As must have been the case with all previous hegemonic societies, our nation’s pursuit of warfare abroad is inevitably cloaked in the rhetoric of national defense. Somehow the story is sufficiently twisted that it seems an inferior military force abroad poses an enormous threat to our national interest, and to such an extent that we must send our troops abroad to confront this force in its own territory and with civilian casualties almost entirely limited to its population. Intellectuals vent their doubts, so homespun Americans become indignant in response, insistent on the need once again to enforce their vision of democratic exemplification to the rest of the world. Meanwhile, our nation’s banks and defense industries reap enormous profits and increased financial liquidity benefits the rest of our population at least to a certain extent.

Warfare accordingly continues to play too big a role in our nation. There has been too much combat on foreign soil–far more than for all other nations combined since World War II. Vietnam and Iraq were illegal, the first because Secretary of State Dulles refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords, thereby precluding American involvement in the avoidance of a plebiscite election as dictated by the Accords, and the second by having bypassed Article 42 of the U.N. Charter, having already benefited from Article 41. The rest of the wars, if arguably legal, could have been avoided without much difficulty by effective negotiations. And too many innocent civilians have needlessly died in these wars. U.S. troops caused the deaths of as many as three million people in Vietnam and an estimated one million in Iraq, totaling two-thirds of the Holocaust victims during World War II. Throw in the two million lives lost in Korea, which was partly our responsibility, and we just about match the Holocaust. Not to forget the heavy financial burden of war, for example the congressional allocations to the military industrial complex to equip and supply the pursuit of warfare. According to Stiglitz, the total cost of our “war of choice” against Iraq will ultimately cost $3 trillion dollars from taxpayers that go into the military industrial complex.

The total financial cost of our military establishment has been no less debilitating to our economy than was the case for most of the previous hegemonic civilizations described two decades ago by Paul Kennedy in his excellent book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House, 1987). It seems that all U.S. military expenditures combined, inclusive of such items as the Veterans Administration, now consume at least 55% of our annual federal budget. This might seem useful in military Keynesian terms, but the total now equals or exceeds military expenditures for the rest of the world combined. Whether we like it or not, our nation has become addicted to warfare since World War II. Most of our military budget is spent on defense industries with trickle-down benefits to a large number of grateful subcontractors (most of them highly patriotic for obvious reasons) as well as their host communities (also highly patriotic for obvious reasons), but this can only be at a substantial cost to the rest of the nation without sufficient trickle-down access. In general Vermont farmers tend to lose; Texas laborers tend to win.

But it cannot be sufficiently emphasized that the Vietnam and Iraq wars–as well as the military operations in Korea, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and even Yugoslavia–have been only the tip of the iceberg. According to Chalmers Johnson in The Sorrows of Empire, published in 2004, 725 U.S. military bases, inclusive of sixteen Main Operating Bases (MOBs), exist in as many as 41 nations. Altogether, 250 thousand U.S. troops are stationed abroad, including 118 thousand in Europe, 92 thousand in east Asia, and 14 thousand in the western hemisphere. Significantly, there was almost no military conflict in these regions at the time of Iraq’s invasion and occupation, yet large numbers of U.S. troops continued to remain deployed in these regions instead of being transferred to Iraq to participate in the fighting there. Preceding the 2007 “surge,” military spokesmen repeatedly insisted in prime time interviews that more troops were needed in order to win in Iraq. They neglected to explain why many thousands of U.S. troops were retained in military bases elsewhere in the world, apparently as a no longer necessary Cold War measure that seamlessly converted into a peacetime occupation strategy. It almost seems as if our government has had an unspoken commitment since the fall of the U.S.S.R. to dominate the entire world into the indefinite future. Proponents might argue that their purpose is to protect the world, but this is to protect the world under our nation’s authority, hence to dominate the world, just as gangland protectionist rings “protect” those they extort money from. It’s no accident that U.S. investors are active worldwide with governments fully cooperative with U.S. authority.

Also deplorable has been the ongoing effort of our government to intervene in other country’s internal affairs by manipulating elections, assassinating both enemies and potential enemies, and in general bringing into play whatever dirty tricks seemed useful. As calculated by William Blum in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, published in 2003, at least fifty such interventions can be counted for less than the four decades since World War II. Among the many countries manipulated by the CIA and other such U.S. organizations have been Greece in the late forties, the Philippines in the 1940s and 50s, Iran and Guatemala in 1953-54, Syria in 1956-57, Ecuador in 1960-63, Iraq in 1972-75, Australia in 1973-75, Angola in 1975-the 80s, Morocco in 1983, and so on. Among the many foreign political leaders targeted for assassination were Chou en-Lai of China, Lumumba of the Congo, Castro of Cuba, Torrijos of Panama, Sukarno of Indonesia, Mossadegh of Iran, Nehru of India, Nasser of Egypt, Sihanouk of Cambodia, Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, De Gaulle of France, Allende of Chile, Manley of Jamaica, Milosevic of Yugoslavia, etc. Fortunately many of them lived to talk about it, but others didn’t.

According to John Perkins in Confessions of a Hit Man, published five years ago, the arrangement was simple enough. Bogus U.S. economists including himself (which he freely admitted) would try to convince foreign governments to “liberalize” their economies by accepting U.S. investments without imposing fees, tariffs, or other such costs. If these governments refused to cooperate, U.S. secret agents identified as “jackals” would arrive to take whatever steps seemed necessary in order to reverse the situation, even if it meant destabilizing the government or assassinating whoever seemed an impediment, presidents and friendly dictators included. And if the jackals failed, then an invasion became necessary as in the cases of Iraq, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Of course the issue was always the war against communism, but somehow the beneficiaries just as inevitably turned out to be U.S. business ventures that had financial interests to be protected and/or advanced by U.S. military forces.

Our country’s unique relationship with Israel has been the source of enough problems that it deserves to be listed here in a category of its own. The $3 billion per year of foreign “aid” to Israel ($500 per capita) is relatively small compared to our nation’s budget as a whole even when a large variety of supplemental benefits provided to Israel is taken into account. However, this supportive relationship has borne unexpected difficulties that Truman should have recognized when he hastened Israel’s creation as a campaign strategy in 1948. Without any clear mandate, Israel’s relentless effort since then to annex adjacent territories in the West Bank has led to such excessive persecution of the Palestinians that the world’s entire Muslim population has become hostile to both Israel and the United States as its primary benefactor. Bin Laden’s first public statement after 9-11, made available on October 7, primarily spoke of retaliation for the American role in Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.

The perhaps unrecognized Machiavellian advantage of our nation’s connection with Israel right now is that it has permitted military Keynesianism to persist during the Obama administration through combat with a variety of Arab nations hostile to Israel. Arab terrorists have replaced the commies as our nation’s most invidious enemies. As a result, warfare continues to play its role as a crutch to our economy exactly when it needs it the most. Obama insists the Afghan campaign is not a war of choice, but of course it has become one, and its potential economic benefit to our defense industries (i.e., all our major industries) can hardly have been overlooked. There is no doubt that bin Laden is still loose and that al Qaeda continues to thrive in Afghanistan as a potential threat to our nation. However, their role focuses U.S. aggression and thereby intensifies their appeal in almost every nation in the region. In fact, al Qaeda’s successful recruitment of guerrilla fighters thrives because of our nation’s aggressive military effort of to root it out in any particular country. And why not? If U.S. troops invaded and forcibly occupied Canada to root out murderous Canadians hostile to Americans, it wouldn’t be long before everybody in Canada could be treated as a potential enemy. The same with Afghanistan, especially now that the brutal Afghan warlord general Dostum has been allowed to return to the fold as a supporter of our puppet president Karzai.

One also asks whether Obama actually thinks combat can be limited to the mountainous region on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or is a new full-scale war what he really wants? Because that’s what he is going to get. Of course we’ll “win” if this is his intention–but all we need to do is declare victory and withdraw any time we want, since the Taliban lacks the capacity to chase us beyond their own border. Nor do they want to. As a result the war is both unwinnable and unlosable–in other words at least as much a quagmire as Vietnam had been. But does Obama really want to mount an escalation that might be judged by history with the same disfavor as President Johnson’s fabricated 1965 Tonkin attack and Bush’s fabricated 2003 threat of Saddam Hussein’s atomic capability? Does he want to be another infamous American president for exactly the wrong reasons?

One also wonders why Obama has, if anything, expanded the use mercenary forces such as Blackwater (now identified as Xe) in Afghanistan, Iraq, and even Africa. It has been disclosed, for example, that roughly one quarter of our nation’s intelligence activity in Afghanistan is farmed out by the CIA to Blackwater. Once Obama and Secretary of State Clinton opposed Blackwater–now they depend on it. Also, why has Obama chosen to enlarge the size of our military by as many as 21,000 new troops, 17,000 of which will be sent to Afghanistan? And why doesn’t he put more effort into negotiating with Taliban factions who are willing to reject al Qaeda–just as was done to “win” the war in Iraq by paying once hostile Sunni tribal leaders monthly salaries between $240 and $300 per month to participate in the so-called surge? And when will our administration finally realize, if they haven’t already, that U.S. combat troops make inferior occupation troops, often provoking a hostile opposition sufficient to initiate a costly full-scale war? This is exactly what happened between March and September, 2003, when the Iraqi populace were goaded by the severe and unprovoked aggressiveness of U.S. troops into outright resistance. Many of these troops are now being used in Afghanistan. Do we truly want déjà vu all over again? Would McCain have gotten away with this sort of thing if he had been elected president? Indignant liberals would be demonstrating in Washington, New York City, and elsewhere.

As for potential conflict with Iran, why does Defense Secretary Robert Gates announce a “routine” trip to Israel to consult its leadership and deny that this consultation would involve the current standoff with Iran? And then, having concluded consultations, why does he announce in his press conference a September deadline imposed on Iran to fully cooperate with U.S. objectives? And why does he insist that if Israel chooses to attack Iran the U.S. would have no recourse but to accept this choice? Is an attack on Iran now in the works? Would this also be suggested by Dennis Ross’s reassignment to the National Security Council perhaps to take operational control of such an attack? If this is what happens, Zionists will once again succeed in diverting U.S. policy from the effort to obtain negotiations with the Palestinians to a peripheral issue that diverts our energies toward a useful and relatively harmless cause beneficial to Israel on another front–this time Iran instead of Iraq.

Speeches by Obama now and again indicate his full awareness that genuine peace is only possible in the Near East once a two-state solution has been implemented between Israel and the Palestinians. But what exactly has been done to bring this about since he came into office? Why hasn’t his administration offered Israel an obvious quid pro quo through diplomatic and trade relations with all Arab nations plus the guaranteed elimination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program–if it has one–in exchange for Israel’s full acceptance of a viable two-state solution respected by both parties? Just as our government has generously financed Israel’s aggressive foreign policy since 1967, it would even more generously finance a peace settlement based on all the agreements already in the works at Oslo, Madrid and Taba, to say nothing of Camp David, Roadmap and Annapolis. All groups and nations involved would get a fat payoff, even ourselves by once and for all terminating the crisis. Suddenly there would be an area-wide peace agreement such as has been proposed repeatedly by the Arab League. Both the Iranians and Palestinians would gladly accept such an arrangement as would most nations outside the Near East. Until this can be brought about, the United States will remain hostage to the Near East quagmire so effectively orchestrated by the Zionist lobby with lies, threats, broken promises, staged indignant rallies, and the like.

Turning to South America, why the announced establishment of three or four new U.S. military bases in Colombia near the border of Venezuela? Even if the command of these bases is turned over to the Colombian government, as Hillary Clinton promises, construction costs would obviously be paid by ourselves, and we can expect that American troops would be permitted to be stationed there. There would also be an airfield for military transport planes and fighter planes. Is this Obama’s first step to enlarge our military presence in South America in order to combat “Chavismo” at the very edge of South America’s most hostile nation? Also, why has it been disclosed that several other bases–half a dozen in all–would be constructed elsewhere in South America from the Andes to the Caribbean? Moreover, was the present military insurrection of Honduras a thousand miles away intended (or permitted) as a “friendly” takeover in the spirit of President Aristide’s forced exile from Haiti in 2004 orchestrated by the Bush administration? Is Obama actually dusting off Otto Reich’s counter-productive South American strategy a couple decades ago in order to initiate full-fledged regional imperialism once again in South America? How can an apparently aggressive shift in policy be undertaken at the same time both in South America and the Near East inclusive of Russia? Is some kind of an overarching strategy in the works to expand our military presence worldwide even further? Or is the timing simply to be chalked up to ineptitude by Washington bureaucrats? They shouldn’t want this kind of thinking to happen.

5. Running Dogs That Bark Up The Wrong Tree

American news coverage is heavy, lasting from morning to night, but with a paucity of genuine new information. Crime and human interest stories predominate, and, relevant to what might be described as “hard” news, the same stories are incessantly repeated until the topic has exhausted the public “mind,” whereupon the press switches to other such stories to fill the gap. In too many instances the primary task is to suppress crucial facts and shape and craft the stories that cannot be avoided to such an extent that they keep the American public ignorant of exactly the issues that matter the most. On the other hand, information that cannot be ignored but is found distasteful and/or ideologically unacceptable (for example, U.S. drones that accidentally kill large wedding parties in Pakistan) lasts just one or two news cycles at most.

Most obviously, the “respectable” American media has almost without exception given full support to our nation’s foreign intervention across the globe. Seldom does news coverage feature information that might discredit military operations against a foreign nation. Instead, with the current exception of Afghanistan, our press has celebrated the cause with full patriotic approval exactly when its approval has seemed the most useful. News coverage repeatedly vilifies the putative enemy and extols the American cause and those engaged in making it happen. And whenever needed, competent patriotic reporters can be found who willingly participate in bending their evidence to support a positive judgment, as illustrated by Barbara Miller’s famous coverage of U.S. preparations preceding the invasion of Iraq as well as the bias of “embedded” war correspondents in response to the fighting. The same “respectable” journalistic support, if not quite at the same level, was put into play to justify military operations in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, and Afghanistan. All of these wars of choice were more or less illegal and ill conceived, and in at least two instances–Iraq and Vietnam–they were finally ruinous to our nation’s sense of collective decency among those who keep track of foreign policy issues. Yet the press promoted them with great enthusiasm exactly when they could have been prevented if there were more public opposition at the time.

Many claim the basic problem is that news coverage has become a commodity almost totally dominated by such media giants as Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and the New York Times Company. Among all these corporate entities, profit predominates at the expense of keeping the public informed. In varying degrees, with Fox at one extreme and the New York Times at the other, the reporter’s “job” of telling stories with a guaranteed audience takes precedence over informing the public at large on an adequate basis. Of course a modicum of information remains important, but it plays second fiddle to the bottom line, the profits guaranteed by the size and enthusiasm of the audience. As a rule of thumb, media owners are Republicans, reporters are middle-of-the-road Democrats (with one or two liberal Democrats to enliven the package), and publishers mediate between owners and reporters, almost inevitably giving the nod to the owners when the choice really matters, for example when it comes time to endorse a political candidate. The bias–and there always is one–thus tilts toward conservatism with a sprinkling of information that might be considered middle-of-the-road liberal.

As an exception to the rule, significant bias often occurs in news coverage relevant to Israel. The news corporations listed above are dominated by billionaires and multi-millionaires incidentally friendly to the Zionist cause as illustrated by their willingness to publicize Arab atrocities and to suppress information about Israeli transgressions. This bias seems evident in the almost total suppression of information about Sivan Kurtzberg and four other Israeli citizens (two of whom were connected with Mossad) when they were arrested at the edge of a New Jersey highway cheering and photographing the 9-11 catastrophe across the Hudson River. It seemed at the time that they were somehow involved in the event, if only as witnesses who knew in advance that it was going to occur. They were held in detention for 71 days, then flown back to Israel with little if any publicity. This bias may also be observed in the almost total lack of press coverage relevant to the 2005 story about Larry Franklin, a Zionist spy who served at a high level as a Pentagon analyst, having been caught and then involved in a sting operation that trapped Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman of AIPAC in the act of accepting secret information to be forwarded to Israel. Many other Zionist spies embedded in U.S. agencies might also have been uncovered if the investigation had been pursued more effectively, but it wasn’t, and the case against Rosen and Weissman was finally closed based on the argument that the secret information was so sensitive that it could not have been used as evidence in a courtroom hearing.

On the other hand, the media’s persistent anti-Arab bias has been in in full display most recently in the media’s top billing over the better part of a week of its indignation with the release of Abdel Baset al Megrahi from prison in Scotland for the destruction of Pan American flight 103 in 1988, over two decades ago, in which a total of 270 people were killed. The official explanation for releasing Megrahi, the token culprit, was his terminal cancer. But whether or not he had any part in the conspiracy–which he has persistently denied–the U.S. media has featured his presumed guilt while totally neglecting the probable justification for this act of terrorism, either the earlier sinking of a couple of Libyan boats in the Gulf of Sidra by American fighter planes or the destruction just six months earlier of an Iranian civilian airliner, flight IR 655, by antiaircraft fire from the U.S. aircraft carrier Vincinnes under the command of Captain Will Rogers III. In this case 290 passengers died (twenty more than in flight 103), 66 of whom were children en route to a vacation with their families on a recognized civilian air route. Neither Rogers III nor President Bush ever apologized for this inexcusable “mistake,” but a couple years later the U.S. government paid slightly over $60 million in damages.

Significantly, the IR 655 incident led to Iran’s acceptance of a U.N. ceasefire that ended the war between Iran and Iraq at a time when Reagan’s administration was intensifying the conflict with its Iran-Contra strategy that just happened to benefit Israel through the mutual destruction of two potential enemies. Today, newsmen such as Wolf Blitzer, a former reporter for the Jerusalem Post, excoriate Megrahi’s release without at all mentioning the overall context. As usual, they totally ignore the full story with the justified expectation that the American public has an even shorter memory than they themselves. But some of us don’t.

Too often the media seems almost eager to convey approved misinformation without questioning it. The majority of intrepid Fox watchers, for example, did not realize for a couple years beyond the 2003 invasion of Iraq that Saddam Hussein had no connection whatsoever with al Qaeda. Vice President Cheney kept insisting that a connection existed between the two based on false reports, and Fox kept this assumption afloat on the airwaves as an unassailable fact–which it wasn’t.

But excessive collaboration has been in effect at all levels in the media, including the three most respectable newspapers, the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Even today, for example, during the supposedly enlightened Obama administration, the American public is kept ignorant of the likelihood that our government secretly encouraged the recent coup d’etat in Honduras. Suggestive of this possibility are the facts that our nation already has 400 troops stationed there and that the military coup leaders are using the Washington lobbyist Lanny Davis, once closely connected with Bill and Hillary Clinton, to represent their case in Washington. It also seems relevant that a U.S. military airfield was used to help fly the deposed president out of Honduras and that U.S. government apologists first tried to excuse themselves with the argument that U.S. representatives in Honduras–whether military, diplomatic, or both–warned the coup leaders not to go through with their plan. How, though, could these Americans have done this if they weren’t aware that a coup attempt was being undertaken? And if they did know of it and opposed such a possibility, as they now insist to their Latin American friends, why didn’t they make an effort to prevent it?

But there are more questions as well. Honduras’ military leadership, mostly educated in Fort Benning’s School of the Americas, avoids doing anything we don’t let them do–so why did we let them do this? Why has our government belatedly cancelled its aid of $30 million to Honduras at exactly the same time as an aid package of $150 million is being provided by the IMF? Could our current administration’s manipulative involvement have anything to do with the State Department’s concern about President Zelaya’s friendship with President Chavez of Venezuela? And is its “lukewarm” support of Zelaya linked with the strategy of “waiting it out” until the next election is held on November 29, less than three months from now, when our government can once again help to manipulate election results as it has done so many times before? One wonders, though, if Zelaya might be able to run for reelection on the technicality that he has not served his full term. The answers to these and other such questions will have far-reaching impact on our nation’s relations with most of Latin America during the rest of Obama’s presidency. Yet coverage in the American press tells us very little. Everybody who is anybody in Latin America is well aware of what is involved–it is the supposedly informed American reader who remains ignorant.

Of course one cannot discount the possibility that the NYT and WP are now researching the Honduras issue to be able to give a full report later, but this did not happen after last August, when Georgia waged a surprise attack against South Ossetia. U.S. newspapers inclusive of the NYT and WP treated the counter-attack of Russian troops as having been the initial assault. But this was not true, and these news sources never fully conceded their error afterward. This left American readers with the false impression that the Russians were mostly at fault–which was not the case. Instead, the encounter began with a highly destructive midnight surprise attack on South Ossetia’s capital planned by Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili. One suspects his strategy was at least partly to expedite admittance in NATO in the near future. But Russians troops stationed in South Ossetia staged a successful counter-attack the next morning, and Georgian troops fled for their lives.

In his recent visit to Georgia, Vice President Biden was able to reinforce the notion that Russia was at fault in his repeated insistence that Russia had first launched the invasion, once doing so while standing arm in arm with Saakashvili. Whether he believes it himself, Biden’s misinformation is only possible because of the failure of most of the American press, especially the New York Times, to set the record straight. Now, just a couple weeks later, we hear that 750 Georgian troops are to be trained by U.S. marines, presumably to serve in Afghanistan. But who is kidding whom? If Russia retaliates, for example by supplying its most advanced technology to augment Iran’s defensive missile system, as it has already announced, the Cold War just might be effectively resurrected, and Obama will have pulled off what McCain could never have achieved if he had been elected. We also learn from a recent Nation article by Alexander Cockburn that Saakashvili has actually boasted of Georgia’s defense minister, David Kezerashvili, and Temur Iakobashvili, its minister in charge of negotiations regarding South Ossetia, having both been Israeli residents before coming to Georgia.

