israel . . . policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel.”

Fighting the Zionists is not easy. Jewish scholars like Finkelstein argue that Zionists generally refuse to answer the content of critiques of Israel , invariably reducing the argument to an ad hominem attack, questioning the legitimacy of the critic, as they did with Freeman. Finkelstein was personally the target of their wrath, losing his university tenure battle due to their protests that he was too impartial. Where ad hominem is not enough, they merely ignore valid criticisms and rely on control of the public discourse, including laws forbidding anti-Semitism, racism or slander, to bury the issue.

Dozens of Jewish and overtly Zionist lobby groups throughout the US monitor all school and university teaching content, regularly denouncing critics and lobbying for their dismissal. As part of the campaign to vilify Islam, David Horowitz organized “Islamofascism Awareness Week” (IFAW) on close to a hundred college campuses in October 2007. At Michigan State University, the campus chapter of Young Americans for Freedom invited a bona fide fascist — Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party — to speak on how Europe is becoming “Eurabia”. IFAW is now an annual event, with seminars on jihad and Islamic totalitarianism.

But there is a silver lining. Formerly schemes to control the discourse took place behind the scenes. Steve Rosen, who led the attack on Freeman, says, “A lobby is like a night flower. It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.” That Rosen is now indicted as a spy, that the Finkelstein, Mearsheimer and Carter books even saw the light of day, and that Freeman was able to blast the lobby so witheringly in the WSJ suggest that broader US society may be awakening to the devastation that the Zionists have wrought on America.

The IMF calls for devaluation of the currencies of these “economies”, which are not really economies at all after their deindustrialization over the past two decades, but the euro-agreements prevent this. And even if they could do the IMF number, their huge mortgage debts contracted in euros and Swiss francs over the past decade would still be unrepayable.

Latvia’s government was trying to comply with IMF-imposed measures to qualify for an emergency loan, much like Argentina in 2001, when brutal cuts to education and social programs sparked a general strike and radicalized the entire nation (except, or course, those responsible for the crisis). The riots in Lativa brought the government down and its credit rating was just lowered to junk status.

It’s no better inside euroland. Q: What’s the difference between Ireland and Iceland ? A1: The letter “c”. A2: Six months.

We haven’t even mentioned Greece, which is already considered a failed state, virtually in a state of civil war since last September. And now the very pillars of the European Union are crumbling. In January, hundreds of thousands marched in French cities in the biggest protest in two decades. An ongoing month-long strike in France’s far-flung Guadeloupe is now full-scale urban warfare, with the dead including a trade union leader. The ruling white elite and tourists are at this very moment fleeing in panic. Martinique and Reunion have joined in.

In Britain demos are breaking out across the country protesting unemployment and the bank bailouts. The British National Party shocked the establishment by winning a council seat in Kent, “penetrating” the south of England, and are expecting major gains in the EU elections in June. Spain lost a million jobs in 2008 and the unemployment rate is expected to reach 25 percent this year. Spain’s (and Ireland’s) so-called wage inflation now requires wage deflation, workers are told. With Spain’s high debt levels, this is impossible. Even if it were possible, wage deflation is a recipe for revolution.

Marches protesting the economic plight of the people are expected to grow and lead to further violence throughout Europe, with Greece as the prequel. Suddenly, the specter of the end of the EU, certainly the end of the common currency, is being raised. Coined to convince the “free world” of the dangers of Communism, the domino effect is back with a vengeance.

The string pullers over the past two decades managed to transform the face of Europe, destroying the Soviet Union and expanding the EU and NATO rapidly eastward. But just as Napoleon and Hitler before them, the over-confident conquerors moved too far too fast, and now face the prospect of losing everything. The marvel of the euro zone is now derided as the Völker-Kerker (prison of nations) recalling the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Italian journalists have begun to talk of Europe’s “Tequila Crisis,” referring to the collapse of Mexico’s peso in 1993 when the elite took their money to the US. A similar capital flight from Club Med could set off an unstoppable process and even bring the euro down.