So the picture gets complicated. Israel demands that pressure be exerted on Russia to withdraw its offer to Iran, and the State Department seems to be making an effort to use both the training of Georgian troops and a new missile system offered to Poland, manned by as many as 100 American technicians, as leverage against Russia in order to give Israel what it wants–the opportunity to attack Iran without any possibility of high-tech Russian intervention. A little news coverage is to be found in our major newspapers relevant to some of what is happening right now, but only in bits and pieces, and without acknowledging the other side of the story or the full extent of all the tradeoffs now in play. If and when military conflict erupts in the region involving a Zionist attack on Iran, our press can take satisfaction in Israel’s “existential” justification, and nobody in the United States will know any better. And with Iran eliminated as a potential threat, Israel can junk any prospects of a regional solution for the Near East, letting it (Israel) continue doing what it pleases in its suppression of Palestinians, hopefully culminating in their transfer elsewhere within another decade or two.

6. Matters Cultural (or not)

And finally the demoralization of the American public cannot be disregarded as a byproduct of collective decline resulting from what might be described as spent expansionism. When a hegemonic civilization begins to disintegrate, in imperial America no less than our nine hegemonic predecessors, this decline bears with it with a full array of negative consequences that are more or less precipitous. Just as our economy is both broke and extravagant at the same time, and just as our military juggernaut is both powerful and ineffectual at the same time, our collective lifestyle and the social infrastructure that supports it are both wasteful and impoverished at the same time. The virtue of growth has degenerated into mere extravagance, and traces of decline can be expected to penetrate every aspect of society that has directly or indirectly shared in this excess. Enlarged rewards proportional to output become an insistence at all levels of economic behavior, and innovation (today a corporate mantra) usually consists of useless variation to suggest improvement instead of a cheapening of the product. Greed thrives, and intrinsic value almost completely takes a back seat to profit maximization.

Cherished possessions become junk too soon. Almost every feature of what we buy and use manifests planned obsolescence as first explained by Bernard London in 1932. Our cars, appliances, TV, computers, cameras, and telephone gadgetry too quickly become obsolete, far too vulnerable to damage, and far too intricate to understand for anybody but the most avid junkies devoted to their use. New houses and furniture are actually stapled together, and new cars and appliances too often depend on plastic components exactly at the sites where wear is the greatest, thus guaranteeing the need for early replacement. Metal isn’t exactly metal, nor is plastic quite plastic. Nor are wood and its various substitutes straight from the tree, if at all. Also, our food, our lawns, and everything we touch, smell or breath is laced with presumably non-toxic chemicals that somehow increase corporate profits but whose combined effect on our health can only be harmful. And so on.

Our medical system is the most expensive and least productive, dollar for dollar, in the entire post-industrial world. Our longevity statistics are actually forty-sixth from the top worldwide according to the 2008 CIA World Factbook estimates. Almost all of Europe lives longer than we do. Obesity has become rampant resulting from the consumption of processed junk food, much of it with the “diet” brand. Today an estimated one-third of the American public are both too bulky and too unhealthy, emblematic of our society as a whole. Also contributing to our nation’s bad health, as many as forty-six million Americans go without health insurance, and according to the Institute of Medicine in 2004, quoted by Wendell Potter (a former private health insurance publicist), as many as eighteen thousand Americans die each year because of the lack of health insurance. Their medical care at emergency wards is both too expensive and necessarily insufficient.

Meanwhile the 1200 private health care providers collectively reap about $30 billion in annual profits. Thirty percent of the health industry’s overall budget is spent on administration costs inclusive of profits, lobbying, and so-called “rescissions,” the ongoing effort of lawyers and medical researchers to exclude potentially unprofitable individuals (i.e., those with bad health) from its benefits programs. Trained employees scour the medical records of patients suddenly in trouble to find an earlier medical problem unmentioned in their original applications, however minor, then retroactively cancel these application for fraud exactly when these patients are the most desperately in need of this support.

No wonder the private health care industry depends as heavily as it does on lobbying elected officials in Washington and dredging up a swarm of blustering “angry” demonstrators presumably eager to retain their private health insurance. During the first three months of this year alone, it is also estimated that health-care companies and their employees have contributed almost $1.8 million to House members supervising health care reform, with the 52 Blue Dog Democrats receiving 25 percent more apiece than other Democrats. Another report says altogether $5.4 million has been spent in campaign donations, 60 percent of which went to the Blue Dog Democrats who now control the committees.

Unfortunately, single-payer insurance comparable to the programs of other post-industrial nations no longer seems a viable possibility in Congress. Moreover, even the substitution of a public option that would include single-payer insurance as a competitive alternative to private insurance plans seems likely to be sacrificed in favor of a much watered-down co-op option guaranteed to fail. Not surprisingly, conservative congressmen supportive of the health insurance industry are now suggesting that even this concession would be unacceptable to them. And it appears their lobby has the political leverage to impose their own choice. As a result, Obama’s campaign promise to obtain genuine health insurance reform if elected seems to have caved in despite its widespread public support, in large part because his public relations effort has been inadequate and he and his subordinates have been too compliant in their negotiations toward acceptable compromises. It seems he is willing to make basic concessions before obtaining an adequate tradeoff from those with whom he is negotiating.

Our educational system is also victimized by bloated costs matched with inferior results. This contradiction is relevant to both the current K-through-12 test-based improvement strategies and the steady degeneration of colleges and universities into corporate ventures that primarily treat knowledge and student enrollment as marketable commodities. Business Administration and computer technology have almost completely replaced history, philosophy, anthropology, and comparative literature as the chosen majors of students, and this is in fact the appropriate choice, given our nation’s current economic crisis. Our universities feature expensive new construction, high salaries for an excessive number of administrators, and a variety of operational costs that have escalated proportional to the total budget. If all these expenses were pegged to faculty salaries and/or student tuition at the same level as five, three, or even one decade ago, one suspects there would be no serious budget crisis. To offset these needless costs peripheral to the basic task of education, our colleges and universities jack up tuition each year and substitute instructors and teaching assistants for tenure-track faculty as much as possible–to the extent that many students do not encounter a genuine tenured professor until they reach their junior year. As a result many college-educated individuals are no longer particularly educated, only competent in making money–that is to say, in maximizing their income relative to the effort expended.

The gap between poverty and perceived respectability seems to have become almost unbridgeable. Vertical mobility has become less accessible than in the past, quite opposite the prevalent myth of poor people striking it rich one way or another. The few who do succeed (rock stars, etc.) get heavy publicity, and most others rest satisfied with the dream. The poor are mostly to be found in run-down urban neighborhoods, the middle-class in stapled split-level houses located in upscale housing projects, and the wealthy in gated communities crowded with stapled McMansions minus personal libraries except for Christmas and birthday books.

Moreover, traditional families have become almost archaic.

Among two-parent families both fathers and mothers work to support an artificial standard of living, and their children either run free or endure the supervision of nannies, many of whom have trouble coping with the English language. Similarly, the rates of divorce and single parenthood are off the chart, as is the deliberate rejection of parenthood among exactly the best and most suitable candidates for this role. Too many of our most promising potential parents don’t parent, while too many of our most challenged parents excessively test this challenge.

Meanwhile, a steady diet of teen-appeal TV movies, reality TV programming, violent computer games, and internet pornography consume the attention of too big an audience. Extravagance has become an obsession of too many Americans who live otherwise impoverished lives. Hollywood movies have become for the most part hebephrenic junk except for a few weeks preceding the March Oscar ceremonies. In response to this collective vulgarity, an ultra-reactionary tide of mindless opposition now manifests itself among our nation’s quasi-literate sub-population of supposedly concerned citizens. As to be expected, these strident misguided soldiers of democracy have latched onto arch-patriotism, fundamentalist religion, the rights of unborn babies, and the freedom to bear arms as the primary answers to our nation’s most compelling problems. A fraudulent $3 trillion war is far less offense to them than health care reform at a far lower cost that actually saves many tens of thousands of American lives.

So exactly who, then, best fits the description as our current generation’s great thinkers, great creators, great jurists and great statesmen comparable to those of previous generations? Alas, they don’t exist except for a few dozen angry iconoclasts, further testimony to our nation’s present decline into mediocrity despite its abundance of glitz and technological gimmickry.

7. Flopping on the Dock

President Obama is certainly bright and competent enough to confront this challenge under the right circumstances. However, he is far too conciliatory with the Bush-style Republicans who managed to survive the last election. It is to be conceded that his supposedly unbeatable majority in both houses of Congress is vulnerable to partisan resistance by blue-dog Democrats working in conjunction with their Republican friends equally indebted to the K-Street lobbyists. Nevertheless, Obama seems almost eager to appease these people, and if his ultra-conciliatory strategy persists much longer his administration is likely to replicate the disappointing outcome of the Carter and Clinton presidencies as opposed to the earlier successes of the FDR and Johnson administrations, the latter despite the glaring exception of the Vietnam War. Meanwhile, Obama’s current foreign policy adventurism should be curtailed, to begin with by coming up with an acceptable withdrawal strategy from Afghanistan. Obama might seem a more effective spokesman in defense of military operations abroad than Bush had been, but his ability to gild a sullied strategy will eventually catch up with him.

Again it is to be acknowledged that the United States enjoys dominant status in the world today similar to that of a handful of hegemonic societies–nine in all–that preceded us throughout the history of Western Civilization. But as much as anything this historic similarity suggests the likelihood of a similar outcome, of course in a manner appropriate to our particular circumstances. For history cannot entirely be forgotten. In 1909, exactly a hundred years ago, England seemed completely dominant across the entire world, and in 1809 so did Napoleon across Europe inclusive of Spain, Egypt, and soon enough Moscow. Both hegemons tumbled, England beginning with the First World War five years later, and France more decisively with Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo six years later. So what about our current prospects as a world power in 2009? As with all our precursors, paradoxically, our economy and military capabilities are at once both formidable and fatally overextended, dependent on a debt level one trillion dollars in excess of the total annual GDP of the entire world combined, the United States included. This amounts to incredible extravagance. It is what has paid for everything else, and now the party is over–almost. Like a landed barracuda, our nation vigorously flops on the dock. It is dangerous to everybody who stands too close but its chances of surviving much longer as a threat to others are slim. So the question poses itself what can be done to slow down this process, if not turn it around. For, again, our nation’s particular version of hubris seems to be running on empty, unable to take things much farther in the direction we’re going.

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.

Armenia

Mickey Z: This April, President Barack Obama broke campaign promise #511, namely to explicitly acknowledge the Armenian genocide as U.S. President. What happened on his recent visit to Turkey? What are the ramifications of his breaking this promise?

David Boyajian: President Obama visited Turkey from April 6 to 7, where he did not use the word “genocide” when referring to the 1.5 million murders committed by the Turkish Ottoman Empire against its Armenian citizens from 1915-1923. As a candidate, Obama had promised several times to do so. His statement in Turkey that he had “not changed his views”–implying he still believes it was genocide–was still a clear breach of his promise to use the “G word.” It was a case study in verbal gymnastics and political duplicity and should be studied in political science courses. Obama’s broken promise obviously eroded his credibility. The same holds true for Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who, as senators, supported the Armenian genocide resolution. They’ve since fallen disgracefully silent. Dr. Samantha Power should also be embarrassed. She’s the National Security Council’s genocide expert and a Pulitzer Prize winning author. As a campaign advisor to Obama, she made a video telling Armenian Americans that as president, Obama would definitely acknowledge their genocide. “Take my word for it,” she said.

Appeasement of a genocide-denying country such as Turkey is bad policy because its message is that genocides can be committed without consequence. Appeasement also erodes U.S. credibility on human rights and its stated desire to be a leader in genocide prevention. Unlike what lobbyists for Turkey would have us believe, Armenian genocide affirmation by America would not harm U.S. national interests. Turkey depends on the U.S. for weapons systems, support for billions in loans from the International Monetary Fund, security guarantees through NATO, advocacy for Turkish membership in the European Union, and more. Some 20 countries, including Canada, France, and Switzerland, as well as the parliaments of the EU and the Council of Europe, have acknowledged the Armenian genocide. None has ever experienced much more than a Turkish temper tantrum in retaliation.

MZ: Two days prior to Armenian Genocide Remembrance day — which annually falls on April 24 –Turkey and Armenia announced that they had agreed to a “roadmap” to normalize relations. What was the significance of this timing? What does the “roadmap” contain?

DB: Behind the scenes, the U.S. State Department had long been twisting Armenia’s arm to agree to a so-called “roadmap” with Turkey before President Obama issued what has become a customary “April 24 statement” by U.S. presidents marking Armenian genocide memorial day. The “roadmap,” announced on April 22, provided political cover for Obama to not use the “G word” on April 24. That is, since there was now supposedly a roadmap for normalization of relations — no matter how vague and hurriedly slapped together — Obama could say that he did not want to upset Turkey and the touted-as-highly-delicate Turkish-Armenian negotiations by using the “G word.” Notice that Obama did not consult with Armenian-Americans or Armenia about this. So much for promises and moral principles. It’s disgraceful that Obama, simply to help Turkey save face, not only broke his promise, but showed blatant disregard for the activists — not just Armenians — who labored so hard for many years for the cause of recognizing all genocides.

Armenia has always said that it was ready to normalize relations with Turkey — which would include Turkey’s re-opening its border with Armenia-without pre-conditions. Suddenly, however, Armenia has had pre-conditions imposed on it in this “roadmap.” According to the Turkish press, the “roadmap” allegedly contains pre-conditions such as: Armenia’s agreeing to a joint commission to examine the veracity of the Armenian genocide — yes, you heard right, Armenia’s formal recognition of current Turkish boundaries — which contain the Armenian homeland, and, possibly, Armenia’s accepting Turkish mediation in the conflict between Armenians and Azerbaijan over the disputed Armenian region of Karabagh — which is absurd since Azerbaijan and Turkey are allies. It appears that Armenia’s president, whose electoral legitimacy is in question, has been worn down in these negotiations by Turkey, the West, and possibly even Russia. And because the Armenian president is grappling with his legitimacy, he is not heeding the cautions being voiced by the people of his own nation about the “roadmap.”

MZ: The U.S. administration and mainstream media would have us believe that Turkey is seeking to “reconcile” with Armenia. Is “reconciliation” really a possibility, or have we misunderstood what’s going on?

DB: The word “reconciliation” in relation to Armenian-Turkish relations is largely an invention of U.S. policymakers, their emissaries, and the mainstream media who take their cues from them. What the U.S. and Europe would like to see is a more stable Caucasus — that is, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia — with open borders. Open borders, you see, would facilitate laying more oil and gas pipelines that would originate in the Caspian Sea region and proceed west to Turkey and then to energy-hungry Europe and Israel. The U.S. and Europe don’t want to put it quite that crudely — no pun intended — so they try to depict Armenia and Turkey as possibly “reconciling” and thus resolving all their differences. Turkey closed its border with Armenia in 1993 out of sympathy with its ally Azerbaijan, which was in a war with the Armenians of Karabagh, a historically Armenian-populated autonomous area within Azerbaijan that Stalin handed to Azerbaijan. Turkey has also been infuriated that Armenia and Armenians worldwide have been demanding that Turkey acknowledge the genocide it committed against Armenians.

Turkey has to acknowledge the genocide or there will never be peace between it and Armenia. And although the Armenian government has not put forth any claims for reparations arising out of the genocide, or for territory, many Armenians do have these goals. They cite the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which provided for Armenian sovereignty over Armenian lands upon which Turkey committed the genocide, and which have since been incorporated into what is now eastern Turkey.

MZ: The countries of the Caucasus are Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan. Most Americans, including the mainstream media, could not find these small countries on a map. Why are Russia and the U.S. — the latter being thousands of miles from the region — so interested in these three small countries?

DB: The Caucasus is truly Ground Zero in Cold War II, the ongoing conflict between the U.S. and Russia. The U.S. — along with Europe and the NATO military alliance — regard Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan as middlemen between the West and the gas and oil-rich regions around the Caspian Sea. The West has already laid gas and oil pipelines from Azerbaijan through Georgia and then on to Turkey and the west. The U.S. wanted those and future pipelines to bypass Russia and Iran because those two countries could shut such pipelines to pressure the U.S. and others. The only possible pipelines routes, therefore, are through Georgia or Armenia. But Turkey shut its border with Armenia in 1993, and Azerbaijan closed its border with Armenia even earlier due to the conflict between it and the de-facto Armenian region of Karabagh. That left Georgia as the only place for these Western pipelines. After the Russian-Georgian was last year, however, opening an alternative route has become more urgent. That largely explains the West’s renewed interest in Armenia. Conversely, Russia sees the Caucasus as within its traditional sphere of influence, and regards U.S. and European interest in the region as hostile acts.

Simultaneously, NATO has been pushing into the region. Georgia, Azerbaijan, and to some extent even the ex-Soviet republics on the other side of the Caspian Sea, are on the path to joining NATO. Russia was already upset that, following the Cold War, NATO had absorbed the former Warsaw Pact nations of Eastern Europe. NATO is now attempting, in effect, to do the same thing on Russia’s southern border. Russia fears that it will eventually be virtually surrounded by NATO. As a result, we have Cold War II: The U.S. and NATO are trying to push into the Caucasus and Central Asia, while Russia is trying to keep them out.

MZ: Why is Israel interested in the Caucasus, and what role is that country playing? Why are Israel and the pro-Israel lobby dead set against recognition of the Armenian genocide by the U.S. Congress?

DB: Israel is interested in getting some of the oil and gas that flow out of the Caspian Sea region. That is, from countries such as Azerbaijan, oil and gas flow west through Georgia, and then on to Turkey and other countries, possibly including Israel. After all, the U.S. and Turkey, which are important players in these pipelines, are obviously also very friendly with Israel. Israel also welcomes all non-Arab supplies of energy since they would make its Western allies less dependent on Arab oil and gas. And Israel has long had what it calls its Periphery Policy. Historically, Israel has not had good relations with its Arab neighbors. Therefore, to serve as counterweights, Israel befriends those countries further away, especially Muslim countries that aren’t necessarily sympathetic to Israel’s Arab neighbors or Palestinians. Azerbaijan, the only Muslim nation in the Caucasus, and some Muslim nations to the east, such as Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, are such countries. Fortuitously for Israel, they also possess significant deposits of gas and oil.

For decades, Israel and Turkey have had very good relations, mainly because they have a common ally, the U.S., and common adversaries, namely Arab nations. In the 1990’s, Israel and Turkey signed a number of military, economic, and political agreements that solidified their relationship. Even before that, but particularly after that, Turkey felt that it did not have sufficient lobbying muscle in Washington. So the Turks asked Israel to convince some of the pro-Israel lobby — the Anti-Defamation League, American Jewish Committee and others — to serve as advocates for Turkey. The Jewish lobby groups agreed. So these groups, as part of their deal with Turkey, deny or call into question the Armenian genocide and work to prevent U.S. acknowledgement of that genocide. These groups won’t tolerate anyone questioning of the Holocaust, and yet hypocritically work against acknowledgment of the Armenian genocide. Interestingly, for the last 2 years, Armenian Americans have exposed the ADL’s hypocrisy. In Massachusetts, for example, fourteen cities severed ties with an anti-bias program sponsored by the ADL because of the latter’s hypocritical and anti-Armenian stance (see NoPlaceForDenial.com). Armenians are determined to challenge genocide denial whenever it occurs.

MZ: Is there a problem with the way the mainstream media has been covering Armenian issues?

DB: Yes. The mainstream media have several problems. First, they know very little about the Caucasus or Armenians. Reporters tend, therefore, to copy each other and repeat clichés and falsehoods — such as that Armenia and Turkey are on the verge of a historic “reconciliation.” Media also tend to accept at face value the propaganda issued by Western governments whose interest in the Caucasus is — let’s be frank — not “reconciliation,” democracy, or human rights, but rather self-interested economic, political, and military political penetration of the Caucasus.

Turkey has about 30 times more people and territory, and 50 times more Gross Domestic Product, than Armenia. The power differential is enormous. Turkey has infinitely more allies in Western media, governments, think tanks, and multi-national corporations-and knows how to use them. Commentators who have a vested interest in touting Turkey for their own political and even financial reasons have particularly come out of the woodwork to deride legitimate Armenian demands. But we rarely hear commentators speak of how a small country that has been the victim of genocide, that has had most of its territory stripped from it, and that has been blockaded by the denier of that genocide — Turkey — is being threatened by that very same unrepentant denier. Mainstream media largely fail to appreciate the foregoing facts. Hopefully, Mickey, this interview will help the media and your readers understand the issues and the region a bit better.

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.

A federal jury in Manhattan convicted Noorzai September 22, for his involvement in an international narcotics trafficking conspiracy that sold tens of millions of dollars of heroin on world markets. The drug lord now faces life in prison and will be sentenced on January 7.

But things aren’t always what they seem.

Noorzai, described by federal investigators and journalists as “the richest man in Afghanistan,” enjoyed close and cosy relations with the Taliban’s top leader Mullah Omar, al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI).

Indeed, Noorzai had become one of the capo tutti capos of Afghanistan’s flourishing heroin rackets and profited handsomely from the protection of his Taliban “friends,” his ISI mentors and allegedly the CIA.

The Washington Post reported December 27, that Noorzai’s New York arrest was aided by a private security outfit, Rosetta Research and Consulting, a firm founded in 2003 by two “businessmen” which the Post refuses to name “because of the sensitive nature of their undercover work.”

“Mike A.,” a former Army Special Forces captain, “Patrick J.,” a former Treasury Department financial-crimes analyst and a group on investors connected to the law firm Motley Rice were principals in the sting that netted Noorzai. Rosetta’s mission according to the Post “was to assist in a mammoth legal case filed on behalf of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by tracking the flow of terrorist-connected money.”

In April 2005, Noorzai was lured to the United States from his Dubai estate “at the instigation of the Drug Enforcement Agency.” After a lavish 11 day holiday at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Manhattan where he enjoyed room service “and considered himself a guest of the U.S. government,” the drug kingpin was arrested.

But here’s the kicker: even as law enforcement sought his arrest as a world-class drug trafficker, Noorzai “was considered an asset by the intelligence side of the government.” And why wouldn’t they?

As I revealed in “Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century: U.S. Surrogates, Terrorists and Narcotraffickers,” (Antifascist Calling, December 19, 2008) citing the Pentagon’s Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130 published by Wikileaks, unconventional warfare is conducted “by, with or through surrogates” and that their preferred assets are irregular forces:

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political “undesirables.” (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3)

It is hardly a stretch that a drug kingpin like Haji Bashir Noorzai, with documented links to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces would be viewed as one such “surrogate.”

Spooks, Drugs and Thugs

When the Taliban was routed by the U.S. during the initial phase of its 2001 invasion, Noorzai was entrusted with some $20 million of the Taliban’s cash for “safekeeping,” according to the History Commons.

But Noorzai turned himself in to U.S. military forces where he spent several days in custody at Kandahar airport. Though questioned by U.S. officials, Noorzai was released and quietly disappeared into Pakistan after an associate was killed by U.S. forces. In a 2002 CBS News account, Noorzai reportedly said, “I spent my days and nights comfortably. There was special room for me. I was like a guest, not a prisoner.”

Eventually, Noorzai resurfaced in Peshawar. Armed with a Pakistani passport allegedly furnished by the ISI, the kingpin operated drug-processing laboratories that turned raw opium into finished “product,” heroin bound for European and U.S. markets.

In 2004, USA Today reported that “according to House International Relations Committee testimony this year, Noorzai smuggles 4,400 lbs. of heroin out of the Kandahar region to al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan every eight weeks.”

No surprise here. After all as journalist James Risen wrote in State of War, “Once the Taliban had been routed, top CIA officials had little interest in the drug problem.” Or if one took a more nuanced approach one would argue Noorzai’s operation amounted to a protected drug racket. The question is: whose racket was being protected? As Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid documented,

The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies. The United States told its British allies that the war on terrorism had nothing to do with counter-narcotics. Instead, drug lords were fêted by the CIA and asked if they had any information about Osama bin Laden. Thus, the United States sent the first and clearest message to the drug lords: that they would not be targeted. (Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, New York: Viking, 2008, pp. 320-321)

This was serious business. With the rapid expansion of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan after the American invasion, the price of heroin plummeted on world markets leading the syndicates that control the illicit trade to stockpile opium in an effort to bolster sagging prices.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) 2008 World Drug Report, the global increase in opium production “was almost entirely due to the 17% expansion of cultivation in Afghanistan.” In 2007, Afghanistan produced some 8,700 metric tons of opium that accounted for a staggering 92% of global opium production.

But in a twist that readers of Antifascist Calling are well aware, convicted narco Noorzai apparently enjoyed a cosy and productive relationship with both al-Qaeda and the CIA. According to the Post,

In an affidavit in his criminal case, he traced a history of cooperating with U.S. officials, including the CIA, dating to 1990. In early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Noorzai said he turned over to the U.S. military 15 truckloads of Taliban weapons, including “four hundred anti-aircraft missiles of Russian, American and British manufacture.”

From the perspective of the CIA and Defense Department, Noorzai could be a useful intelligence asset. But law enforcement officials continued to consider him a notorious criminal whose drug proceeds supported militants battling U.S. forces. Rosetta’s interest seemed purely commercial: to pump him for information that could be reported back to its clients, the Rosetta documents indicate. (Richard Leiby, “Tangled U.S. Objectives Bring Down U.S. Spy Firm,” The Washington Post, December 27, 2008, A01)

But lest we fall into an obvious trap and think that the Afghan drugs trade is solely a creature of the ISI, al-Qaeda or the Taliban, similar charges of corruption have been leveled against Hamid Karzai’s government. Indeed, in 2006 Guardian reported that senior political figures in Kabul, including the president’s brother, Walid, and deputy interior minister for counternarcotics General Muhammad Daud, are heavily involved in the illicit trade.

One official told the Guardian, “He [Daud] moves competent officials from their jobs, locks cases up and generally ensures that nobody he is associated with will get arrested for drugs crime.” The Interior Ministry according to published sources didn’t just fail to take down the warlords, “it became a major protector of drug traffickers.”

Additional reports identified the governor of Helmand province, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, a close friend and ally of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as personally profiting from the illicit trade. Indeed, British counternarcotics officials told Rashid that Akhunzada “was accused of favoring his cronies with prime real estate parcels and commanded hundreds of well-paid gunmen, while the police force was undermanned and unpaid and mullahs, aid workers, teachers, and women activists who opposed poppy cultivation were being gunned down.”

Helmand province, under the nominal control of the Karzai government and American and NATO allies was the conduit for opium sales flowing towards the drug labs in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan from other provinces, particularly those from the far northern provinces of Mazar and Badakhshan, run by U.S.-backed warlords favored by Special Forces’ “unconventional warfare” theorists.

It wouldn’t be the first time nor the last, that the United States cultivated narcotraffickers as intelligence assets, including those connected to America’s reputed arch-enemy, Osama bin Laden. As Peter Dale Scott wrote on the convergence of international organized crime structures and the capitalist deep state,

Mafias and empires have certain elements in common. Both can be seen as the systematic violent imposition of governance in areas of undergovernance. Both use atrocities to achieve their ends; but both tend to be tolerated to the extent that the result of their controlled violence is a diminution of uncontrolled violence. (I would tentatively suggest an important difference between mafias and empires: that, with the passage of time, mafias tend to become more and more part of the civil society whose rules they once broke, while empires tend to become more and more irreconcilably at odds with the societies they once controlled.) (”Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection,” Global Research, September 6, 2008)

Why then, given the decades-long collaboration amongst intelligence agencies and drug trafficking syndicates, do U.S. corporate media still find it “ironic” that current American efforts to stamp out Taliban-controlled drug networks in fact, simply hand control of the traffic over to narcos more amenable to American geopolitical goals?

One Big Happy Family

While the United States insists that international drug flows are financing terrorism, which indeed they are, U.S. agencies including the CIA and Army Special Forces continue to rely on trafficking networks as a reliable source for irregular fighters and as intelligence assets.

According to the Guardian, the relationships amongst Afghan government forces, opium smugglers and their Taliban “adversaries” are quite complex, but when it gets down to brass tacks, amazingly simple: money talks. Hameedullah, an opium smuggler and government employee told the Guardian,

He went on to explain how the economy of the poppy trade took in the Taliban and the government. “The Taliban benefit from the poppy because the farmers pay them taxes. And when the government destroys the fields, the people support the Taliban,” he said. “The government also benefits from the poppy–we pay officials so they won’t destroy our land. Two years ago we paid them so they only destroyed two jeribs (1 acre) of my land.” …

“The Taliban say we are doing the jihad and you are making money so you should support us. Smugglers give a lot: three Land Cruisers in Sangin a few weeks ago.”

The relationship between the Taliban, police and poppy trade is quite simple, he added: “If we don’t plant opium then smugglers don’t make money. If we [the smugglers] don’t make money the Taliban and police don’t make money. The Taliban and the officials have a very strong relationship–if they don’t then how can we do so much trade and travel to so many districts?” (Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “Life in Helmand, where rich rewards are reaped by poppy farmers, police and the Taliban,” Guardian, 22 December 2008)

Its a relationship that has a proven track record: drug lords make money, intelligence agencies cultivate assets and perhaps, siphon illicit funds for off-budget operations, international banking cartels earn billions from laundered drug proceeds and corrupt comprador elites secure a comfortable existence.

Such richly-rewarded “arrangements” continued long after the Soviet military withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Indeed, international narcotrafficking and related terrorist networks with links to the the CIA, the ISI, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States launched subsequent “jihads” against their geopolitical rivals in the Balkans and the ex-Soviet Union, where thousands of former Afghan veterans filled the ranks of the Bosnian, Kosovan and Chechen “mujahideen.”

According to economist Loretta Napoleoni, by the 1990s Pakistan hoped to create “a trans-Asian axis, under Pakistani hegemony, stretching from the eastern border with China, inclusive of Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics, to the oil-producing regions of the Caspian Sea.”

That the government of Benazir Bhutto did so with U.S. blessings as a means to destabilize Russia is evident with the subsequent assault in Chechnya by CIA-trained Afghan-Arab veterans aided and abetted by ISI and Saudi Arabia. The plan, according to Napoleoni, was “to divert Russian attention” by encouraging an “Islamist insurgency in Chechnya, forcing the Russians to fight in the Caucasus.”

Thusly, Shamil Basayev, a Chechen field commander, received extensive ISI training “at the Amir Muawia camp in the Khost province in Afghanistan,” under the operational control of ISI and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Afghan-Arab veterans were sent to Chechnya to train future fighters. “Among them was the Jordanian-born Khattab, whom Basayev had met and befriended in Pakistan. Khattab was a hero of the anti-Soviet Jihad; he was also close to Osama bin Laden and his funding network. In 1995, Khattab was invited to Grozny to head the training of Mujahedin fighters.”

Indeed, Osama bin Laden is reported to have contributed some $25 million to the Chechen “jihad.” But as Napoleoni documents, the operation relied heavily on already-existent drugs and arms trafficking networks.

In 1995, Khattab’s move to Grozny was arranged by the International Islamic Relief Organisation, a Saudi-based charity funded by mosques and wealthy donors in the Gulf. The same year, Basayev, and later Khattab, linked up with criminal organisations in Russia as well as with Albanian organised crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). These alliance proved fruitful in generating profits from the drug trade and contraband, especially that of arms. Chechnya soon became an important hub for various rackets, including kidnapping and the trade in counterfeit dollars. Basayev also benefited financially from money laundering activities in Chechnya. (Loretta Napoleoni, Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks, London: Pluto Press, 2003, pp. 92-93)

Similar destabilization campaigns utilizing the same Pakistani-Saudi terrorist networks and international drug trafficking syndicates broke out in Ingushetia, Dagestan and North Ossetia. The United States and their NATO partners encouraged what Napoleoni terms “the expansionism of Muslim countries such as Pakistan and religious colonisation by Saudi Arabia” across the region.

These networks, with a wink and a nod from Washington, are fully operational today.

Mumbai Attack: Same Drugs, Same Thugs

Indeed, international drug trafficking syndicates connected to Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA are reported to have been operational assets during the November Laskhar-e-Toiba (LET) assaults in Mumbai. As I reported in mid-December, Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company enjoys protected status afforded by the ISI and his extensive smuggling networks along the Indian coast were used to infiltrate LET thugs into Mumbai.

Despite these linkages, investigative journalist Jeffrey R. Hammond reported December 19, that Ibrahim associate “Mohammed Ali continues smuggling operations out of Mumbai for Ibrahim’s crime syndicate, D-Company, completely unmolested by Indian investigators and law enforcement.”

As the crisis deepens and Pakistan shifts troops towards the Indian border, a December 4 piece in The Times of India wonders why the Maharashtra government “has not taken any action against the D-Company here.”

One senior official asked, “What’s the point of asking Islamabad to hand over Dawood when we’re not doing anything to destroy his empire in Mumbai and other places in India?”

Similar questions must also be put to senior U.S. intelligence and counterterrorist officials as to why Afghan drugs kingpin Haji Bashir Noorzai was viewed as “a useful intelligence asset” up to the time of his arrest and conviction in New York federal court?

An unmentionable fact in Noorzai’s indictment, one that was raised however by defense attorney Ivan Fisher during the drug lord’s trial, was Noorzai’s work as a U.S. intelligence asset even as he grew rich off of Afghanistan’s heroin trade, through “efforts to reach working agreements with the Americans in Afghanistan since the 1990s,” Fisher told the International Herald Tribune. James Risen reports,

Noorzai was in Quetta when the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks occurred, and he returned soon after to Afghanistan, according to his lawyer. In November 2001, he met with men he described as American military officials at Spinboldak, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Fisher, his lawyer, said. Small teams of U.S. Special Forces and intelligence officers were then operating in Afghanistan, seeking the support of local tribal leaders against the Taliban.

Noorzai was taken to Kandahar, where he was detained and questioned for six days by the Americans about Taliban officials and operations, according to his lawyer. He agreed to work with them and was released. In January 2002, he handed over 15 truckloads of weapons, including about 400 anti-aircraft missiles, that had been hidden by the Taliban inside his tribe’s territory, Fisher said. (”Afghan’s arrest shines light on dark side of U.S. terror fight,” International Herald Tribune, February 2, 2007)

But when State Department official Robert Charles suggested placing Noorzai on President Bush’s list of foreign narcotics kingpins, at the time no Afghan heroin traffickers were on the list which Charles thought was “a glaring omission.”

He suggested three names, including Noorzai’s, but said his recommendation was met with an awkward silence during an interagency meeting. He said there was resistance to placing any Afghans on the list because countering the drug trade there was not an administration priority. Charles persisted, and in June 2004, Noorzai became the first Afghan on the list. (Risen, op. cit.)

“Awkward silence” indeed! Even as tensions today continue to rise between India and Pakistan, the virtual disappearance of Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company from the Mumbai frame is all the more astonishing given the narcoterrorists’ documented record of violence in furtherance of the geopolitical goals of his ISI masters.

But even though civilian rule has returned in Islamabad, retired Pakistani Army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg, a veteran of the Afghan campaign and a key figure responsible for toppling Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1990 cautioned the Wall Street Journal, “The ISI can make or break any regime in Pakistan. Don’t fight the ISI.”

9/11’s Drug Connection

These links are not new and were revealed long before the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, a former analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Julie Sirrs, traveled undercover to Afghanistan in 1998 after al-Qaeda’s East African embassy attacks and learned that the Taliban regime, then a darling of the Clinton administration and the multinational oil giant Unocal, was being courted by Washington as a force for “regional stability.” Sirrs reveals that the regime “was being kept in power significantly by bin Laden’s money and the narcotics trade.”

In 2004, Gail Sheehy reported in the New York Observer that for her trouble, Sirrs had her security clearances revoked and was subsequently hounded out of the DIA.

Unocal, a California-based company, had been courting the Taliban to build a massive pipeline system across Afghanistan that would connect the vast oil and natural-gas reserves of Turkmenistan to ports in Pakistan. The American energy giant partnered with a Saudi company, Delta Oil Co. Ltd., and promised the Taliban that it could expect up to $100 million in transit fees from the proposed $4.5 billion project. …

Ms. Sirrs said she believed that her information was discounted because it was damaging to the Taliban.

“The State Department didn’t want to have anything to do with Afghan resistance, or even, politically, to reveal that there was any viable option to the Taliban,” she said. (Gail Sheehy, “Ex-Spook Sirrs: Early Osama Call Got Her Ejected,” The New York Observer, March 14, 2004)

And what of the 9/11 attacks themselves, the presumed “trigger” for the Global War on Terror?

In the introduction to Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié’s book Forbidden Truth, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen wrote: “Yet the links [to 9/11] do not merely end with the greater bin Laden family–they involved the House of Saud, the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence agency, other wealthy Saudi bankers and merchants, Islamic charities and madrassas, U.S. oil tycoons, and U.S. defense contractors like The Carlyle Group.”

An unholy alliance that has persisted since the end of World War II. Added to the mix are the invisible yet omnipresent tentacles of the international narcotics trade that cuts across global money flows and paves the way for U.S. “special operations.”

As investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker revealed in Welcome to Terrorland and subsequent reporting,

Just three weeks after Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi arrived on July 3, 2000 to attend the flight school at Huffman Aviation in Venice, FL., the owner of the flight school, Wallace J. Hilliard, had his Learjet surrounded by DEA agents with submachine guns on the runway of Orlando Executive Airport.

Agents found 43 pounds of heroin, arrested everyone onboard, and confiscated the plane. …

Moreover, the drug connection was uncovered independently in two different places: by our investigation in Venice, FL., and by FBI translator Sibel Edmonds in Washington D.C.

“The 9/11 terror plot intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a ‘crystal clear’ picture of what was going on,” said Edmonds. (”The 9/11 Heroin Connection,” MadCowMorningNews, September 7, 2006)

Indeed, according to German investigative reporter Jürgen Roth’s account in Netzwerke des Terrors, in 1995 the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) investigated Atta for drug crimes and falsifying phone cards while a student at the Hamburg Technical University. While 9/11’s lead hijacker wasn’t charged, a record of the investigation will prevent him from obtaining a security job with Lufthansa Airlines in early 2001 according to Newsday, the History Commons revealed.

As FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds wrote on the connections amongst drug traffickers, terrorists and key U.S. allies such as Turkey, a major transportation hub for the flow of heroin into Europe, Edmonds wondered, “who are the real lords of Afghanistan’s poppy fields?”

For Al Qaeda’s network Turkey is a haven for its sources of funding. Turkish networks, along with Russians’, are the main players in these fields; they purchase the opium from Afghanistan and transport it through several Turkic speaking Central Asian states into Turkey, where the raw opium is processed into popular byproducts; then the network transports the final product into Western European and American markets via their partner networks in Albania. The networks’ banking arrangements in Turkey, Cyprus and Dubai are used to launder and recycle the proceeds, and various Turkish companies in Turkey and Central Asia are used to make this possible and seem legitimate. The Al Qaeda network also uses Turkey to obtain and transfer arms to its Central Asian bases, including Chechnya. (”The Hijacking of a Nation,” National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, November 29, 2006)

This too, follows a demonstrable pattern. Since the 1960s, the Turkish state has utilized far-right and Islamist surrogates to wage a dirty war against the left. Openly fascist political formations such as the National Action Party (MHP), the organization’s terrorist wing, the Grey Wolves and various Islamist “green gangs” such as the Army-controlled Turkish Hizbullah, have all been implicated in state terrorism and the international narcotics trade.

But the connections amongst narcotraffickers and terrorist financiers, though extensive, have all but been ignored by U.S. corporate media as it hyped the “failure of imagination” fairy tale spun by Washington insiders.

While the 9/11 Commission cited “intelligence failures” to “connect the dots” prior to the attacks, it is the contention of this writer that ongoing intelligence operations utilizing Afghan-Arab veterans and international narcotics syndicates, including al-Qaeda–in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and South Asia–lie at the heart of 9/11’s cover-up.

In other words these cosy and highly profitable relationships built-up over decades, rather than unproven claims of an “inside job,” allegations which all-too-frequently disappear Western intelligence agencies and their Islamist partners, were central to the 9/11 plot and subsequent U.S.-led “war on terror,” a war of terror waged globally for resource extraction and geopolitical advantage over capitalist rivals.

One shudders to consider what the incoming Obama administration is contemplating when it recommends a “surge” of U.S. troops into Afghanistan. But if history is any judge, we can be certain that the illicit relationships amongst drug cartels and intelligence agencies will continue far into the future.

While drug lord Haji Bashir Noorzai awaits sentencing in Manhattan, someone else has already taken his place. After all, some things never change…

Poland, in a tizzy, quickly signed up for US Patriot missiles; the EU and NATO, in a snit, suspended relations with Russia and did their best to undermine Russia’s fragile economy. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates made a grand tour of countries supposedly threatened by Russia (in addition to visiting his new friends in Kosovo), though only the woe-begone Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili bothered meeting him at the airport. This darling of the West — and Israel — suddenly found himself friendless after his disastrous altercation with his neighbor. Even Israel pulled in its horns, cutting off its lucrative arms sales out of fear of Russia.

Little more than a month later, the storm clouds over Russia seem to have dispersed. Europe again began improving relations, with a Euro-Russia summit in November, followed by renewed negotiations on a strategic partnership and a renewal of Russian-NATO dialogue in December. The Bush administration was not amused, but then lame-duck President George W Bush has about as many friends these days as Saakashvili.

It was amusing watching NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer jumping through hoops, so to speak, in early December after a NATO foreign ministers meeting, as he explained the alliance’s decision to begin “a conditional and graduated re-engagement” with Moscow, despite strident disapproval from Washington, not to mention Moscow’s own strident disapproval of NATO moves to absorb Ukraine and Georgia, and after its spectacular assertion of authority in its “near abroad” with the recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abhazia. The Hoop argued, “Russia is such an important factor in geopolitical terms that there is no alternative for NATO than to engage Russia.” He innocently claimed he had no idea why Russia felt “victimized, not to be taken seriously, but if that is the perception, we have to discuss it, because I have to try to convince them that democracy and the rule of law coming closer to Russia’s borders — why should that be a problem?”

As if he actually believes that NATO is about the tired clichés of democracy and freedom that are used to justify this Cold War relic, and not about US empire and its attempt to end any residual opposition, especially in the oil-rich Eurasian space, which Russia just happens to control.

So why the sudden courtship of the Russian ogre? De Hoop said it was because of Afghanistan, fighting terrorism and narcotics. We could add the financial crisis as well. But towering over even that is the very frightening specter of another arms race between the two — yes two — superpowers which Europe is uncomfortably sandwiched between.

It’s as if Don Juan realized too late that his latest flame — his true love this time — was wise to him and had decided the jig was up. Defying the US, de Hoop Scheffer and his Euro diplos realized their place was the tried and true middle path between the two big guys. He did his best to pretend that nothing really was wrong, but no one was fooled. “I’m basically an engager,” de Hoop Scheffer said. “But engagement can’t take place in the context of spheres of influence. We have to see if Georgia is a watershed or not. I hope not, and I’ll do my best that it will not be.” Sorry, de Hoop. You closed the barn door too late. Your beloved has bolted.

The emissary of the spurned lover, Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitri Rogozin, welcomed the decision to resume informal talks with Russia, saying, with not a little sarcasm, “I personally do not see the difference between formal and informal sittings, except that you don’t have coffee in an informal meeting but you still can order one.” Rogozin also said that the decision not to give a formal action plan to Georgia and Ukraine showed that relations with Russia were more important to NATO than either applicant. He predicted that NATO would retreat from admitting Georgia and Ukraine, a prospect that “does not cheer anyone in the alliance.” Rogozin said that “there is an open split within NATO, and it will widen if NATO tries to expand further. The schemes of those who adopted a frozen approach to Russia have been destroyed.” Words that left Don Juan apoplectic. The Hoop shot back that Rogozin could say what he liked, and American officials dismissed his comments as bluster aimed at a domestic audience.