What is the euro, except a fixed exchange rate agreement among members? Skeptics have always dismissed it as a dangerous straightjacket, since Europe is far from uniform. It means national governments are highly restricted in their monetary and fiscal policies to deal with crises. It also means that ripples in Europe become tidal waves, as all the countries’ economic successes or failures happen together.

This is fine if governments are united in pursuing a common agenda to promote stability and prosperity for the common Europeans, but neoliberalism allows for no such political will. The common economic space has merely allowed large companies and banks to take control of the whole market, supposedly to be equal competitors to their big brothers in the US, China and elsewhere. But riding the wave of privatization and euro-expansion, they threw caution to the winds, with no strong national governments to clip their wings. The EU “government” is exposed as worse than useless, a rubber stamp for this Thatcherite mania, fooling Europeans into thinking there was someone controlling the private chaos.

As the euro begins to slide against the worthless dollar (that’s right), no one is seriously preparing for the possibility of its immanent collapse and what to do about it. Instead, incredibly, a Financial Times columnist calls on the EU to drop its euro-entry requirements for the “economies” of eastern Europe and quickly shepherd them into the “safe” euro-fold. Just as mad as this strategy may seem is the one presently being implemented: to pump endless cash into the banks that have recklessly moved into this economic wasteland.

It is vital to keep the edifice afloat, after all. Virtually all of Eastern Europe is in hock to Western banks and as they go bankrupt, or for the “lucky” ones, their exchange rates plummet with respect to the euro, they represent bargain-basement fire sales for the West. The Polish zloty plunged 50 percent in the past six months, making it impossible to repay the countless euro-Swiss loans contracted by unwitting Poles, lured by low interest rates.

The banks have lent Eastern Europe about $1.7 trillion, since “independence” and this must be saved from disappearing at all costs. The currently proposed $31 billion to be pumped into the banks is peanuts — as long as national governments (that is, the people) pay it, of course.

If the steely-nerved bankers can stay the course, the pay-off is potentially immense. Lured into euro-clutches, these orphan nations can now be squeezed. Integration with a vengeance, on a par with their WWII and post-WWII occupations. At least under post-WWII socialism (which many Eastern Europeans remember fondly), the common people were provided for and the ruling party’s privileges circumscribed. But if today’s unsupervised elites keep sending their money abroad, the pit becomes bottomless. Riots turn into revolutions.

France will no doubt lead the way. Students occupied the Sorbonne recently in a long-running battle against President Nicolas Sarkozy’s education reforms, supported by 70 percent of the population. French radical politicians Jose Bove and the popular New Anti-Capitalist Party leader Olivier Besancenot have already traveled to Guadeloupe in solidarity with the strikers. “Their fight is our fight — against capitalism, exploitation, the big supermarkets,” exhorted a newly radicalized Bastille district activist.

Sarkozy’s popularity is at its lowest at 36 percent, with a similar number of French saying they would welcome strikes “on a huge scale.” The pollster Dabi said, “There is a sense of incoherence and a sense that Sarkozy does not really know where he is taking France. But that’s largely because there is an incoherence and Sarkozy doesn’t know here he is taking France.”

The same can surely be said of all Western leaders these days. United States President Barack Obama has it easy. He at least has a clear agenda to tear up — the Reagan-Bush one. But the only common policy of Western leaders so far is one dictated by the banking elite: “Bail us out, but leave us alone.” If anything, they are demanding coordinated bailing out and calling for a new international banking institution, which of course they will control, and which, we are supposed to believe, will avert any further unpleasantness. Such an institution may well act to avert capitalism’s collapse, but there will be lots of “unpleasantness”, evenly distributed among the common people.

The sunny euro-vistas of yesterday are no longer. Eastern Europe risks being eaten alive by Western banks. Western Europe risks mere stagnation and endless political unrest. All indications are that this is a dead-end; that the only way forward is to break the hold that the economic system has on both East and West. The upheavals have begun and the real domino effect will spread throughout Europe this summer. That the European parliament elections in June will take place in a hostile atmosphere is an understatement.