Upping the ante, in the NATO meeting’s final communiqué, which went through 22 drafts, the foreign ministers gave their unanimous support to the planned deployment in Europe of US missile defenses, which Washington continues to say are for protection from Iran, not Russia. Reading from a script retrieved from history’s dustbin, the ministers called the missile system “a substantial contribution” to defense and encouraged Russia to take up US proposals for cooperation on missile defense, oblivious to US president-elect Obama’s own skepticism about the system, or the comments last month by French President Nicolas Sarkozy that the missile defense would “bring nothing to security” but “would complicate things and make them move backward,” or Russia’s threat to install short-range missiles of its own in Kaliningrad.

As for Russian President Dmitri Medvedev’s proposed talks on a new “security architecture” for Europe — which Sarkozy agreed to in November — de Hoop Scheffer said that NATO members were “quite happy with the security structure as it exists in Europe. There is not a shimmer of a chance that NATO could or would be negotiated away.” The Euro fans of America and foes of Russia see the Russian president’s proposals as a direct attempt to undermine NATO. And so what? The only way to make peace with Russia is to do what should have been done 17 years ago, when the Warsaw Pact was disbanded: dismantle its twin and build a European partnership from the Atlantic to the Pacific, minus the US and Canada. There is something called the United Nations where everyone can get together. The EU and Russia are already working together on peacekeeping — through the UN — as seen with the current EUFOR mission in Chad, which includes 320 Russians. I repeat: Who needs NATO to police the world?

De Hoop drew his line in the sand at a news conference with Georgian Foreign Minister Eka Tkeshelashvili. She expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the meeting, in which ministers reconfirmed that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members of NATO and said NATO would accelerate cooperative reform programs with both countries through existing NATO commissions. Don’t hold your breath, Eka. A lot can happen between now and “eventually”. The US and Germany are at odds over how further expansion of NATO can proceed, with Germany insisting on a MAP (Membership Action Plan) and Bush’s team arguing that “MAP has been fetishized”. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Daniel Fried said that this “is not the only way to get there,” wherever “there” is. Instead of a MAP, he has in mind the NATO-Georgia Commission established hurriedly after 8 August, modeled after the NATO-Ukraine Commission established in 1997 — “MAP without MAP”, as the German fetishists drolly put it.

But the bottom line on Georgia is that it can’t join NATO if it is not at peace with its neighbors, as this would oblige NATO to go to war to “defend” it. This argument could even encourage Russia to make a move on Crimea, putting Ukraine in the same predicament, making it, too, ineligible. How ironic this would be, given NATO’s pretensions to be a bastion of peace.

As the Hoop performed his verbal acrobatics, the EU was performing its own high wire act with Russia, renewing negotiations on a new strategic partnership. But with a nod to US desires to keep moving eastward come hell or high water, European Commission President José Manuel Barroso also outlined to the press the EU’s proposed new “Eastern Partnership” with Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova and Belarus, the latest move into the ex-Soviet bloc since the EU expanded in 2004 and 2007 to embrace the Baltics and all the former Warsaw Pact nations. The partnership offers free trade deals, closer energy ties, easier access to visas and financial assistance programs worth a total of €600 million over two years. To their bitter disappointment, EU-member hopefuls Ukraine and Moldova were lumped together with the others, indicating that their applications were on hold.

Interesting, the supposed rush to get Ukraine and Georgia into NATO and the procrastination over them joining the much more important economic organization. The Eastern Partnership was a response to Sarkozy’s Mediterranean Union, bringing all the Mediterranean countries together with the EU in a loose economic club, and was put on fast track after the war in Georgia in August. Barroso denied suggestions that the EU was seeking to establish itself as an alternative power centre to Moscow. “The Cold War is over,” said Barroso, “and where there is no Cold War, there should be no spheres of interest.” Who does he think he’s kidding?

But Russia has no beef with EU expansion, which can only benefit Moscow in the long run. In fact, it is not inconceivable that Russia itself could join this economic pact, which clearly benefits one and all, at least economically. This cannot be said of NATO. De Hoop Scheffer understandably wants to keep his prestige (and pension), but this is one endangered species that deserves extinction.

As NATO prepares the fireworks for its big 60th anniversary, its plans for Georgia and Ukraine are in disarray and its war in Afghanistan is a nightmare that could tear the organization apart in 2009. Happy anniversary.

President Nicholas Sarkozy of France, who was host of the Nice meeting between Russia and the 27 member-nations as EU president, helped Medvedev back off. He made it clear that the US should reconsider its missile defense plans in Poland and the Czech Republic. “Between now and then,” referring to talks on a new security architecture for Europe — a Russian proposal — to be held by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe , which includes the US and Russia , next June, “please no more talk of anti-missile protection systems,” Sarkozy said. The deployment of a missile defense system “would bring nothing to security in Europe.” The Russian leader welcomed Sarkozy’s conciliatory approach, saying that all countries “should refrain from unilateral steps” before discussions on European security take place. “If we share one home, we should get together and make agreements with one another,” meaning the Russians will not follow through with their threat if the US agrees to a “Zero Option” with regards missiles in Europe.

Although he holds the rotating presidency of the EU, Sarkozy was actually moving beyond his official mandate, since the bloc has little power over defense matters. The Czechs, who take over the EU presidency in January, and Poles were furious with Sarkozy. “We hope that the project will continue,” Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski said after meeting his Czech counterpart Karel Schwarzenberg. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk huffed Thursday that Russia was not part of the plan. “The anti-missile shield is the subject of contracts between Poland and the United States, and other countries are not — and will not — be participants in these negotiations.” Alexandr Vondra, the Czech deputy prime minister, said he was “surprised” by Sarkozy’s comments, which, he said, contradicted French statements at the NATO meeting in Bucharest, and exceeded Sarkozy’s purview as EU president. “There was nothing in the EU mandate to talk about missile defense.”

This is a fine example of Sarkozy at his hyperactive best, one where he used his antennae well, sensing the shifting weather patterns and attempting to divert a needless and destructive storm, which, he would no doubt add in his own defence, would hit the Poles and Czechs even harder than the rest of Europe. This whole episode shows the weakness of the EU: pipsqueaks are vaulted into the diplomatic big leagues and can pursue petty grudges that leave the EU helpless to pursue a sensible agenda. French president Jacques Chirac was undermined in 2003 by these parvenus who slavishly hung on every lie coming out of the US concerning Iraqi WMDs, preventing a strong European resistance to the criminal invasion of Iraq. Good for the Sark.

The French leader’s nod to the Russian proposal for a new European security structure also elicited jibes. The Euro fans of America and foes of Russia see the Russian president’s proposals as a direct attempt to undermine NATO. And so what? This senseless Cold War relict merely raises hackles and sticks its imperial nose where it doesn’t belong. The EU and Russia are already working together on peacekeeping — through the UN — as seen with the current EUFOR mission in Chad, which includes 320 Russians. Who needs NATO to police the world? Good for Medvedev.

Overriding squawks from Lithuania, Europeans also agreed Monday to resume talks with the Russians on a long-term EU-Russia pact on the economy, energy and security matters. Negotiations were suspended after the Russian war with Georgia in August, but since then the financial crisis has underlined the need for rapprochement. “We don’t need a Cold War. We need cool heads,” said Barroso. Even Russophobe German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “I think it is better to talk with each other than about each other.”

While Russian and European leaders were extending olive branches to each other in Nice, their foreign ministers were chattering at a NATO meeting in Brussels about their latest pet project — putting pressure on Turkey to deploy permanent NATO navy forces in the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, one of the most strategic waterways of the world and located in Turkish territorial waters. Turkey is rightly concerned that such move would violate the 1936 Montreux Convention, which limits the total weight of the warships that a country which does not border the Black Sea can deploy to 45,000 tons, and eventually harm its sovereign rights over the straits, not to mention its booming economic ties with Russia. Turkey has long opposed the deployment of NATO navy forces on the Black Sea, saying the region is perfectly safe and the Black Sea countries’ joint patrol missions are more than sufficient.

But these Euro and NATO intrigues are far less important that the behind-the-scenes activities now going on in US conference rooms, where president-elect Barack Obama’s political plans for accommodating Russia are now in high gear. Relations with Russia are the cornerstone to the empire’s success during Obama’s presidency. The world, certainly Europe and NATO, is now holding its breath, waiting to see what Obama will do about the missiles and the Georgians, with the ball firmly in his court.

Unfortunately, he can’t hit it back for another two months. In the meantime, the discredited Bush regime is doing its best to dig potholes in the court and make Obama’s task doubly hard. A fine example took place last weekend in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt , with yet another of the pointless meetings that Bush has sent his beloved Condoleezza Rice on. It took barely an hour for Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to dismiss the supposedly new set of proposals she brought concerning START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) and missile defense. “The current US proposals are insufficient because the Bush administration is seeking to make the decision [on the deployment of the missile shield] irreversible,” a Russian source said. Lavrov insisted that any new discussions on the European missile shield should involve Russia , the US and the EU and must be based on respect for common interests rather than on a unilateral decision made by Washington . But absolutely no one is fooled by Bush anymore as his 76 per cent disapproval ratings show. If anything, such tired attempts at covering the empire’s tracks merely give Obama more food for thought.

The tone Obama sets in relations with Russia will be vital to the success of his presidency. Medvedev, like Obama, is still an open book. In his state of the union address the same day as Obama’s stunning victory, Medvedev revealed ambitious plans to strengthen Russian democracy, condemning state interference in elections, mass media, civil society and the economy — all of which gives birth to corruption in the bureaucracy. He proposed that those parties falling below the 7 percent threshold in parliamentary elections, yet reaching more than 5 percent, should be represented with at least one or two deputies in the State Duma, increasing diversity, that only elected deputies should become governors of Russia’s regions or members of the Federation Council, and that local governments and non-governmental organizations have greater say in the legislative process. He called for less state control of the media: “Freedom of speech should be secured by technological innovation. Experience shows that it is practically useless to ‘try to persuade’ bureaucrats to leave mass media alone. One should not try to persuade, but extend as broadly as possible the space for the Internet and digital television.”

If Obama wants to make any progress in the empire’s affairs abroad, be it in Afghanistan, Europe, Iraq, Iran, he will have to wrestle the Cold Warrior Washington establishment into submission and make peace with Russia . This will have the truly wonderful side-effect of strengthening Medvedev’s hand in his own struggle with statist authoritarians.

This is the way for America to encourage democracy around the world — by refraining from threatening other countries and interfering in their affairs. If American is not perceived as a threat by Russia, constantly intriguing and pushing its European allies into “stupid” Cold War stand-offs, Russia will be able to continue its halting, democractic transformation.

* * * *

Why the concern with Russia?

Well, it has not a few trumps up its sleeve, which Obama would be wise to note:

* The perennial steel-fist-in-velvet-glove Russian gas supplies to Europe, now strengthened by Gazprom’s Southstream pipeline plans which look set to scuttle the anti-Russian Nabucco pipeline plan. The latter will hardly be feasible given the economic meltdown emanating from the US and infecting the entire world. The Russian hold on European gas supplies looks very secure.

* Its continued nuclear energy cooperation with Iran. If the US expects to see any conciliatory move from Iran it will have to take Russia into account.

* Its control over the fastest and cheapest transit routes for NATO military supplies to Afghanistan. They just happen to be the rail and air links through Russia and former Soviet Central Asia. Already, Russia has signaled it will not necessarily be so hospitable to NATO use of these precious routes.

* The overriding US object in the near future: stabilizing Iraq. The next few years in Iraq will be troubled, to say the least, and Russian cooperation with the West will be vital.

* Cooperation in dealing with the international financial crisis and threatening world recession. The Russian economy has rapidly integrated into the world economy during the past two decades, for better or worse, bringing with it Russian mafia, liberal use of offshore banking and other dubious western inventions. This means it is an important part of any solution.

The Russian hold on gas supplies to Europe is nothing to worry about. The Russians have always been reliable partners, from WWII on, as long as the West plays ball and doesn’t push them too hard. Measured, stable diplomacy is all they ask. Iran threatens no one, despite hysterical Israeli rhetoric, and will no doubt go on Obama’s back burner, despite whispers in his ear from the Zionists in his camp. Since Afghanistan and dealing with the world depression are the center pins of Obama’s foreign policy, he would be very foolish to provoke the Russians needlessly on high profile but meaningless issues like the missiles and expanded NATO membership.

INTRODUCTION

World war or world peace is the blunt choice that will face either Barack Obama or John McCain when one of them is elected president of the United States on Tuesday, November 4, 2008.

For a major eruption of violence to be averted, the new president must deal positively with the reappearance of Russia on the world stage, the emergence of China as an economic force, and the aspirations of all the nations on earth for a decent and secure way of life.

Making matters much more dangerous are the ongoing financial crisis, along with what appears to be the start of a worldwide economic recession of as yet undetermined depth and duration.

It is Europe, not the U.S., from which proposals are emerging for a transformative approach to the most compelling issues. But will it be enough?

THE DISASTROUS PRESIDENCY OF GEORGE W. BUSH

In December 2000, at the time the U.S. Supreme Court was intervening in the disputed vote count in Florida to name Republican George W. Bush president over Democrat Al Gore, the stock market began to crash. The “dot.com” bubble, based largely on foreign investment in internet companies and technology stocks, deflated. By the time Bush was inaugurated in January 2001, signs of a recession were appearing.

This did not prevent the Bush administration from initiating a $450 billion tax cut for the upper income brackets that Congress approved in March 2001. A similar cut was subsequently enacted in May 2003.

On September 11, 2001, the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City were attacked by airplanes flying into them, followed that morning by an air attack on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

Terrorists from Al Qaeda, an organization of Islamic extremists associated with the Afghan mujaheddin, and a Saudi figure, Osama bin Laden, alleged to be their leader, were blamed. The wealthy bin Laden family had close ties to the U.S. and the Bush family.

Within a few weeks, the Bush administration pulled a battle plan from the shelves of the Pentagon and invaded Afghanistan. The object was to wrest control of that nation from the Taliban, supposedly Al Qaeda collaborators. A new U.S. Asian land war had begun.

In March 2003, the Bush administration added to the Afghan action the second invasion of Iraq in the past thirteen years, following the “Shock and Awe” aerial attack. The assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq, with torture of prisoners, use of depleted uranium weapons, and killing of civilians, was methodical and brutal.

Americans who had opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 70s were appalled at how history was repeating itself. The public was subjected to a relentless barrage of pro-war propaganda by square-jawed military talking heads

Behind the scenes were the international financial and oil interests who stood to benefit from the removal of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as an independent actor in the Middle East. Financiers like David Rockefeller, who had founded the Trilateral Commission and was one of the “internationalist” leaders of what had come to be called the “New World Order,” tended to remain in the shadows, but their presence was palpable.

Rockefeller had reportedly expressed his world view in a statement at a 1991 meeting of the Bilderberg Group:

“The supra-national sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

With respect to most of the U.S. military actions after World War II, especially the ones after Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, an argument could be made that the internationalists were using the U.S. military as their personal global police force.

Even so, the Neocons—“new conservatives”—who had rushed to the forefront after September 11, 2001, working chiefly through Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Richard Cheney, seemed to be a more radical element than the officials who had been in charge during the Clinton years, when the U.S. and NATO went to war against Serbia. Many of the Neocons were Jewish, with strong ties to Israel.

In 1997 the Neocons had created the Project for a New American Century, which advocated a new invasion of Iraq, and published a statement that positive change might result from a “catalyzing event—a new Pearl Harbor.” Later this was interpreted as possibly having foreshadowed the 9/11 attacks.

President George W. Bush justified the Iraq invasion by claiming that the regime of Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Later this claim proved to be a lie.

To many the attack was a simple act of aggression. Kofi Annan, Secretary General of the U.N. said of the invasion on September 16, 2004, “I have indicated it was not in conformity with the U.N. charter. From our point of view, from the charter point of view, it was illegal.” The U.S. paid no attention to Annan’s misgivings.

The U.S. attack on Iraq was not without controversy, even among the international elite. According to Daniel Estulin, writing in his breakthrough book, The Bildergerg Group, the Europeans at the 2001 Bilderberg Conference summoned Donald Rumsfeld and blasted him for prematurely planning an attack on Iraq that year. But by 2003, says Estulin, they were prepared to endorse it. Still, the U.S. had far less active support from other nations than with the 1991 invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush’s father.

WARS ARE NOT CHEAP

Starting in 2001, the Bush administration had increased the frequency of White House meetings with Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who lowered interest rates by 550 basis points from January 2001 to June 2003. This succeeded in floating the U.S. economy through injecting a huge amount of cash into what came to be called the “housing bubble.”

It’s consumer spending that keeps the U.S. economy running, but ever since the 1980s, when we began to export so many of our manufacturing jobs, family income had stagnated. It has been established by researchers, and documented as well by Daniel Estulin, that at a certain point the financial elite made the momentous decision that the U.S. would be de-industrialized. According to one account, this decision had been a topic of discussion in meetings in China, after Nixon’s visit there in 1972, that were held among David Rockefeller, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and Chinese Premier Chou En-Lai.

When Rockefeller and Columbia University professor Zbigniew Brzezinski—later President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser—formed the Trilateral Commission in 1973, the plan to turn the U.S. into a financial/service economy instead of the world’s greatest industrial democracy seemed to become a key objective. How well this program succeeded is shown by statistics from the website Economy in Crisis:

· From 1978 to July 2008, more than 16,613 U.S. companies were sold to foreign corporations.

· The steel, publishing, textile, machine tool, automobile, and electronics industries declined sharply.

· By 2006 American manufacturers suffered a twenty-two percent structural cost disadvantage compared to overseas competitors through taxes, health and pension benefits, litigation, regulation, and unequal environment protection.

· In 2006, $1 in $4 of US consumption on manufactured goods went immediately and directly to imports.

· In 2007 China alone exported over $321 billion in goods to the United States compared to the $62 billion in goods we exported to them. The U.S. trade deficit, estimated to exceed $800 billion in 2008, is costing $1.5 million per minute in remittance to foreign companies.

· Three million high-paying manufacturing jobs were lost between 2000 and 2005 alone. The U.S. lost 63 thousand jobs just in February of 2008.

· Foreign manufacturers operating in the U.S. accounted for over twenty percent of our exports and manufacturing assets, and a large percentage of our employment in 2006.

· As of December, 2007, the U.S owed fifty-three percent of its debt to foreign countries and other international interests. This is 25.5 percent of our total national deficit, and we finance nearly 100 percent of all new borrowings from foreign interests. Our competitors are now our bankers.

· High-paying goods-producing industries have lost net employment over the past twenty-seven years, while lower paying non-tradable services-providing employment has doubled.

· In 2004, China and India graduated a combined 950,000 engineers versus 70,000 in the U.S. The United States ranks near the bottom of science/math proficiency

Beginning around 1991-92, with cheap credit now flowing from the Federal Reserve System, home prices soared. The money from new mortgages and home equity loans became a virtual “cash cow” for families strapped for cash.

The federal government had already been taking steps during the 1990s to ease mortgage credit so that more families could purchase homes. But after 2001, many more loans were based on fraudulent mortgage applications, where brokers exaggerated borrower incomes. ABC News later reported that during this period risk analysts at Washington Mutual, one of the nation’s largest banks, were told to ignore high risk loans because lending had to be maximized. Those who objected were disciplined or fired.

On Wall Street, banks that wrote mortgages began to offload them by packaging them into mortgage-backed securities that were sold around the world as bonds to banks and investors. Risk analysts at the leading credit-rating agencies, such as Standard and Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch, gave their highest ratings to mortgage-backed securities whose risks were later acknowledged to be grossly underestimated.

Also, mortgage companies, with Alan Greenspan’s endorsement, began to offer more Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs), loans that would reset at higher rates in future years. Mortgage brokers fed the growing bubble by telling people they should buy now, because housing prices would keep going up and they could resell at a profit before their ARMs escalated.

As a result of the bubble, large amounts of money began to flow into the economy, not only from mortgages and home equity loans, but also from capital gains on the resale of inflating property. Meanwhile, in the world of investment securities, the Securities and Exchange Commission reduced the amount of their own capital investors were required to bring to the table, resulting in a large increase in bank leveraging of speculative trading. This fed additional bubbles in the equity, hedge fund, derivatives, and commodities markets. The SEC also eliminated most of its Office of Risk Management through budget cuts.

According to an April 2008 Washington Post article by New York governor Elliot Spitzer, state attorneys-general who wanted to investigate allegations of mortgage fraud were blocked from doing so by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency within the U.S. Treasury Department. There was no federal agency charged with regulating mortgage fraud to take up the slack. Spitzer made these charges just before he was forced to resign from office over a sex scandal disclosed by a leak of FBI investigative documents.

Thus it appeared that a major part of U.S. economic growth was tainted by outright criminality, with collusion from the highest levels of the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve System, and the financial industry. But the housing and investment bubbles generated enough economic activity and tax revenues through 2006 to allow the Bush war policy to be implemented.

George W. Bush was reelected in 2004 at the height of the bubbles. By 2005, the housing bubble alone was accounting for half of all U.S. growth and yielding substantial tax revenues to all levels of government. Still, the Bush administration was running huge budget deficits from expenditures on the increasingly-expensive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Congress approved funding for the Afghan and Iraqi wars even after the Democratic Party regained majority control in the 2006 elections. The funding also allowed for the start of construction in Baghdad of the world’s largest U.S. embassy, as well as permanent military bases in Iraq.

During this time, an internal battle raged between the U.S. State Department, which wanted to implement a plan to rebuild Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, and the Defense Department, which was mainly interested in military occupation. Defense won out.

L. Paul Bremer, former U.S. foreign service officer and managing director of Kissinger and Associates, was named occupation director. But the Iraqi economy and physical infrastructure were shattered. Two to three million Iraqi civilians were killed, injured, or driven into exile.

The housing bubble began to collapse when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 425 basis points from June 2003 to June 2006. In January 2006, Ben Bernanke replaced Alan Greenspan as Fed chairman. Greenspan had been chairman for nineteen years during which the largest financial bubbles in world history were created.

This sequence of events led some to contend that the Federal Reserve had both deliberately created the housing bubble, then deliberately destroyed it. Hundreds of millions of people around the world, including U.S. homeowners and foreign investors, ultimately were trapped in the Greenspan/Bernanke pincers.

By 2007, the federal government’s debt was over $9 trillion and reached $10.3 trillion by October 2008. It was now obvious that a serious economic downturn lay ahead. By 2007, signs of a recession loomed, as homeowners who had signed up for “subprime” and ARM mortgages began to default.

By 2008 the number of home foreclosures would exceed four million. The mortgage-based bonds sold through Wall Street brokerage houses to U.S. and foreign investors, began to prove worthless. They had proliferated around the world as virtual time-bombs in investment portfolios.

By August 2008, foreign investors, such as the Bank of China, were becoming increasingly involved in the crisis. Reuters ran a story that Chinese banks planned to stop investing in U.S. markets, which the Chinese government denied, but the threat remained.

If the Chinese and other Asian exporting and petroleum-rich nations pull out, the days of “dollar hegemony,” where the dollar constitutes the world’s reserve currency, providing almost unlimited funding for the U.S. commercial and military empire, will be over.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION HITS A WALL

By the first presidential primary elections of 2008 in Iowa and New Hampshire, the campaign to select the next president of the United States was underway. The eight-year George W. Bush presidency would be ending within a year.

By now the Bush years seemed to exemplify the most grievously wrong-headed aspects of U.S. foreign and domestic policy since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The 2008 election will mark the end of an era, though no one knows for sure what will come next.

What has to be questioned are an economy that has been downgraded from one based on industry to a service economy structured around finance, an aggressive military policy with U.S. forces engaged around the world, and trade and fiscal deficits as far as the eye can see.

With all this going on, the Bush White House has brought the world’s most powerful nation to a point of crisis, possibly even to the brink of catastrophe.

In retrospect it can be seen that U.S. military occupation of the Middle East, focusing on Iraq and involving extensive collaboration with Israel, was an extension of the century-long attempt by the Anglo-Americans to control the region’s fossil fuel resources.

But the nation of Iraq and its people had been crushed in the meantime. Even if the U.S. were to withdraw combat forces at some time in the future, the permanent military bases it plans to leave behind will be islands in a sea of hostility. Today even these bases are in jeopardy, as Iraq’s elected government pressures the U.S. to commit to a complete withdrawal by 2011.

Iran has clearly been strengthened by U.S. action to destroy Sunni power in Iraq and has been emboldened by the successes of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon in standing up to the Israelis. U.S. intentions to attack Iran have evoked strong opposition among Europeans and can be seen to have enhanced the influence of Russia and China, since Iran is now an observing member of the Shanghai Cooperative Organization.

After initial successes in Afghanistan, U.S. forces have become bogged down in protecting the capital of Kabul, where President Hamid Karzai rules under virtual siege, while the Taliban have come back to contest control of the countryside. The U.S. has resorted to bombing sorties which often kill civilians and has begun to escalate the war by sending raiding parties into neighboring Pakistan.

After the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S., acting through NATO, moved aggressively to extend its influence into the former Soviet republics and surround Russia with nations friendly to the West. The former Soviet Union and Soviet satellite states that joined NATO were Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia (formerly part of Czechoslovakia), Bulgaria, and Romania.

The European members of NATO have not yet agreed to extend invitations to the Ukraine and Georgia after those nations expressed interest following establishment of pro-Western governments, though a communiqué after the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest indicated membership would be forthcoming.

But the NATO façade may have cracked, as shown by a recent trip by German Chancellor Angela Merkel to St. Petersburg for meetings with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev.

According to a report by George Friedman:

The central question on the table was Germany’s position on NATO expansion, particularly with regard to Ukraine and Georgia. Merkel made it clear at a joint press conference that Germany would oppose NATO membership for both of these countries, and that it would even oppose placing the countries on the path to membership. Since NATO operates on the basis of consensus, any member nation can effectively block any candidate from NATO membership. The fact that Merkel and Germany have chosen this path is of great significance. Merkel acted in full knowledge of the U.S. view on the matter and is prepared to resist any American pressure that might follow.¹

Also by 2008 the U.S. was losing influence with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan—which had joined with Russia and China in the SCO. In central and south Asia, as well as Africa, nations have been unwilling to act as hosts for new U.S. military bases.

The U.S. had been losing ground in Central Asia and elsewhere even before Georgia invaded its former province of South Ossetia on August 8, 2008.

The invasion of South Ossetia by Georgia’s forces, armed and trained by the U.S. and Israel, was crushed so decisively by the Russians as to be a major embarrassment to the Bush administration. According to Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili’s former defense minister Irakly Okruashvili, Saakashvili carried out the attack despite warnings from the U.S. that they could not come to his aid militarily.²

Okruashvili faulted the U.S. for not being sufficiently critical of Saaksashvili in the months leading up to the attack. From this report it is unclear whether the U.S., while trying to keep Georgia in its orbit as a pathway for natural gas pipelines, was trying to goad Russia into a major military confrontation, though such a scenario seemed possible. Of course the U.S. media and politicians blamed only Russia for the conflict.

In Latin America, the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela has begun to forge an alliance with Russia, even to the point of announcing a plan for joint naval maneuvers in the Caribbean. Chavez is also acting as an inspiration to populist movements elsewhere in South America, including those in Bolivia and Ecuador.

Announcements by Vladimir Putin, now the Russian prime minister, that Russia is opposed to a unipolar world were reminiscent of the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon and Russian General Secretary Leonid Brehznev met as equals to forge the policy of détente. Putin created a sensation on February 10, 2007, at the 43rd Munich Conference on Security Policy, when he said:

“What is a uni-polar world? No matter how we beautify this term, it means one single center of power, one single center of force, and one single master.”

Speaking of the U.S., Putin said:

The United States has overstepped its borders in all spheres—economic, political and humanitarian—and has imposed itself on other states.…Local and regional wars did not get fewer, the number of people who died did not get less but increased. We see no kind of restraint – a hyper-inflated use of force.…[The U.S.] has gone from one conflict to another without achieving a fully-fledged solution to any of them.

Putin clearly has rejected the one-world aspirations of the Western financial elite which acts through U.S. military power. After the Georgian crisis, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s successor as president, reiterated:

The world must be multipolar. Single polarity is unacceptable. Russia cannot accept a world order in which any decisions will be made by a sole nation, even such a serious one as the United States. Such a world order will be unstable and fraught with conflicts.

Where did the European Union (EU) fit in after the Georgia debacle? Clearly the Europeans were not passive spectators to a U.S.-Russian standoff. European leaders moved quickly to negotiate a cease-fire in Georgia followed by withdrawal of Russian troops.

The more the EU acts as a bloc, the more it seems that a new nationalist entity has come into existence, complete with its own Euro-based currency. The European population wants peace, prosperity, justice, and to be left alone. They particularly do not want to be dragged into America’s wars. The EU has also taken the lead economically with a 2007 GDP of $16.8 trillion vs. $13.8 for the U.S. (IMF figures)

In the Middle East times are changing too. Israel, for instance, seems to be in social crisis. Though Jews are both leaving Israel and moving in, the population is stable but small. Of a population of 7.3 million, 5.5 million are Jewish Israelis. A substantial minority of non-Jews are imported laborers.

But Israel has a poorly-formed middle class. The gap in Israel between rich and poor is growing, as in the U.S., often with only minimum wage jobs available, even to military veterans. Also, common lands in the kibbutzim are being privatized, and residents reportedly are tending to withdraw from peripheral areas to settle around Tel Aviv for safety from strife with the Palestinians.³

Some Israeli politicians say that Iran, with its supposed nuclear ambitions, poses an “existential threat” to the nation. But there are reports that the U.S. has told Israel they will not be permitted to attack Iran on their own.

ECONOMIC COLLAPSE

If the Bush administration is being challenged in the foreign policy arena, in the area of macroeconomics it may have been checkmated.

As stated previously, the financial crisis deepened in the late summer of 2008 when China and the other nations of the world that had been floating the U.S. fiscal and trade deficits by their purchase of public and private securities became alarmed. This was in reaction to Wall Street’s issuance of the huge amount of “toxic” debt from mortgage-backed securities that were now collapsing in value as the housing bubble imploded.

Analyst William Engdahl has stated that the financial meltdown was secretly planned in order to weaken the European banking system. Engdahl wrote:

“As one senior European banker put it to me in private discussion, ‘There is an all-out war going on between the United States and the EU to define the future face of European banking.’”

The start of the recession and the decline of purchasing power by consumers who can no longer borrow quantities of money also means that the U.S. will cease as the customer of last resort whose purchases conveniently float the world economy. The Japanese, sitting on billions of U.S. dollars in their bank accounts, are reportedly furious that U.S. consumers might no longer support the abundant lifestyle of the world’s richest nation.

The dollar is so shaky that some nations are reducing their dollar reserves and turning to other currencies. Talk has been rampant about a worldwide shift to a multi-currency regime, possibly including the Euro, the Yuan, the Yen, and even the Ruble. In March 2007 the Governor of China’s Central Bank Zhou Xiaochuan announced:

“China will diversify its $1 trillion foreign exchange reserves, the largest in the world, across different currencies and investment instruments, including in emerging markets.”

The U.S. Council on Foreign Relations is supporting the movement to a multiple currency regime in its journal, Foreign Affairs. Though the federal government denies any concrete plans, the so-called Amero has been mentioned as the currency of a hypothetical North American Union made up of the U.S., Canada, and Mexico.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration, led by Secretary of the Treasury Henry M. Paulson, working in league with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, has begun to introduce gigantic amounts of publicly-backed credit to rescue the exploding financial system.

As recently as 2006, the U.S. financial industry earned over $500 billion in profits—an astronomical sum. Some hedge fund managers were earning $1 billion a year. Now Wall Street is a disaster scene, with financial firms losing over 200,000 jobs in a year and major investment banks going bankrupt.

Also, the two quasi-governmental mortgage guarantee agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, have failed. Despite their lavishing $175 million in the last decade on buying influence from Congress, the government has fired their executives and is taking the two agencies over in a conservatorship. The government also took over insurance giant AIG.

When, on September 23, 2008, Henry Paulson asked for $700 billion dollars to purchase bad debt from U.S. and foreign banks without any oversight or guarantee of success, Congress revolted, with the House of Representatives rejecting the proposal in an initial vote. They did so because their constituents were enraged with the terms proposed by the Bush administration for a gigantic giveaway of taxpayers’ money.⁴

U.S. taxpayers could now be finding themselves on the hook for possibly trillions of dollars of debt liabilities due to Wall Street mismanagement and fraud. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have begun belated criminal investigations. Americans on “Main Street” and their representatives in Congress remain horrified.

Some say the capitalist era is over. The financiers and stock brokers have run rampant in the 2000s under President George W. Bush. They’ve been called, only half-jokingly, “The Masters of the Universe.”

But their excesses have been encouraged by the Bush administration, the Federal Reserve, and the government’s regulatory agencies, which have combined to facilitate an explosion of leveraged speculation in the housing, hedge, equity, commodity, and derivative markets. More shocks undoubtedly lie ahead.

By September 2008, as the bubbles were starting to blow up, the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression was underway. Despite initial opposition, Congress caved in to pressure from Bush and the bank lobbyists and approved a revised version of Paulson’s plan. According to reports, including a statement on the floor of the House of Representatives by Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), members of Congress were threatened with a declaration of martial law to keep public order if the measure failed.

The Treasury Department has started to float new bond issues to raise money to buy the bad mortgage debt, not only from U.S. banks but from foreign investors as well. Meanwhile the stock market is continuing to decline and by October 10 had lost almost forty percent of its value in a year. Over $8 trillion in wealth had vanished from U.S. markets, including the retirement savings and dividend income of tens of millions of people. On October 24, the Dow Jones closed at 8,378.95 vs. 14,198.1 on October 11, 2007.

At the same time, rising prices of oil, food, and other commodities have begun to produce another era of global stagflation, similar to the 1970s, though oil prices have fallen recently. Still, the U.S. financial collapse is resulting in the onset of a worldwide recession that most commentators, including economists at the IMF, said could only get worse—possibly much worse.

Has the New World Order proved to be a parasite that killed its host? Maybe in the U.S. it has. By early October 2008, millions of Americans had been crushed by debt and were losing their homes to foreclosure, tent cities of the homeless were springing up, unemployment claims were soaring, and factory orders were plummeting.

The credit crisis is combining with shortage of consumer purchasing power to cause commerce to shut down at a time when stores should be increasing inventory for the Christmas season. Most of the major chain stores are closing unprofitable retail outlets, throwing thousands of employees out of work.

With the financial system crashing it was only a month from the presidential election, when it would be up to the next president—either Barack Obama or John McCain—to deal with these calamities. Other than a small “stimulus” tax rebate in the spring of 2008, nothing had been done by the Bush administration to rebuild the weakened U.S. producing economy or help the rank and file consumer.

Whose fault was it? David Rockefeller had clearly been the leader during past decades of the “intellectual elite and world bankers” who would replace the old-fashioned nation-state and whose legacy the U.S. was now reaping. Rockefeller had been quoted as saying at the United Nations on September 23, 1994:

“This present window of opportunity, during which a truly peaceful and interdependent world order might be built, will not be open for too long. We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order.”⁵

Intended or not, the “major crisis” had arrived.

Rockefeller may have been a kind of “Emperor of the West,” but he is now 93 years old. Yet he has successors who are now running things. Henry Paulson is the most visible. Also prominent are the heads of the largest banks who are being featured regularly in news reports, such as Jamie Dimon, CEO of the banking colossus J.P. Morgan Chase.

Washington Mutual Bank had run short on ready cash during the credit crisis, so Dimon’s bank was able to acquire its $307 billion in assets for only $1.9 billion. Commentators said it was a “fire sale.”

William Engdahl writes:

The Paulson plan is now clearly part of a project to create three colossal global financial giants—Citigroup, JP MorganChase and, of course, Paulson’s own Goldman Sachs, now conveniently enough a bank. Having successfully used fear and panic to wrestle a $700 billion bailout from the U.S. taxpayers, now the big three will try to use their unprecedented muscle to ravage European banks in the years ahead.

THE 2008 ELECTION

When the financial crisis struck during the week of September 22, it was only six weeks before the presidential election. Democrat Barack Obama shot up in the polls, because voters perceived him as more likely than Republican John McCain to deal effectively with the situation.

Obama, with a Kenyan father and a white American mother, was the first African-American to run for the presidency of the U.S. on a major party ticket. To many it was a shock that Obama had defeated such a formidable opponent as Hillary Clinton, wife of former president Bill Clinton, in the Democratic primaries.

Now Obama was the beneficiary of the bad economic news. In American politics, Democrats, with their New Deal heritage and the semi-prosperity under Clinton in the 1990s, are viewed as being more in touch with the economic problems of ordinary citizens. Also, the Democrats’ income policies have generally favored the working and middle classes more than the rich, and Obama was promising to repeal the Bush tax cuts that benefited mainly the upper brackets.

Further, the incumbent party—in this case the Republicans—is more likely to be viewed as responsible for the current economic situation, good or bad, and McCain had consistently allied himself during his long Senate career with the financial deregulation dating from the Reagan years that was now proving disastrous.

McCain had just finished saying in a speech, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” but on Wednesday, September 24, he changed his tune. Now, he said, he was suspending his campaign and would return to Washington, D.C., to help solve the crisis. The Democrats howled with derision at this seeming act of political hypocrisy which showed, they said, how desperate McCain had become to maintain credibility.

Clearly the campaign had now changed—or had it? Until the financial crisis, both Obama and McCain had been extremely cautious in putting forth proposals, trying more to avoid saying anything the media could criticize than to suggest fundamental economic changes. Also, Obama’s presidential campaign had received huge contributions from Wall Street.

Both men had been presenting themselves as populists, the friends of the middle class. McCain emphasized tax reduction and limitations on government spending as means of economic growth. Obama spoke in favor of job creation, including five million new jobs from “green energy”—solar and wind power, etc. He also promised to cut taxes for those earning less than $250,000 a year.

But neither had been convincing as signs of an economic recession began to accelerate. Obama’s five million new jobs, for instance, were an intention, not a plan. But they were obviously needed. The financial emergency hit after job losses of 60,000 for August were announced.

Nor did either offer many specifics or explain how they could implement new federal programs in the face of the gigantic budget deficits being projected. CNN news commentator Lou Dobbs blasted them for delivering “poll-driven sound bytes” and failing “to even mention real economic issues,” like the overseas outsourcing of jobs.

Washington Post columnist David Broder accused the pair of “running from reality.” Broder added:

“The frustration that is growing stems from their mutual reluctance to talk candidly about the situation one of them will inherit. If either of them has a clue what to do to help stabilize this tottering economy, he is keeping it to himself.”

What was most clear about events was that the deregulation of the financial system that began in the 1980s now could be seen to have wrecked the U.S. economy. But neither Obama nor McCain proposed regulatory changes or sought in any way to challenge the machinations of the financial titans.

THE CANDIDATES TAKE NOTICE OF THE DEEPENING CRISIS

Housing and home ownership are among the key issues. During the housing bubble, the prices of homes inflated to two or three times their previous value. Now these prices have been collapsing, though homeowners still have to make payments in excess of what the homes were now worth. Critics have pointed out that the Wall Street bailout plan both Obama and McCain voted for was intended to keep home prices high, even if families have trouble making their mortgage payments and continue to lose their homes to foreclosure.

And mortgage payments are going up due to rising interest costs and the resetting of adjustable rate mortgages. On October 8, with the stock market still in free fall, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates for the banking system, but the rise in mortgage interest rates for consumers continued. It will be difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut rates further because this weakens the dollar and makes investments in the U.S. economy less attractive for China, Japan, and other foreign dollar holders.

Up to this point there has been scant mention of the fact that there had been no increase in the level of investment in the U.S. producing economy in thirty-five years. It is also a fact that with the rising level of unemployment and continued decline in the manufacturing job base, U.S. consumer purchasing power has caved in. And despite the financial bailouts, there is still no new economic engine to lead a recovery.

During the week of October 6, Obama continued to surge in the polls. Both McCain and his vice-presidential candidate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, had performed poorly in the televised debates, and the projections of state-by-state counts in the electoral college showed Obama approaching enough votes to ensure victory. The election was now only a month away.

At this point the McCain campaign decided to “go negative” in criticizing Obama on “character issues,” with an unnamed “high-ranking campaign official” making the incredible admission to the New York Post that “if the campaign focused on the economy we would lose.” McCain’s team had already announced they were halting their campaigning in Michigan, perhaps the industrial state hit hardest by the economic downturn.

On the evening of Monday, October 13, Obama tried to seize the initiative through a major address in Toledo, Ohio, on a new economic recovery plan which included the following provisions:

• A tax credit of $3,000 per job for companies adding jobs in the U.S.
• Elimination of capital gains taxes on investments in small and start-up businesses.
• $25 billion of federal money for infrastructure projects.
• Tax cuts for workers, middle-class employees, and senior citizens.
• Extension of unemployment benefits.
• Penalty-free hardship withdrawals from retirement accounts.
• Allowing bankruptcy judges to modify mortgage terms for distressed consumers.
• A ninety-day foreclosure moratorium for financial institutions that participated in the congressional bailout plan.

But there was a glitch. Despite the variety of provisions and the obvious voter appeal, the plan would only provide a $50 billion stimulus to the economy, less than $175 per capita. The amount would be dwarfed by the estimated total of $1.5 trillion the federal government had committed to between March 16 and October 3 to rescue the financial system.

The rescue included financial institution bailouts and takeovers, costs due to bank failures, new mortgage insurance, and tax breaks added to the bailout bill. This largesse would have to be paid for by yet more government borrowing, with an unprecedented $1 trillion deficit looming for fiscal year 2009.

Obama made a serious misrepresentation about the nature of the additional deficit by claiming that the government’s $700 billion outlay in purchasing bad bank debt would be paid back when the loans the debt was based on were redeemed. But the reason the debt was bad in the first place was that it came from mortgages that homeowners were expected to default on. Not even the power of the federal government was going to squeeze blood from this turnip.

In Obama’s wake came a host of progressive commentators offering their own stimulus proposals to be financed by government debt as though it would be as easy as turning on a garden hose. An example was the $300-$400 billion plan put forth by Rutgers University professor Eileen Appelbaum who, like Obama, never mentioned the possibility of increasing overall tax revenues or curbing military spending as funding sources.

The day after Obama put forth his plan, McCain said he would offer $52 billion in tax cuts but no stimulus spending. He had campaigned against congressional “earmarks,” which were a type of budget appropriation for infrastructure projects proposed by representatives for their home districts. McCain viewed federal infrastructure spending as “pork,” making it a taboo which he could not break at this late stage of the game.

The day McCain made his proposal, the government announced that $250 billion of the Wall Street bailout would be used for the Department of the Treasury to buy shares in the nation’s largest banks. This followed similar action announced for British banks by Prime Minister Gordon Brown. The measure would restore some of the bank capitalization lost through loan defaults. U.S. banks would now be partially nationalized.

A few days later, the Federal Reserve announced it would take over a critical function of the commercial banking industry by using its emergency powers to fund day-to-day operations of U.S. businesses through the discount window of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

In spite of all this, the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and every commentator writing on the subject was still predicting a long and deep recession for both the U.S. and world economies. Around the world stock markets continued to fall.