Using a crisis to push through unpopular measures doesn’t work anymore, as Greek and Latvian politicians have discovered. The streets are already ringing with the cry: “We won’t pay for your crisis!”

Despite being ideological opposites, Harper was nonetheless delighted that he merited the coveted “first”. It traditionally belongs to Mexico, but Harper is a key ally for Obama in his Afghanistan war, vowing to keep 2,500 troops in the volatile Kandahar region for another two years despite polls that show 60 per cent of Canadians want them home now. They have suffered the third largest casualty rate, with 108 deaths. No doubt Obama’s generals decided on where Obama would go first.

Other issues that unite the neighbors in an uncomfortable embrace are trade and environmental regulations. On the eve of the trip, Obama renewed his call to renegotiate North American Free Trade Agreement, an early campaign pledge that he dropped once his campaign was taken over by the corporate elite. He emphasized that he wanted to strengthen labor and environmental standards in the pact, which have proven toothless in practice. “My hope is that . . . there’s a way of doing this that is not disruptive to the extraordinarily important trade relationships that exist between the United States and Canada.” Harper warned that it was a “very complex agreement” and cautioned against reopening it.

However, the deepening depression means that just about any policy is now up for grabs. The $787 billion stimulus package originally included a “Buy American” clause for idle steel producers, which alarmed Canadian producers. Harper dared to lecture him publicly: “If we pursue stimulus packages, the goal of which is only to benefit ourselves . . . we will deepen the world recession, not solve it.” Obama reassured Harper that he wanted “to grow trade and not contract it”.

NAFTA was signed into law by president Bill Clinton in 1993, bringing the US , Canada and Mexico into a common market. At the time, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger described the agreement as “the most creative step toward a new world order since the end of the Cold War.” Interestingly, he just last month called the current world economic crisis a “unique opportunity for creative diplomacy” to achieve his “new world order.” For those who shudder at what he has in mind, perhaps NAFTA would be better scrapped than merely adjusted. Since free trade suggests a minimum of governmental regulation, the fact that the agreement between political elites is “very complex” is an oxymoron.

The agreement has little to do with genuine free trade and a great deal to do with greater economic and even political union. It builds on the experience of the European Union, which was the result of a series of NAFTA-like agreements (the European Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market, the European Atomic Community and the European Community). The EU now has its own flag, parliament, courts, currency, and issues passports. But with the current economic crisis, thankfully, there is as yet little incentive to pursue such an agenda in North America.

Canada has several complaints about unfair US trade practices, one concerning beef exports, which will be exacerbated by US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s proposal for changes to country-of-origin labels on meat sold in US stores. Canada shelved a World Trade complaint last month that charged the US labeling law was a trade barrier that depressed prices for Canadian livestock. Canadian Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz warned that Canada would revive its WTO challenge if proposed protectionist rules are put in place.

Regarding energy and the environment, the two leaders are poles apart. Harper has made Canada the object of ridicule for his refusal to abide by Canada’s commitments to the Kyoto Protocol, his enthusiasm for the ecologically disastrous tar sands of Alberta, and Canada ’s wasteful use of energy in general. Nonetheless, the leaders discussed a joint initiative to strengthen research and development on clean energy, including the reduction of carbon emissions and the development of a shared electricity grid. “I’m quite optimistic that we now have a partner on the North American continent that will provide leadership to the world on the climate change issue, and I think that’s an important development,” said Harper. He hopes this “leadership” will agree to exempt Canada ’s oil sands from any new American environmental regulations.

A note of whimsy was struck by ageing French movie icon and long time animal-rights activist Brigitte Bardot, who has for decades campaigned against Canadians hunting baby seals on ice flows in the spring. She sent a letter to Obama urging him to speak out against seal hunting while in Canada. The US banned Canadian seal products in 1972. The EU is considering a ban on seal products, and Bardot expressed hope that Obama could use his positive image in Europe to lobby for the ban.