Meanwhile, in foreign affairs, there has been a subtle movement among the U.S. establishment over the last three years away from Israel. Former president Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, was a milestone. Also, Obama’s vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden reportedly told Israel they would have to live with a nuclear Iran.

The candidates made the required nods in the direction of Israel as a valued ally, but none spent much valuable air time on the topic. Jewish voters typically voted with the Democratic Party and were not seeing any reason to switch.

Obama still had a credibility problem, except it was with progressive voters.

In running after having served in the U.S. Senate for only four years, Obama had come out of nowhere to capture the imagination of younger and highly-educated voters sick of Bush’s wars. But far from being the peace candidate he seemed to be early in his election bid, now when he said he had opposed the Iraq War from the start, he clarified his position to mean that he only opposed it because the U.S. should have been focusing its military efforts more on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He talked about “taking out Osama bin Laden,” referring to the 9/11 attacks seven years ago. But bin Laden hadn’t reliably been seen or heard from for years, and some doubt he is even still alive.

Obama also said, in accepting the Democratic Party nomination for president in Denver on August 28, that he would “truly stand up for Georgia” and “curb Russian aggression.” Later Obama called Russia’s actions “evil.” Biden referred in his acceptance speech to “Russia’s challenge to the free and democratic country of Georgia.” Obviously, these aggressive positions, based on falsehoods, could trigger a U.S.-Russian confrontation if pushed to their logical extremes.

McCain has been serving in Washington, D.C., in the House or the Senate, since 1983. He is a former Vietnam prisoner of war and the son and grandson of Navy admirals. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1958 with a dismal ranking of 894 out of 899.

McCain is the favored candidate of the military-industrial complex and, with Alaska governor Sarah Palin as nominee for vice-president, the religious right-wing. He is also the one who would likely ensure continued record-setting oil company profits.

While Obama called for an oil windfall profits tax that could yield $15 billion a year in new federal revenue, McCain’s proposals “would deliver a $3.8 billion tax cut to the five largest American oil companies,” according to the Center for American Progress Action Fund. $1.2 billion of the cut would go to Exxon-Mobil, largely associated with the Rockefeller family.

McCain had tried to appeal to the Christian fundamentalist constituency by picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate, though no candidate for that office ever had less experience at the national level. She said that the Iraq War was “God’s task,” while British Petroleum reportedly was a sponsor for her inauguration.

Many thoughtful people, including conservative commentator George Will, have been dissconcerted at the prospect of a McCain/Palin presidency. Will, with his typical patrician understatement, said McCain’s reaction to the economic crisis was “un-presidential” and “made some of us fearful.”

McCain also has a reputation for a bad temper and making snap judgments. The selection of Sarah Palin seemed like an example of the latter. McCain is the oldest presidential candidate in history and not of the best health. People have been looking at Sarah Palin in light of the terrifying prospects that such a seemingly clueless person could occupy the White House if McCain died in office.

If Obama had been in danger of losing the progressive wing of the Democratic Party by his unwillingness to separate himself sufficiently from the Bush administration’s militant foreign policy, events were still in his favor. By early October, with the highly unpopular bailout having been approved and the stock market continuing to sink, Obama remained calm in the televised debates and in campaign speeches.

For an outdoor speech in St. Louis, Obama drew 100,000 spectators. He has begun to look like a president-in-waiting, while McCain seems increasingly the man time has passed by.

But the next president could be faced with momentous decisions if he cares to make them. Events since the late 1970s showed how much the philosophy in U.S. ruling circles had moved away from President Richard Nixon’s concept of a multilateral world based on a balance of power to one of world conquest by an international order headed by the global financiers and enforced by a militant U.S. government.

Therefore it is difficult for many observers to be hopeful about seeing the U.S. take its place among a peaceful family of nations. Both candidates promised “change.” But would they change anything that really made a difference? Or would they just follow orders?

As the campaign entered its final month, it was Obama’s to lose. Still, many people believed that the real reason George W. Bush had won the 2000 and 2004 elections was due to campaign fraud in Florida and Ohio respectively and feared that something similar could happen in 2008.

Would the Republicans steal what was arguably one of the most important presidential elections in U.S. history? The New York Times reported on October 9:

“Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law.”

The Obama campaign was even calling for appointment of a federal special prosecutor to investigate allegations of illegalities. As Obama continued to rise in the polls and McCain fell further behind, some said that if McCain did win the election, it could be done only through dishonest means.

If the Republicans do steal the election and elect McCain/Palin, a coalition of progressive activists led by David Swanson has pledged to take action. Swanson wrote:

If your television declares John McCain the president elect on the evening of November 4th, your television will be lying. You should immediately pick up your pre-packed bags and head straight to the White House in Washington, D.C., which we will surround and shut down until this attempt at a third illegitimate presidency is reversed.⁶

Then there were those who suspected that the 9/11 terrorist attacks had been carried out by elements within the Bush administration—or that they looked the other way and “allowed” the attacks to happen—and were afraid the Republicans would do something similar to arouse the fears of voters while McCain was staggering to apparent defeat.

Rumors that such an event was planned have been swirling for over a year. Such speculation, along with the fears about election fraud, shows just how much eight years of Bush and Vice-President Richard Cheney has alienated the public and how little the president and his party are trusted.

EUROPE WEIGHS IN

But no matter whether Obama or McCain is elected, the U.S. is part of a larger world where its credibility is in the gutter and where economic weakness has begun to remove its power of choice.

It has already been noted that it was foreign creditors, especially China, that appeared to be threatening to pull the plug on the U.S. government’s incessant borrowing which may have been the trigger that forced Henry Paulson to admit a crisis had hit by going to Congress for the financial rescue package.

Then with the election only two weeks away, it became clear that Europe had something different in mind than letting the U.S. return to its old ways of what might be called “Wild West” economics. After all, for several decades, U.S. politicians and businessmen had run all over the globe grabbing whatever they desired in order to support the world’s most wasteful and resource-intensive lifestyle.

At the same time as the U.S. was trying to shore up its failing—and flailing—financial industry, the nations of the EU have been taking actions to protect themselves. Except that the EU was focusing more on assuring solvency by increasing government control rather than the mindless “free-market” cash bailouts that Paulson and Bernanke were engineering. When in mid-October the Europeans weighed in, the U.S. stock market staged a single-day rally, with a gain of over 900 points in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average.

Over the past few years the sense has been building that the Europeans were becoming alarmed at the threat which U.S. misrule was posing to the world on a number of fronts, including 1) the breakdown of the world’s largest economy triggered by gross irresponsibility on the part of both the U.S. public and private sectors; 2) the overly-aggressive and failing U.S. military posture in the Middle East; and 3) U.S. refusal to address overriding international issues like resource conservation and global warming.

On October 18, the Canadian Globe and Mail reported on a recent meeting between French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The report said, “Nothing would be truly fixed, they believed, until there was a new world financial system in place, a new economic watchdog supervising the world’s economies.”

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown had written as much in a memo to the French and German leaders. The Globe and Mail report continued:

Europe had reached a consensus, at least superficially, on a solution that had not been attempted in sixty-four years: a major global meeting that would attempt to redesign the world-finance system. It was an acknowledgment, at a high level, that with the current crisis, the entire postwar economic system may have come to an end…. By Tuesday morning, the Americans were on board, at least as far as attending the proposed meeting — expected to be held in New York shortly after the November 4 presidential election. [Canadian] Prime Minister Stephen Harper, fresh from his re-election, said Friday he also supports holding the meeting. All the G8 industrialized nations have agreed to attend, at least on paper, and it is expected that China, Brazil and India will take part. While there’s no consensus on what the new financial order should be and there are signs of deeply divergent views, these countries appear at least willing to talk about a new international order at a meeting the three European leaders are calling Bretton Woods II, after the 1944 meeting that started it all.

The day before the Globe and Mail report, an article by Brown appeared in the Washington Post, where he wrote:

This is a defining moment for the world economy. We are living through the first financial crisis of this new global age. And the decisions we make will affect us over not just the next few weeks but for years to come. The global problems we face require global solutions.

Brown added that, “The next stage is to rebuild our fractured international financial system” and mentioned that the purpose was to “root out the irresponsible and often undisclosed lending at the heart of our problems.”

Perhaps what Brown has in mind was to act on behalf of Europe in rescuing the Western financial system from the excesses of those in the U.S. who have wrecked it. Brown concluded diplomatically:

“There are no Britain-only or Europe-only or America-only solutions to today’s problems. We are all in this together, and we can only resolve this crisis together. Over the past week, we have shown that with political will it is possible to agree on a global multibillion-dollar package to recapitalize our banks across many continents. In the next few weeks, we need to show the same resolve and spirit of cooperation to create the rules for our new global economy. If we do this, 2008 will be remembered not just as a year of financial crisis but as the year we started to build the world anew.”

The Globe and Mail article provided additional detail on the topics the summit would cover:

The document that Mr. Brown first made public on Wednesday morning …proposes a set of organizations — a ‘new international financial architecture for the global age’— that will monitor risks in the financial system and provide an early-warning system; determine global standards of regulation; supervise international corporations in their cross-border activities, protect markets from excessive activities of speculators; stamp out major conflicts of interest and set standards for pay and bonuses; internationalize accounting standards, and provide transparency in complex financial transactions.

Over the weekend, Sarkozy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso met with President Bush at the presidential Camp David retreat in Maryland where they announced “a series of summits on addressing the challenges facing the global economy,” starting with one in the United States “soon after the U.S. elections.”

But Sarkozy sounded much more aggressive than Bush or other U.S. officials had been in curbing reckless “free-market” abuses. He told the press:

The president of the United States is right in saying that protectionism and closing one’s borders is a catastrophe. He is right to say that it would be wrong, catastrophic, to challenge the foundations of market economics. But we cannot continue along the same lines because the same problems will trigger the same disasters.

Sarkozy mentioned several areas where he might want to negotiate new regulations exceeding what the U.S. and Britain were looking for, including more stringent regulation of international banks, hedge funds, and credit-rating companies. According to press reports, he also said that world leaders should reconsider the rules governing offshore tax havens such as the Cayman Islands.

Sarkozy has also been reported as saying, “We want a new world to come out of this. We want to set up the basis for a capitalism of entrepreneurs, not speculators.” Another topic Sarkozy and other European leaders have mentioned is restoring the system of fixed currency exchange rates that the U.S. abandoned in 1972, an action which introduced an era of worldwide currency anarchy. He said that fixed, but flexible, exchange rates “should definitely be on the table.”⁷

Regarding any potential conflict with the U.S. over the upcoming summits, Sarkozy said after a meeting in Europe: “Europe wants it. Europe demands it. Europe will get it.”⁸

Finally, on October 23, the White House announced that President Bush would host the first summit on November 15 in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post reported that:

Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and others have signaled a desired to go much further in regulating markets than Bush seems inclined to do. Brown said yesterday that he wants greater cross-border oversight of banks and other financial firms, while Sarkozy called for much stricter government supervision of financial markets.

By now attendance had been expanded to include the entire G-20 which represents two-thirds of the world’s population. The G-20 includes Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union.

Finally, at a meeting hosted by the Chinese on October 25 in Shanghai, Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao confirmed the need for far-reaching measures. With Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, German Chancellor Merkel and French President Sarkozy in attendance, the attendees issued a statement which said they recognized “the need to improve the supervision and regulation of all financial actors, in particular their accountability” and agreed “to undertake effective and comprehensive reform of the international monetary and financial systems.”

Prior to this meeting, said Reuters:

The front-page commentary in the overseas edition of the People’s Daily said that Asian and European countries should banish the U.S. dollar from their direct trade relations for a start, relying only on their own currencies.

The era of American unilateralism is clearly on the verge of ending, but are we seeing the same configuration of nations that run the Trilateral Commission and the Bilderberg Group taking advantage of the crisis to further the New World Order agenda of total domination of the world by Western international finance?

And is this why smaller nations such as Iceland are seeing their currencies under attack from unknown sources? Other nations with shaky currencies are Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, South Korea, Argentina, Russia, Pakistan, and Brazil. Is someone trying to stampede these nations into seeking shelter under an umbrella belonging exclusively to the big Western banks?

And will such measures simply bind every nation on earth more stringently to the worldwide debt-based monetary system that has failed so spectacularly? Are we in fact seeing the stage now being set for the complete and final triumph of the global reign of usury?

And if the U.S. financial system is completely controlled by whatever supranational infrastructure is devised, will it then be subjected to the same type of neoliberal regime of austerity and privatization the IMF imposes on the nations it dominates? Will the “Washington Consensus” turn and devour its originator?

In a 1998 paper, World Bank analysts stated, “Crises are a window of opportunity.” (Dr. Richard Werner, Gang8 Yahoo Group) So was the financial crisis engineered at this stage of the U.S. political process to create what could be a global financial coup d’etat before the next president takes office?
Or is there a more benign interpretation of events? Is the older, wiser, and more mature civilization of Europe riding to rescue a world the U.S. has brought to the brink of destruction?

Whether it’s Obama or McCain who is elected president on November 4, that person will sit in attendance at the planned summits with the rest of the world presenting its case for change. Of course change there has to be. The U.S. owes the world a mountain of debt, as well as redress for its lawlessness.

Also, the possibility of a federal government debt default in 2009 is looming for a nation that has never been in such a precarious financial position. The days of the Wild West are indeed over. But what will come next?

WHAT SHOULD THE NEXT PRESIDENT DO TO FACE THE CRISIS?

Senior White House correspondent Helen Thomas said of Bush, “He is the worst president in all of American history.” The public shares Thomas’s view. By mid-October 2008, ninety percent of those polled said the nation was headed in the wrong direction.

Former President Jimmy Carter said something similar in the area of foreign policy: “I think, as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history.”

One thing is certain: the legacy left by President George W. Bush is indeed a kind of Armageddon. The challenges that will face the next U.S. president are almost beyond comprehension. They include war vs. peace and the ability of the world economy to function.

But with so many changes in the world, shouldn’t we have not just an economic “summit,” but a general framework for peace that would end hostilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Eastern Mediterranean?

With respect to Russia, China, India and even the EU, the new president will doubtless be expected to embrace the politics of multilateralism in order to maintain a balance of power among the nations of the world. But shouldn’t a strong voice also be given to the nations of the Islamic region, as well as Africa, Latin America, and Australia/New Zealand?

By now it is abundantly clear that global finance capitalism cannot replace the nation-state. It should be just as clear that only a world of functional and prosperous nations can create an effective international federation as contemplated by the U.N. charter.

The Europeans seem to have an inkling of this, but will the world arrive at stability if Western bank-run finance is seen as the only viable economic system? How about a broader approach to prosperity that would help the people of every nation on earth, not just those who live off lending and interest? Is our planet condemned to the misrule of various forms of “trickle-down” economics forever?

The organization that should be the most concerned is the U.N., but where is the U.N. today? Obviously it is nearly dead as a positive and active force in the world. In a farewell address preceding his 2006 retirement as secretary-general, Kofi Annan discussed three major problems of “an unjust world economy, world disorder, and widespread contempt for human rights and the rule of law,” which “have not been resolved, but have sharpened” during his service.

This disintegration has taken place during the George W. Bush presidency. In a December 11 speech, Annan asked for the U.S. to return to President Harry Truman’s multilateralist foreign policy and to follow Truman’s belief that “the responsibility of the great states is to serve and not dominate the peoples of the world.”

Anther matter the new president should deal with is to get control of the U.S. military-intelligence network. He must reverse the Neocon takeover of the State Department engineered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and halt the militarization of U.S. embassies resulting from escalation of the number of military staff assigned from the Department of Defense.

Another major question is whether the danger of U.S. government bankruptcy will result in reduced military expenditures. But will the war-mongers surrender the enormous portion of the U.S. government budget they are accustomed to consuming?

While the furor over the financial meltdown was raging in October, Congress quietly passed a staggering $611 billion defense authorization on top of $189.3 billion in “supplemental” funding for the Iraqi and Afghan wars. The Pentagon says its budget will increase by $450 billion over the next five years.

Both Obama and McCain voted to approve the defense authorization bill. Among the projects they funded was a truck-mounted microwave crowd-control weapon being developed by Raytheon for 2010 deployment.

To be used to control civilian demonstrators, each weapon will cost $5 million. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to ask the next president to explain why he thinks this weapon is needed?

Under another program the Defense Department will pay contractors a staggering $300 million “to produce news stories, entertainment programs, and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to ‘engage and inspire’ the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government,” according to a letter from Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) to defense secretary Robert Gates. This is enough money to pay 6,000 employees $50,000 per year. Maybe Obama and McCain should explain why they voted to approve this outrageous expenditure.

Neither is NATO expecting a benign outcome to the world crisis. Author Michael Collon reported in an article on “What Will the U.S. Foreign Policy be Tomorrow?”:

In January 2008, five former NATO generals presented a preparatory document for the NATO summit meeting at Bucharest. Their proposals reflect a terrifying possibility. And what gives weight to their document is that, up until recently, all of them held very high positions. General John Shalikashvili was U.S. Chief of Staff and Commander in Chief of NATO in Europe, General Klaus Naumann ran the German army and was president of the military committee of NATO in Europe, General Henk van den Breemen was Dutch Chief of Staff and Admiral Jacques Lanxade held the same post in France, while Lord Inge ran the General Staff and was also Chief of the Defence Staff of Great Britain.⁹

Collon described the document in a section entitled, “Five NATO Generals Prepare a World Government.” The document stated, “What the Western allies expect is the pro-active defense of their societies and their way of life maintained over the long term.” It continued, “The objectives of our strategy are to preserve the peace, our values, economic liberalism, and stability.”

“Economic liberalism” means market-oriented global finance capitalism under the control of the Western banking system.

The document also identified enemies, the chief one being China:

China is in a situation to wreak great harm on the US and the world economies, based on its enormous reserves in dollars….China is in a position to use finance to impose itself on Africa and acquire the capacity to utilize it on a much greater scale—if it so decides.

This statement by the general is mind-boggling. Hasn’t it been U.S. government policies that resulted in these dollars being paid to China? And isn’t the West talking out of both sides of its mouth in planning a world economic summit that includes China, while contemplating war against that nation?

Indeed, the rise and fall of the U.S. bubble economy cannot be understood unless the role of China is taken into account. This role is increasingly problematic in light of statements such as one made recently by Shi Jianxun, a professor at Shanghai’s Tongji University:

“The grim reality has led people, amidst the panic, to realize that the United States has used the U.S. dollar’s hegemony to plunder the world’s wealth.”¹⁰

Whatever agreements U.S. bankers and politicians may once have made with China for them to take over our manufacturing while we lived off financial profits have grievously backfired. Solving this conflict with China peacefully may be the next president’s greatest challenge. But decisions to the contrary may already have been made, with the president’s job being merely to carry them out.

FACING THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

Assuming that peace may yet prevail, we may hope that in facing the economic crisis, the next president will go beyond working with other nations in attempting to fix the financial system. No financial fixes will change the fact that a severe economic repression has arrived and that the producing economy of the U.S. and other nations have begun to spiral downward.

The possibility exists of enormous human suffering. In fact the suffering has already started, with bankers filing court actions that have led to uniformed policemen or even SWAT teams evicting large numbers of innocent people, often elderly, from their homes around the country. With the stock market crash, tens off millions of people are losing their hard-earned savings and retirement nest eggs.

The downward path to further human suffering is being prepared by mass media propagandists like the Washington Post’s Robert Samuelson, who argues that the hard times mean we must slash programs for the elderly and poor like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. In an October 22 article Samuelson wrote:

I wish everyone a pleasurable retirement. But we need to overhaul our government retirement programs for the common good and not just the good of the elderly. We have already waited so long that there’s no way to do this without being unfair to someone — overburdening the young or withdrawing promised benefits from older Americans. The present financial crisis, by reducing retirement savings, has made a hard job even harder. Still, these federal programs began as safety nets for the needy; now they’ve become subsidies for living long, regardless of need.

“Subsidies for living long”? With columnists for prestigious newspapers advocating policies that border on genocide, it’s time to talk about real solutions.

The first thing to realize is that the money raised through taxes and borrowing from the future, which the politicians have thrown at their wars and financial bailouts, exists as real economic purchasing power. This means that it can be used for other purposes—for purposes that directly benefit the people of the nation who work for a living, send their children to school, and want to save for their old age.

The key to having money available for beneficial social purposes, rather than war and profits from lending, is that it should be issued directly by the government, not lent through the banking system which uses public debt as collateral.

The Democrats mention investment in U.S. infrastructure, though they do not provide details about how to pay for it except through more government deficit spending funneled through the Federal Reserve System. But what if we left the banks out of it for a change?

What would really help repair the damage to the collapsing U.S. domestic economy would be an uncompromising program of interest-free lending and grants for infrastructure development and an effort at restoring the nation’s manufacturing base, along with decent, well-paying jobs. Such a program would constitute a “New Deal for the 21st Century,” as spoken of by 2008 presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). Kucinich has introduced legislation for zero-interest infrastructure lending in the last two sessions of Congress.

The economic recovery program proposed by Barack Obama may be a step in the right direction, but the $25 billion infrastructure provision is pathetically small. Obama should be listening to Congressman Kucinich as much as to his own advisers and Wall Street campaign contributors.

Recently Kucinich released a sixteen-point plan that included infrastructure development, as well as implementation of the American Monetary Institute’s American Monetary Act, the most progressive piece of monetary reform legislation in U.S. history. It’s in the area of monetary reform that Obama could have the greatest impact, though there’s no indication it has crossed his mind.

One feature of the American Monetary Act is nationalization of the Federal Reserve, as was done with the Bank of England in 1946. The act would also provide for direct government expenditures for public purposes as took place in the 19th century with the Civil War Greenbacks. The Greenbacks helped fuel the U.S. economy until the early 20th century. Contrary to bankers’ propaganda, they were non-inflationary. By comparison, under the Federal Reserve System, the dollar has lost ninety-five percent of its value, most of this loss taking place since 1965.

An area of economic recovery that has been ignored is the disappearance in the U.S. of family farming. During the Great Depression, a majority of Americans still lived on farms, so at least could grow food in times of trouble.

Today, the dominance of agribusiness, inflated land prices, the high cost of credit, “free trade,” and NAFTA have taken away that ability. A nation that cannot feed itself locally is playing with fire. Who can say that famine could not arise even in developed nations during a general economic collapse?

DIVIDEND ECONOMICS

The one economic measure that has made a positive difference in 2008 was the federal government’s issuance to taxpayers of a tax rebate averaging $600 per recipient. The stimulus measure demonstrates how easy it is to spend money directly into the economy if the politicians want to do so.

Along these lines, the new president could institute ongoing cash stipends to citizens similar to the Alaska Permanent Fund. This year the Alaska state government made a payment to each resident of $3,269 from resource revenues. The American Monetary Act also contains a dividend provision, as does the platform for the Green Party.

But $3,269 is not enough. An annual citizens’ dividend of $1,000 per month has been proposed by Washington, D.C., analyst Stephen Shafarman, in his new book, Peaceful, Positive Revolution (Tendril Press, 2008).

A similar program leading to an annual basic income guarantee has been enacted by Brazil and was used in modified form by Argentina to recover from its economic collapse of 1999-2002. Shafarman is part of the U.S. Basic Income Guarantee Network, which has ties to its European counterpart, the Basic Income European Network (BIEN). For the author’s own description of a dividend-based economic model, see “An Emergency Program of Monetary Reform for the United States,” Global Research.

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A citizens’ dividend could work wonders in rebuilding the economy from the bottom up, including small business and local agriculture. To assure that dividends are spent for necessities, they could be issued as tax-free food, fuel, and housing vouchers from a government recovery account not dependent on taxation or borrowing. Rather the backing for the vouchers would be the productive potential of the economy.

This way, new economic production could be generated without bank loans. The vouchers, when spent, could be funneled into a network of community savings banks that would re-lend the money locally. (Richard C. Cook, “How to Save the U.S. Economy: The Cook Plan,” Global Research.)

By taking such steps to restore economic vitality, the U.S. might eventually overcome the delusion spawned by the New World Order and clung to by all the leaders of the Western nations that financial wealth has meaning apart from a nation’s producing economy. In continuing to maintain the fictitious belief in finance-based wealth without a robust producing economy to support it, the nations of the West have wandered down a cul-de-sac.

In 1896, William Jennings Bryan spoke at the Democratic National Convention, saying to the bankers and their tyrannical gold standard, “You shall not crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” Today mankind is being crucified on a banker’s promissory note.

Real wealth is created by human labor and ingenuity applied to the resources of the earth using energy that derives from nature. It is not created by bank loans. Credit has a role, but it should be treated as a public utility, like water, electricity, and clean air.¹¹

Today a new economic science is needed. Such a science would build on such historical movements as Distributism and Social Credit, both developed by British thinkers in the early 20th century and current as viable economic schools of thought in Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain, Australia, and elsewhere.

Distributism posits an alternative to both capitalism and socialism by arguing that the best economic system is one that provides ownership and autonomy to the maximum number of people. When the Social Credit concept of regular dividend payments as a means of monetizing future production potential is introduced as well, an entirely new monetary basis for economic democracy emerges.

A revolution in economics is needed. The future of the world is now at stake, particularly because it is obvious that the U.S.’s status as the world’s superpower is coming to an end. People know something is drastically wrong with a nation that relies more than any other on “market economics,” yet has the world’s largest prison population, a declining standard of living, decreasing life expectancy, an epidemic of drug and alcohol addiction, overwhelming debt, and so much domestic violence.

This is what turning over the nation to the financial elite has done. Will the next stage be an economic depression where millions more become homeless and people actually starve? If so, it all started when, in 1913, the financiers took over through the Federal Reserve System and created a monetary system based on usury, debt-based currency, and bank leveraging of speculation, combined with crony capitalism and criminal disregard of all legal and commonsense standards.

The politicians profited from this system which has now failed. The financiers and their enablers in the White House and Congress have driven a once-great nation off a cliff. Will the European solution of collective action to shore up the world’s debt-based monetary system make a difference? Or will it just lead to a new era of international financial looting, forced population reduction, and a more sophisticated police state than anything we have seen yet?

ECONOMICS OF THE SPIRIT

Maybe a New World Order really is needed. If so, shouldn’t it be one with a genuine spiritual basis leading to economic justice, not just a modification of the system we have today? Such a system based on economic justice was affirmed in a message to the author by an Australian author, Omna Last, who wrote:

But what if there was a truly representative world government…I do not mean a coercive world government imposing itself on the peoples of the world, but one that operated exactly as you suggest an American government should operate in helping to fulfill the potential in the lives of Americans? A government that provided free no-interest economic dividends to every nation of the world community? If the money was embezzled, used for corrupt purposes, or helped to destroy the world’s eco-system further, then that country would receive no free dividends for a period in the future.

In an article posted on his website on October 26, Omna Last wrote:

Earth is a temple. The money-changers have taken over the temple…. It is time to remove the money-changers from their positions as priests of the new religion of money…. Governments all over the world should be run by people in tune with their divine selves – their conscience, in tune with God, not in love with money and its power, but in love with the moral laws of the Universe.

Those with eyes to see knew the present crisis was coming long ago. That vision now has spread to more people. What is increasingly clear is that positive change, as opposed to the change that is just a drift to disaster, will only happen when people who love freedom demand it, work for it, and sacrifice for it. Will the next president of the United States facilitate such change or stand in its way?

1. George Friedman, “The Russian Resurgence,” www.Stratfor.com, September 18, 2008.
2. Brian Rohan, “Saakashvili “Planned S. Ossetia Invasion”: Ex-Minister,” Reuters, September 14, 2008.
3. Ian S. Lustick, “Abandoning the Iron Wall: ‘Israel and the Middle Eastern Muck’,” Middle East Policy, Vo. XV, No. 3, Fall 2008.
4. Richard C. Cook, “Mortgage Fraud: The Paulson Bailout Plan,” Global Research, September 23, 2008.
5. Berit Kjos, “The U.N. Plan for Global Migration,” News with Views, 2006.
6. David Swanson, “A McCain Win Will be Theft: Resistance Planned,” Global Research, October 20, 2008.
7. Bloomberg.com, October 6, 2008.
8. Christian Science Monitor, October 20, 2008.
9. Information Clearing House, October 12, 2008.
10. “U.S. Has Plundered World Wealth With Dollar,” Reuters, October 24, 2008.
11. Richard C. Cook, “Credit as a Public Utility: The Key to Monetary Reform,” Global Research.

The court’s opinion on Kosovo, which experts say could take one to three years, is not binding, but it will put a break on further efforts to integrating Kosovo into the world community as an independent country.

The move was a much-needed victory for Serbia, which lobbied heavily during the build-up to the vote. Despite the fact that 90 percent of Kosovars are nominally Muslim and despite the popular image of Serbia as anti-Muslim, Egypt, Algeria, Indonesia and Iran supported Serbia, showing that this is not a Muslim issue. 74 nations abstained, including most European and Muslim nations, strange bedfellows, but understandably so.

The Europeans don’t want to oppose a legitimate recourse to international law. Some European and most Muslim nations have separatist movements like Indonesia, which has to deal with ethnic conflicts in Aceh and Irian Jaya, and Azerbaijan, with its Armenian breakaway enclave Nagorno-Karabakh. Separatist concerns also lie behind the reluctance of some European Union countries to recognize Kosovo. Only 20 of the union’s 27 members have done so, with those opposed to the move including Spain, Cyprus and Romania.

It was also a victory for Russia, which has been explaining to the Muslim world ever since Kosovo declared independence in February what a dangerous precedent it is. In mid-March, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said before beginning a Middle East visit that Moscow was urging Muslim states to withstand pressure to recognize Kosovo, a state he said had been “illegally formed. I would like to warn against the temptation to give in to calls from non-Arab and non-Islamic states addressed to Islamic countries to show Islamic solidarity and recognize Kosovo,” he told Rossiiskaya Gazeta. Lavrov also pointed to unrest taking place in Tibet at the time, suggesting that Kosovo’s breakaway had helped to trigger the “disorder” there.

In contrast to Kosovo, which was an integral part of Serbia until NATO bombed Serbia and invaded Kosovo in 1999, Georgia’s secessionist provinces had been functioning as independent countries from 1991-2 and South Ossetia was invaded by the Georgian army and its capital flattened by Georgian bombs, which the Serbs never did to Kosovo. So despite the contrary view of the two tragic incidents in the Western media, Serbia and Russia ’s arguments against Kosovo have found a sympathetic ear.

Only six members of the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) have recognized its independence. The day after the independence declaration, OIC Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu issued a statement declaring “our solidarity with and support to our brothers and sisters there. There is no doubt that the independence of Kosovo will be an asset to the Muslim world and will further enhance joint Islamic action.” But at an OIC summit in Dakar, Senegal, a month later, OIC heads of state resisted a Turkish initiative and merely voiced “solidarity”, leaving recognition up to individual member states. The only six to have taken the step so far are Turkey, Albania, Afghanistan, Burkino Faso, Sierra Leone and Senegal.

“We strongly believe that the support we got from the international community to gain our freedom is the largest miracle of Allah and the largest sign of his mercy towards his people in Kosovo,” Blerim Gashi, public information officer of the Kosovar-Arab friendship and economic cooperation chamber, wrote on the Al-Arabiya television channel’s website. “We do hope that our brothers in faith will take their rightful place on our side.” It is the poorest country in Europe, notorious for drug, arms and human smuggling, and with an unemployment rate of 40 percent. Kosovo authorities have no control over about 15 per cent of its territory where about 200,000 Serbs live. Local Serbs in those areas recognize only the Serbian government, despite opposition from Kosovo’s UN and European Union administrators.

On his way to New York for last minute lobbying, Kosovo Foreign Minister Skender Hyseni visited OIC headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he met with Ihsanoglu and “expressed the hope that more OIC member states would recognize the independence of Kosovo.” While the Kosovar was in Jeddah at the OIC, his Serbian counterpart, Vuk Jeremic, was in Cairo at the Arab League — all 22 of whose members are also in the OIC.

As if to emphasize where Kosovo’s interests really lie, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was in Pristina at about the same time, the first US Cabinet member to Kosovo since the country declared independence, where he met with the president and prime minister of Kosovo and lunched with the 1,600 US troops at Camp Bondsteel. He just happened to be on his way to nearby Hungary for a meeting of NATO defense chiefs. The US pledged $400 million at a donors’ conference earlier this year.

Gates dismisses Russia’s vehement opposition as sour grapes, an attempt to “exorcise past humiliations,” but a less tendentious look reveals a sophisticated diplomatic offensive by Russia with regards, not so much Kosovo, as the Muslim world in general. Russia sees Kosovo as a US-EU invention with dangerous implications for the world. It views the war in Iraq in a similar light, is increasingly critical of the war in Afghanistan, and as such is being actively courted by Arab countries, not to mention Iran.

Moscow’s new friends include Syria, eager for Russian arms and more than willing to restore the old Soviet naval base at Tartus, and Hamas, which went so far as to recognize Abkhazia and South Ossetia, putting it in league with Russia’s close friend Nicaragua. Moscow is seen as less beholden to Israel, and has shown it is eager to be considered an even-handed broker in the Palestinian issue, having hosted a peace conference last June for the first time.

As president, Vladimir Putin visited Iran last October, Saudi Arabia in January, and Libya in April, his last official visit as president. Recently Russia, with its large Muslim population, has expressed interest in joining the OIC. This thaw in relations has been a two-way street. Russia signed a deal to build a railway in Saudi Arabia and another on gas production in Libya, forgave Iraq $12 billion in Soviet-era debt, and has forgiven past Saudi and Iranian support to Chechen rebels.

Arab nations see in Russia not only an important ally and counterweight to the US, but a role model of sorts. Political analyst Abdel-Fattah Mady at Alexandria University writes at IslamOnline.net, “Arab countries fail to define a framework for their common national security. Unfortunately, Arab regimes cannot distinguish between their peoples’ interests and those of the United States. Russia teaches Arabs a very important lesson: Arabs must settle their internal divisions if they want to join the club of nations that defend their interests without fearing the US. Unfortunately, Arabs lack strong leadership with a clear vision of national security. Neither do they have the political determination to change facts on the ground.”

Washington is forced to watch other powers shape events.

– Financial Times, August 25, 2008

Everywhere one looks, US imperial policy has suffered major military and diplomatic defeats. With the backing of the Democratic Congress, the Republican White House’s aggressive pursuit of a military approach to empire-building has led to a world-wide decline of US influence, the realignment of former client rulers toward imperial adversaries, the emergence of competing hegemons and loss of crucial sources of strategic raw materials. The defeats and losses have not dampened militaristic policies nor extinguished the drive for empire building. On the contrary, both the White House and the Congressional incumbents have embraced a hardening of military positions, reiterated a confrontational style of politics and an increased reliance on overseas, bellicose posturing to distract the domestic populace from its deteriorating economic conditions. As the economic and political cost of sustaining the empire increases, as the Federal government allocates hundreds of billions to the crises-ridden financial sector and cuts tens of billions in corporate taxes, avoiding collapse and recession, the entire economic burden is borne by the wage and salaried class in the form of declining living standards, while 12 million immigrant workers are subject to savage police state repression.

The overseas failures and domestic crises however have not led to progressive alternatives; the beneficiaries are overseas competitors and the domestic elite. In large part where public opinion majorities have expressed a desire or clamored for progressive alternatives, they have been thwarted by political representatives linked to militarist ideologues and the corporate elites.

Paradoxically the defeats and decline of US military directed empire building has been accompanied by the retreat of the anti-war movements in North America and Western Europe and the sharp decline of political parties and regimes opposing US imperialism in all the advanced capitalist countries. In other words, the defeats suffered by the US Empire have not been products of the Western Left, nor have they led to a ‘peace dividend’ or improved living standards for the working classes or peasants. To the extent that there are beneficiaries, they are found largely among the newly aspiring economic imperial countries, like China, Russia and India, among the oil rich countries of the Middle East, and especially among a broad swath of large agro-mineral export countries like Brazil, South Africa and Iran, which have carved out important niches in their region’s.

The growth and overseas expansion of the new economic empire building countries and their agro-mineral-financial ruling classes (with the possible exception of Venezuela) have greatly benefited a tiny elite, comprising not more than twenty percent of the population. The relative decline of US military imperialism and the rise of new economic imperialist powers have redistributed wealth and market share between countries but not among classes within the ascendant powers. While the militarists-Zionists-financial speculators rule the US Empire, the new billionaire manufacturers, real estate speculators and agro-mineral exporters rule the emerging economic empires.

The second paradox is found in the fact that the political forces militarily defeating the US military-centered empire are not the forces benefiting from the struggle.

While the Iraqi and Afghan resistance has imposed almost a trillion dollar cost on the US Treasury and tied down over 2 million rotating US troops over the past six years, it is the Chinese, Indian, Russian, European, Gulf Oil and financial ruling classes which have reaped the benefits from massive US non-productive expenditures. While the new economic beneficiaries are, in large part, secular, imperial and elitist, the politico-military forces undermining and defeating the US military empire are religious (Islamic), nationalist and mass-based.

The contemporary defeats of US military empire building are not a product of Western, secular, mass leftist movements. Nor do they result in a progressive, egalitarian society. Instead we have fast-growing highly unequal economies, led by ruling classes promoting their own ‘national’ versions of free market/neo-liberal strategies, which maximize profits through economic exploitation of labor, resource extraction and pillage of the environment. Until the mass movements, intellectuals and activists of the West break from their passivity and blind allegiance to the existing major parties, the defeat of US militarism will be a costly burden assumed by the masses of the Third World while the benefits will accrue to the rising new billionaire economic imperialists.

The Geography of Imperial Failures and Retreat

Middle East: Iraq and Iran

The ascendancy of military-directed empire building in the US has once again put into evidence its utter incapability to impose a new imperial order. After six and a half years of war and occupation in Iraq, the US has suffered enormous military casualties and over half a trillion in economic losses, without securing any political or military or natural resource gains. The losses from the war have generated domestic opposition to US military intervention, undermining current and future imperial military capacity. Even the US-designated puppet ruler in Iraq, Al Maliki, has demanded a set date for US withdrawal. US client Afghan President Karzai has called for greater oversight over US military operations which have killed thousands of non-combatants and civilians, thus deepening and extending support for the national resistance which now operates throughout the country.

For those in the US, particularly on the ‘Left’ who mistakenly argued that the invasion of Iraq was a ‘war for oil’ (rather than a war in support of Israeli hegemonic ambitions), Iraq’s signing of a $3 billion dollar oil contract with the China National Petroleum Corporation in late August 2008¹ demonstrates the contrary, unless one wishes to revise the slogan to ‘US War for Chinese Oil.’ In the 6 years since the US invaded Iraq, US oil companies have still failed to secure major oil deals.

On October 4-5, 2008, Shell, one of the world’s biggest petroleum multinationals and OMV, an Austrian energy corporation will sponsor a conference in Tehran under the auspices of the National Iranian Gas Export Company to promote ‘gas export opportunities and potentials of the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ This conference is simply one more example of the role of major petroleum companies attempting, through peaceful means, to build their overseas holdings (‘economic empire’). The major opposition to this ‘oil for peace’ move on the part of Shell Oil came from the leading Jewish-Zionist promoter of US engaging in Middle East wars for Israel — the Anti-Defamation League, which criticized Big Oil. According to its two principle leaders, Glen Lewy and Abe Foxman, “…these two companies are co-sponsoring a conference with the state-owned energy company of the leading state-sponsor of terrorism and human rights violator. Bu promoting one of Iran’s strategic industries, natural gas, OMV and Shell are hindering the effort of responsible states (sic) and corporations to isolate Iran.”

The conflict between Shell/OMV and a leading American Zionist-Jewish organization highlights the fundamental conflict between economic-centered empire building and military-centered empire building. The fact that Shell and OMV went ahead with the Iranian conference shows that at least some sectors of the oil industry are finally beginning to challenge the stranglehold that Zionist-militarists have over US Middle East policy. After having lost tens of billions of dollars in lucrative oil contracts thanks to Zionist-dictated policies , the oil companies are finally taking the first tentative steps toward formulating a new policy.

By pursuing the Israeli-US Zionist agenda of sequential wars and sanctions against oil-rich Muslim countries, Washington has lost access, control and profits to global economic competitors in a strategic region.

Africa

In the African nation of Somalia Washington opted for military intervention via the proxy Ethiopian dictatorial regime of Meles Zenawi to bolster the discredited and defeated pro-US puppet regime of Abdullah Yusuf. After almost 2 years the Ethiopian and the puppet regime only control a few blocks of the capital, Mogadishu, while the rest of the country is in the hands of the Somali resistance. According to the Financial Times², the Ethiopian regime “expressed a desire to curtail its military engagement in Somalia.” The US surrogate has been militarily and politically defeated; the US failed to secure support for its proxy occupation from the African Union. Throughout Africa, China, the EU, Japan, Russia and to a lesser degree India and Brazil all have made inroads in securing joint ventures in oil, raw materials export markets and large-scale, long-term infrastructure investments, while the US backs armed separatists in the Sudan and subsidizes the corrupt Mubarak regime in Egypt for over a billion dollars a year. Not only has the US empire lost out economically to its global competitors, it has suffered a major military-diplomatic defeat in Somalia and severely politically and financially weakened its Ethiopian client.

South Asia

In South Asia, the US strategic puppet ruler, Pakistani dictator Musharraf has been forced to resign — and the weak and divided electoral coalition which has replaced him has not been able to match the military, diplomatic and intelligence support for the US war in Afghanistan which Musharraf provided. The Pakistan-Afghan border is virtually open territory for cross border attacks, recruitment and military supplies by Afghan resistance organizations. The empire’s loss of Musharraf further undermines US efforts to impose an outpost in Afghanistan.

Through frequent ground and air attacks on Pakistan regions bordering Afghanistan, the US-NATO ‘coalition’ has multiplied, deepened and made massive civilian political and armed opposition throughout the country. The ‘election’ of the US client and convicted warlord and thug, Asif Ali Zadari, as President of Pakistan, will not in anyway contribute to the recovery of US influence outside of very limited elite political and military circles. Washington’s pursuit and extension of military imperialism from Afghanistan to Pakistan has led to even more severe political defeat among a much wider population in South Asia.

Top NATO generals and officials have recognized that the ‘Taliban’ has reorganized and extended its influence throughout the country, controlling most throughways to the major cities and even operating in and around the capital Kabul. Repeated US bombing and missile strikes of civilian housing, cultural events and markets have alienated vast numbers of Afghans and led to widespread opposition to US client ruler Karzai. The promises of both US presidential candidates to vastly expand the US occupation forces in Afghanistan upon taking office, will only prolong the war and deepen the weakening of the economic empires and its domestic foundations.

Caucasus

Washington’s attempt to extend its sphere of influence in the Caucasus through a territorial grab by its authoritarian Georgian client, President Mikheil Saakashvili, led instead to a profound defeat of the local satrap’s regional ambitions. The political break and integration with Russia of South Ossetia and Abkhazia represents the end of unrestricted expansion of the US and EU in the region — and a rollback in contested terrain. The rash adventurism and subsequent destruction of the Georgian economy by Saakashvili has provoked widespread internal unrest. Worse still, Georgia, the US, and its Eastern European clients call for ‘sanctions’ against Russia, threatens to undermine Western European strategic energy supply lines, as well as end Moscow’s collaboration with US military policies in Afghanistan, Iran, and the Middle East. If Washington escalates its military and economic threats to Russia, the latter can provide Iran, Syria and other US adversaries with powerful middle range ultra-modern anti-aircraft missiles. Equally important, Russia can dump over $200 billion in US Treasury notes, further weaken the US dollar and set in motion a global run in the currency.