Harper is fretting these days, worried about his own political future, after calling an early election last November, hoping to coast to a majority government on the back of his beloved US hawks. But his calculations were mistaken. The hawks were trounced (unless you consider Obama a hawk in sheep’s clothing), and he was almost deposed by an invigorated opposition. They called on Governor General Jean to give them the reins of power after Harper introduced a budget undermining election financing laws and ignoring the economic crisis besetting the world. What Harper told Jean has never been disclosed, but she quickly caved in to Harper and dissolved parliament for two months, letting Harper lick his wounds and introduce a budget that met all the opposition’s demands. However, the writing is on the wall for this “unsexy” politician, and Obama would do well to keep a polite distance from him.

Canada’s relationship with the US was famously compared to a mouse sleeping with an elephant by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Jack Granatstein of the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute grimly called on Canadians to pray for Obama to get America’s act together, writing that, “if the United States falls into the pit, Canada will be one of the nations dragged down with it.”

Hudson calls it “Stage One of a two-stage plan,” so far unannounced, to transfer trillions more to people who, in any sane world, would be behind bars, the purpose being to re-inflate the bubble economy that made them wealthy beyond their dreams while leaving wages stagnant and creating little meaningful work. The “change” president is continuing the Bush-Paulson giveaway, allowing the process of creating a few giant Wall Street-based trusts which will act as the economy’s central planners in the new “socialism for the rich.” Any talk of nationalization should be seen in this context. “Washington has given them $9 trillion so far, with promises now of another $2 trillion — and still counting.” Instead of sputtering about capping CEO bonuses, if he is serious, why hasn’t Obama reversed the Clinton-Rubin repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, responsible for the massive speculation for the past two decades?

But this is in fine American tradition, albeit taken to the extreme. Bankers have always worked hand-in-glove (either that or dagger-in-hand) with politicians. 19th century Democratic president Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill to give Texas farmers $100,000 to buy seed grain during a drought, saying: “Federal aid in such cases encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character.” However, he thought nothing of giving bondholders $5 million the same year. After WWII, Keynesianism provided an intellectual gloss to government handouts to failing industries, especially military, with workers similarly being lectured about belt tightening as executives quietly deposited their bonuses and accumulated their stock options.

To pretend that throwing all this money at a sick economy will heal it is the height of folly. To understand the way out of the crisis, compare the situation with the world food crisis. Is the current economic crisis due to too many people? That may sound foolish — it is — but that is how many economists address the food crisis. Leaving aside the debate about an optimal global (or US) population size, the correct answer to both is: the crisis is due to extremely skewed distribution of wealth and lack of access by the poor to basic food (and increasingly now in the US — shelter).

The current crisis simply can’t be addressed without facing the accumulation of 30 years of creeping — under Bush II, accelerating — income redistribution in favor of the rich. The wealthiest one percent has increased their share of returns to wealth — dividends, interest, rent and capital gains — from 37 percent a decade ago to nearly 70 percent today. This is the highest proportion since records started, worse than the situation in the 1920s, which incidentally preceded the 1930s. Without facing up to this, no stimulus package will bring prosperity to the homeless and jobless. Certainly no tax reductions will bring any positive effect when more and more are too poor to pay taxes, and the rich, who benefit from this, will spend not on basics, but luxury goods, probably imports, or just spirit the extra funds into offshore accounts to avoid any worries.

The centerpiece of the stimulus package, much like president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s, is job creation. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said that, “millions and millions and millions of people will be helped, as they have lost their jobs and can’t put food on the table of their families.” All well and good, though there is no guarantee that even if millions of jobs are created in the short term that this will translate into a systemic recovery. This was the case under FDR. It took WWII — government-enforced socialism for all — to drag the US out of depression.

This brings us to the other distortion that has continued to weaken the US economy since the days of Reagan (really, since WWII): the inexorable militarization of the US economy, spending money on unproductive — indeed destructive — commodities, which only sap the economy’s vitality, providing no general-use infrastructure which can benefit all, no goods which can be consumed or traded except to foreign dictators quelling rebellions. The soaring trade and budget deficits are a direct result of the joint US obsession with weapons and tax reduction. As the Soviet Union found during its economic crisis in the 1980s, spending an exorbitant amount — almost a trillion dollars by the US today — on military non-production is simply unsustainable. America accounts for nearly half of all global military spending, an amount larger than the next 45 nations together.

Just as the answer to the food crisis is promoting land redistribution, providing peasants with ready access to the means of feeding themselves, so the answer to the world economic crisis is wealth redistribution, putting money in the hands of the poor, who will be likely to spend it locally on basics, supporting themselves and their local communities. The most successful of Obama’s stimulus projects will put money into their hands which will be rapidly respent on, say, house repairs, starting new small businesses, paying wages to daycare workers, and the like.

The original stimulus package included a clause requiring US steel to be used in spending, a perfectly rational “protectionist” policy. “Buy American” should not to be denounced per se. It is nothing more than an application of “think globally, but act locally.” Any spending to stimulate the economy should of course rely on local production wherever possible. It is the government’s role to make sure it is more economical to buy and sell locally than truck and fly goods thousands of miles. If this violates WTO rules, then work to change those irrational rules, for as well as hurting local economies, they promote ecologically harmful global warming.

The days of relying on both corporate agriculture and global finance and industry are numbered, the very opposite of the conclusion proposed by Henry Kissinger in The Independent (UK) on 20 January. There, he gloats of the “unique opportunity for creative diplomacy” which the present crisis provides. True, he admits that it struck “a major blow to the standing of the United States ,” encouraging every other country to “seek to make itself independent, to the greatest possible degree, of the conditions that produced the collapse.” So far so good. But his prescription, strangely, is more “common action”, a “political” “new world order,” corresponding to the international economic one now in existence, the alternative being “chaos”.

But political decisions are already largely coordinated among countries at such gatherings as the recent WEF and the upcoming G20. These gathering of the most powerful political and economic leaders occur like clockwork, and any independence shown by mavericks, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or Iranian President Ahmedinejad, is ruthless attacked and subverted, if possible. No, the NWO, relying on increasing world corporate control — legitimated by use of the likes of the UN — has come to an impasse not by some fluke, but because it is wrongheaded. It has produced “chaos”, and it must be abandoned.

Kissinger calls for “a new Bretton Woods,” finessing the important point that this was a financial institution set up primarily by the victorious US to meet its own global needs. It would be more apposite to call for “a negation of Bretton Woods.” His provides a choice between “an international political regulatory system with the same reach as that of the economic world” (that is, consolidate the current inequalities) vs. a dismantling of the current global monster, and of course opts for the first alternative. But, it, ably administered by Kissinger et al, is the one that brought us to this impasse. The “chaos” Kissinger fears is really the democratic awakening of the people. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent eclipse of socialism, they have been lulled into accepting the soothing promises of politicians in thrall to their ever more powerful corporate masters.

“The extraordinary impact of the President-elect on the imagination of humanity is an important element in shaping a new world order,” enthuses Kissinger. But will Obama’s stimulus package be an opening salvo in the battle for even greater imperial overreach, or will Obama listen to the millions of simple Americans who stumped for him and reject this ominous NWO proposed by his patron?

Food is a human right, but production to feed mainly corporate profit will merely lead to more food crises. Similarly, fulfilling all our basic needs should be a human right as enshrined in the vaguely worded UN Declaration of Human Rights, which should be dusted off and promoted as part of the inspiration for Obama’s defining policy tackling the current economic “chaos”. A truly new world order requires stimulating real people, not yielding to banksters’ threats and the failed policies of Kissinger et al. There Is No Other Alternative.