In Georgia, as elsewhere, US military-centered empire building gives priority to a failed marginal land grab by a third rate client over lucrative strategic economic and military relations with one of the world’s global oil and gas powers and a crucial collaborator in its ongoing military operation in the Middle East. While US economic relations with Russia crumble in the wake of its aggressive military encirclement of Moscow — military bases in the Czech Republic, Poland, Georgia, Bulgaria, Rumania — Western European empire builders resist making military threats in favor of harsh rhetoric and ‘dialog’ in order to sustain strategic energy ties.

Middle East: Israel and the Arabs

In the Middle East, the US unconditional backing of Israeli military aggression in Lebanon, Palestine and Syria, and US backing of weak and ineffective Arab clients has led to a sharp decline in US influence. In Lebanon, since the defeat of the Israeli invasion in 2006, Hezbollah literally rules the southern half of the country — and holds veto power within the national government, reversing US client rule.

In Gaza, US and Israeli military attempts to seize power and oust Hamas via its client Abbas and Dahlen were rounded defeated and the independent nationalist movement led by Hamas consolidated power.

Washington’s effort to regain its influence and improve its image among conservative and moderate Arab rulers by ‘mediating’ a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine in Annapolis in November 2007 was utterly destroyed by Tel Aviv’s open and total repudiation of all the basic conditions set forth by the Bush Administration. Washington has no influence on Israel’s colonial expansion. On the contrary, the US Middle East policy is totally subject to the Israeli state through the Zionist Power Configuration and its control over Congress, Presidential selection, the mass media and major propaganda ‘think tanks’. The Zionists demonstrated their power by even dictating who could or could not even speak at the Democratic National Convention with the unprecedented censoring of former President James Carter because of his humanitarian criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians. Zionist-Israeli usurpation of US Middle East policy has led to strategic losses of investments, markets, profits and partnerships for the entire multi-national oil and gas industry.

The political fusion of imperialist militarists confronting Russia at the cost of strategic economic relations and Zionist-militarists pursuing Israeli regional power has led to multiple failed military adventures and tremendous global economic losses.

The Western Hemisphere

The application of the militarist strategy as well as the relative decline of economic hegemony has led to strategic defeats and failures in the Western Hemisphere. In late 2001, Washington challenged and threatened to take reprisals against President Chavez for refusing to submit to Bush’s ‘war on terror.’ Chavez at the time informed a bellicose representative of the State Department (Grossman) that, “We don’t fight terror with terror.” Less than 6 months later in April 2003, Washington backed a failed military coup and between December 2002 to February 2003, a failed bosses lockout. The failure of the US militarist strategy devastated Washington’s military and ruling class clients, and radicalized the Chavez Government. As a consequence, the Venezuelan leader proceeded to nationalize oil and petrol sectors and develop strategic ties with countries that compete with or oppose the US Empire, such as, Cuba, Iran, China and Russia. Venezuela signed strategic economic agreements in Latin America with Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Cuba and Nicaragua. While Washington poured over $6 billion dollars in military aid to Colombia, Venezuela signed petrol and gas investment and trade agreements with most of the Central American and Caribbean countries, severely challenging Washington’s influence in the region.

High commodity prices, booming Asian markets, unacceptable US tariffs and subsidies led to the relative independence of Latin America’s ‘national capitalist’ regimes, who embraced ‘neo-liberalism’ without the constraints of the IMF or the dictates of Washington. In these circumstances the US lost most of its leverage — except Colombia’s military threats — to pressure Latin America to isolate Chavez — or even Cuba. Washington’s military strategy led to its self-isolation.

Overseas Consequences of Failed Military Strategies

Isolation in Latin American can not be overcome because Washington’s pursuit of empire via prolonged military aggression — in the rest of the world and in Latin America — can not compete with the profits, wealth, investment and trade opportunities offered to the ruling classes of Latin America by the new markets in Russia, the Middle East, Asia and by oil rich Venezuela.

Washington’s militarist imperial strategy is evident in its dual policies: Prioritizing the spending of $6 billion in military aid to repressive Colombia while sacrificing $10 billion in trade, investments and profits with oil rich Venezuela. Washington has spent over $500 billion in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; billions are spent in war preparations against Iran; over $3 billion annually for Israel’s military; all the time losing hundreds of billions of dollars in trade and investment with Latin America.

The most striking aspect of this historical contrast is that the military spending embedded in military-centered empire building has failed even its minimum goal of gaining political control, military outposts and strategic resources for war. In contrast, global market competitors have secured access and control over strategic economic resources, and signed lucrative political co-operation agreements without costly military commitments.

Domestic Consequences of Failed Military-Driven Empire Building

The cost of military-Zionist driven empire building to the domestic economy has been devastating: Competitiveness has declined, inflation is eroding living standards, employment with stable living wages is disappearing, unemployment and loss of jobs is skyrocketing, the financial system is disconnected from the real economy and on the verge of collapse, home foreclosures are reaching catastrophic levels and taxpayers are being bled to death to bail out the trillion dollar home mortgage debt speculators. Political malaise is widespread. In the midst of system-wide crisis, an emerging police state has taken hold: thousands of legal and undocumented immigrant workers have been seized at their factories and detained in military camps away from their children. Muslim and Arab associations are raided and prosecuted on the bases of paid informers, including hooded Israeli ‘witnesses.’ The federal and local police practice ‘preventative detention’ of activists and journalists prior to the Presidential conventions, seizing protestors before they can exercise their constitutional rights and systematically destroying the cameras and tapes of citizens attempting to document abuses. Failed military imperialism brings in its wake a burgeoning police state — backed by both political parties — in the face of economic crises which threatens the political and social foundations of the empire.

Conclusion

The economic crisis in the run up to the Presidential elections has not led to the emergence of a mass based progressive alternative candidate. Both the Democratic and Republican contenders promise to prolong and extend the imperial wars and submit to unprecedented Israeli-Zionist military dictates with regard to Iran.

Crises and military defeats have not led to a re-thinking of global economic and military commitments. Instead we witness a right-wing radicalization, which seeks to escalate confrontations with China, Russia and Iran. The US draws in its wake the client regimes of Eastern Europe and the Caucasus and Baltic regions to counter Western Europe’s emphasis on ‘economic-centered’ empire building.

The reality of a multi-polarized economic world however undermines US efforts to impose a bipolar military confrontation. China holds $1.2 trillion dollars in US debt. Western Europe, in general, depends on over one-third of its energy for its homes, offices and factories from Russia. Germany relies on Russia for almost 60% of its gas. The economies of Asia: Japan, India, China, Vietnam and South Korea all depend on oil from the Middle East and not on the Middle East war plans of the Israeli-American militarists.

Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Venezuela and Iran are essential to the functioning of the world economy. In the same way that the US-Israel-United Kingdom cannot support their empire on the bases of failed military strategies abroad and economic disaster and police state policies at home.

1. Financial Times, August 28, 2008.
2. August 28, 2008.

Nor, it seems, do the Democrats have the courage to raise the issue of McCain not having been born in the United States as the Constitution requires. Nor questioning him about accusations by his fellow American prisoners about his considerable collaboration with his Vietnamese captors. Nor a word about McCain’s highly possible role in the brutal Georgian invasion of South Ossetia on August 7. (More on this last below.)

Obama has lost much of the sizable liberal/progressive vote because of his move to the center-right (or his exposure as a center-rightist), and he now may have lost even his selling point of being more strongly against the war than McCain — if in fact he actually is — by appointing Joe Biden as his running mate. Biden has long been a hawk on Iraq (as well as the rest of US foreign policy), calling for an invasion as far back as 1998.¹ In April, 2007, when pressed in an interview about his vote for the war in 2003, Biden said: “It was a mistake. I regret my vote. … because I learned more, like everybody else learned, about what, in fact, we were told.”² This has been a common excuse of war supporters in recent years when the tide of public opinion turned against them. But why did millions and millions of Americans march against the war in the fall of 2002 and early 2003, before it began? What did they know that Joe Biden didn’t know? It was clear to the protesters that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were habitual liars, that they couldn’t care less about the people of Iraq, that the defenseless people of that ancient civilization were going to be bombed to hell; the protesters knew something about the bombings of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Panama, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan; they knew about napalm, cluster bombs, depleted uranium. … Didn’t Biden know about any of these things? Those who marched knew that the impending war was something a moral person could not support; and that it was totally illegal, a textbook case of a “war of aggression”; one didn’t have to be an expert in international law to know this. Did Joe Biden think about any of this?

If McCain had a role in the Georgian invasion of breakaway-region Ossetia it would have been arranged with the help of Randy Scheunemann, McCain’s top foreign policy adviser and until recently Georgia’s principal lobbyist in Washington. As head of the neo-conservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, Scheunemann was one of America’s leading advocates for invading Iraq. One of McCain’s primary campaign sales pitches has been to emphasize his supposed superior experience in foreign policy matters, which — again supposedly — means something in this world. McCain consistently leads Obama in the opinion polls on “readiness to be commander-in-chief”, or similar nonsense. The Georgia-Russia hostilities raise — in the mass media and the mass mind — the issue of the United States needing an experienced foreign policy person to handle such a “crisis”, and, standard in every crisis — an enemy bad guy.

Typical of the media was the Chicago Tribune praising McCain for his statesmanlike views on Iraq and stating: “What Russia’s invasion of Georgia showed was that the world is still a very dangerous place,” and Russia is a “looming threat”. In addition to using the expression “Russia’s invasion of Georgia”, the Tribune article also referred to “Russia’s invasion of South Ossetia”. No mention of Georgia’s invasion of South Ossetia which began the warfare.³ In a feature story in the Washington Post on the Georgia events the second sentence was: “The war had started, Russian jets had just bombed the outskirts of Tbilisi [Georgian capital].” The article then speaks of “the horror” of “the Russian invasion”. Not the slightest hint of any Georgian military action can be found in the story.⁴ One of course can find a media report here or there that mentions or at least implies in passing that an invasion from Georgia is what instigated the mayhem. But I’ve yet to come upon one report in the American mass media that actually emphasizes this point, and certainly none that put it in the headline. The result is that if a poll were taken amongst Americans today, I’m sure the majority of those who have any opinion would be convinced that the nasty Russians began it all.⁵

What we have here in the American media is simply standard operating procedure for an ODE (Officially Designated Enemy). Almost as soon as the fighting began, Dick Cheney announced: “Russian aggression must not go unanswered.”⁶The media needed no further instructions. Yes, that’s actually the way it works. (See Cuba, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, etc., etc.)

The president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili, is an American poodle to an extent that would embarrass Tony Blair. Until their 2,000 troops were called home for this emergency, the Georgian contingent in Iraq was the largest after the US and UK. The Georgian president prattles on about freedom and democracy and the Cold War like George W., declaring that the current conflict “is not about Georgia anymore. It is about America, its values.”⁷ (I must confess that until Saakashvili pointed it out I hadn’t realized that “American values” were involved in the fighting.) His government recently ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post. The entire text, written vertically, was: “Lenin … Stalin … Putin … Give in? Enough is enough. Support Georgia. … sosgeorgia.org.”⁸

UK prime minister Gordon Brown asserted that Russia’s recognition of the independence of Georgia’s two breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was “dangerous and unacceptable.”⁹ Earlier this year when Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence from Serbia, the UK, along with the US and other allied countries quickly recognized it despite widespread warnings that legitimating the Kosovo action might lead to a number of other regions in the world declaring their independence.

Brown’s hypocrisy appears as merely the routine stuff of politicians compared to that of John McCain and George W. re the Georgia fighting: “I’m interested in good relations between the United States and Russia, but in the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations,” said McCain,¹⁰ the staunch supporter of US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and leading champion of an invasion of Iran.

And here is Mahatma Gandhi Bush meditating on the subject: “Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century.”¹¹

Hypocrisy of this magnitude has to be respected. It compares favorably with the motto on automobile license plates of the state of New Hampshire made by prisoners: “Live Free or Die”.

Our beloved president was also moved to affirm that the Russian recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia: was an “irresponsible decision”. “Russia’s action only exacerbates tensions and complicates diplomatic negotiations,” he said.¹² Belgrade, are you listening?

It should be noted that linguistically and historically distinct South Ossetia and Abkhazia had been autonomous Russian/Soviet protectorates or regions from early in the 19th century to 1991, when the Georgian government abolished their autonomy.

So what then was the purpose of the Georgian invasion of Ossetia if not to serve the electoral campaign of John McCain, a man who might be the next US president and be thus very obligated to the Georgian president? Saakashvili could have wanted to overthrow the Ossetian government to incorporate it back into Georgia, at the same time hopefully advancing the cause of Georgia’s petition to become a member of NATO, which looks askance upon new members with territories in dispute or with military facilities belonging to a nonmember state such as Russia. But the nature of the Georgian invasion does not fit this thesis. The Georgians did none of the things that those staging a coup have traditionally found indispensable. They did not take over a TV or radio station, or the airport, or important government buildings, or military or police installations. They didn’t take into custody key members of the government. All the US/Israeli-armed and trained Georgia military did was bomb and kill, civilians and Russian peacekeeper soldiers, the latter legally there for 16 years under an international agreement. For what purpose all this if not to incite a Russian intervention?

The only reason the United States did not itself strongly attack the Russian forces is that it’s a pre-eminent principle of American military interventions to not pick on anyone capable of really defending themselves.

Unreconstructed cold warriors now fret about Russian expansionism, warning that Ukraine might be next. But of the numerous myths surrounding the Cold War, “communist expansionism” was certainly one of the biggest. We have to remember that within the space of 25 years, Western powers invaded Russia three times — World War I, the “intervention” of 1918-20, and World War II, inflicting some 40 million casualties in the two world wars alone. (The Soviet Union lost considerably more people to international warfare on its own land than it did abroad. There are not too many great powers who can say that.) To carry out these invasions, the West used Eastern Europe as a highway. Should it be any cause for wonder that after World War II the Soviets were determined to close down this highway? Minus the Cold War atmosphere and indoctrination, most people would have no problem in seeing the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe as an act of self defense. Neither does the case of Afghanistan support the idea of “expansionism”. Afghanistan lived alongside the Soviet Union for more than 60 years with no Soviet military intrusion. It’s only when the United States intervened in Afghanistan to replace a government friendly to Moscow with one militantly anti-communist that the Russians invaded to do battle with the US-supported Islamic jihadists.

During the Cold War, before undertaking a new military intervention, American officials usually had to consider how the Soviet Union would react. That restraint was removed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. We may now, however, be witnessing the beginning of a new kind of polarization in the world. An increasing number of countries in the Third World — with Latin America as a prime example — have more fraternal relations with Moscow and/or Beijing than with Washington. Singapore’s former UN ambassador observed: “Most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia” … While the western view is that the world “should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia … most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be clearer.”¹³ And the Washington Post reported: “Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s influential son, echoed the delight expressed in much of the Arab news media. ‘What happened in Georgia is a good sign, one that means America is no longer the sole world power setting the rules of the game … there is a balance in the world now. Russia is resurging, which is good for us, for the entire Middle East’.”¹⁴

Scheming at the convention?

Am I the only one to be a bit suspicious about what happened at the Democratic Convention on August 27? Why did Hillary Clinton call for a suspension of the roll call when it reached New York and ask that Barack Obama be selected by the convention by acclamation? Many delegates had worked very hard to get the vote out at their primaries and wanted the opportunity to publicly announce the delegate count. What harm would there have been to allow every state to vote?

And why, after Clinton’s motion, did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi immediately cry: “All those in favor, say Aye”, followed by a large roar, and she then cried: “All those opposed say Nay.” It is impossible to say how strong the Nay vote was because the time elapse between Pelosi calling for it and her declaring that “The measure is approved” was no more than one or two nanoseconds. She literally did not allow a Nay vote to be heard.

I also can not find a record of the vote that took place before it reached New York.

Does anyone else find anything strange about all this?

All consciences are equal, except that some consciences are more equal than others

The Bush administration has proposed stronger job protections for doctors and other health care workers who refuse to participate in abortions because of religious or moral objections. Both supporters and critics say that the new regulations are broad enough to allow pharmacists, doctors, nurses and others to refuse to provide birth control pills, Plan B emergency contraception, and other forms of contraception, while explicitly allowing employees to withhold information about such services and refuse to refer patients elsewhere. “People should not be forced to say or do things they believe are morally wrong,” Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt said. “Health-care workers should not be forced to provide services that violate their own conscience.”¹⁵

It’s difficult to argue against such a philosophy. It’s also difficult to be consistent about it. Do Leavitt and others in the Bush administration extend this concept to those in the military? If a soldier in Iraq or Afghanistan is deeply repulsed by his/her involvement in carrying out the daily horror of the American occupation and asks to be discharged from the military as a conscientious objector, will the Pentagon honor his request because “people should not be forced to do things they believe are morally wrong”? The fact that the soldier voluntarily enlisted has no bearing on the question. A person’s conscience develops from life experiences and continual reflection. Who’s to say at what precise point in time a person’s conscience must rebel against committing war crimes for the objection to be considered legally or morally valid? Signing a contract is no reason to be forced to kill people.

Can a health-care worker strongly opposed to America’s brutal wars refuse to care for a wounded soldier who has been directly involved in the brutality? Can a civilian doctor, pharmacist, or psychologist in the US refuse to treat a soldier on the grounds that if they help to restore his health he’ll be sent back to the war front to continue his killing?

Can peace activists be allowed to withhold the portion of their income taxes that supports the military? They’ve been trying to do this for decades without any government support.

National Pentagon Radio

WAMU, the Washington, DC National Public Radio (NPR) station asked its listeners to write them and tell them what they used the station as a source for. Some of those who replied were invited in for a recorded interview, and a tape of part of the interview was played on the air. I sent them the following email:

June 13, 2008
To mysource@wamu.org
Dear People,
I use WAMU to listen to All Things Considered. I use All Things Considered to get the Pentagon point of view on US foreign policy. It’s great hearing retired generals explain why the US has just bombed or invaded another country. I’m not bothered by any naive anti-war protesters. I get the official truth right from the horse’s mouth. Is this a great country, or what? I hope you’re lining up some more great retired generals to tell me why we had to bomb Iran and kill thousands more people. Just make sure you don’t make me listen to anyone on the left.
Sincerely,
William Blum, who should be on Diane Rehm, but never will be asked
[followed by some information about my books]

I had no expectation of any kind of positive reply. I figured that if my letter didn’t do it, then surely the titles of my books would reveal that I’m not actually a lover of the American military or their wars. But I don’t really want to believe the worst about the mainstream media. That’s too discouraging. So it was a pleasant surprise when someone at the station invited me to come in for an interview. It lasted more than half an hour and went very well. I expressed many of my misgivings about NPR’s coverage of US foreign policy in no uncertain terms. The interviewer said he was very pleased. He expected this was going to be an interesting piece for the station to broadcast. But as it turned out, that was the end of the matter. I never heard from the station again, and my interview was never broadcast.

About two months later I sent an email to the interviewer asking if the interview would be aired. I could verify that he received it, but I got no reply. I think the interviewer had been sincere, which is why I’m not mentioning his name. Someone above him must have listened to the tape, remembered where “public” radio’s real loyalty lay (to its primary funder, Congress), and vetoed the whole thing. My (lack of) faith in American mass media has not been challenged. And those who work in the mass media will continue to believe in what they practice, something they call “objectivity,” while I will continue to believe that objectivity is no substitute for honesty.

The audience contributes its share to the syndrome. Consumers of news, if fed American-exceptionalism junk food long enough come to feel at home with it, equate it with objectivity, and equate objectivity with getting a full and balanced picture, or the “truth”; it appears neutral and unbiased, like the living room sofa they’re sitting on as they watch NBC or CNN. They view the “alternative media”, with a style rather different from what they’re accustomed to, as not being objective enough, therefore suspect.

The president of NPR, incidentally, is a gentleman named Kevin Klose. Previously he helped coordinate all US-funded international broadcasting: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Central Europe and the Soviet Union), Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio/TV Marti (Cuba), Worldnet Television (Africa and elsewhere); all created specifically to disseminate world news to a target audience through the prism of US foreign policy beliefs and goals. He also served as president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Would it be unfair to say that Americans then became his newest target audience? All unconscious of course; that’s what makes the mass media so effective; they really believe in their own objectivity. Not to mention the conscious propaganda.

1. See Stephen Zunes, “Biden, Iraq, and Obama’s Betrayal,” Foreign Policy in Focus, August 24, 2008.
2. Meet the Press, April 29, 2007.
3. Chicago Tribune, August 28, 2008.
4. Washington Post, August 31, 2008, p.B1.
5. For further discussion of the Georgia issue, see Robert Scheer, “Georgia War a Neocon Election Ploy?”, Huffington Post, August 14, 2008; Pat Buchanan, Creators Syndicate column of August 22, 2008; Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation blogs, August 21, 2008.
6. Reuters, August 10, 2008.
7. Washington Post, August 9, 2008. p.1.
8. Washington Post, August 28, 2008, repeated September 1.
9. Guardian (London), September 1, 2008.
10. See and hear these actual words actually coming out of the actual mouth of the man.
11. National Public Radio (NPR), August 15, 2008.
12. Associated Press, August 27, 2008.
13. Guardian (London), August 28, 2008, column by Seumas Milne, quoting from ambassador Kishore Mahbubani’s interview in the Financial Times (London) of August 21.
14. Washington Post, August 30, 2008, p.18.
15. Associated Press, August 21, 2008, Washington Post, August 22, 2008.

On Wednesday, September 3, the White House announced a comprehensive aid package valued at $1.1 billion dollars to help the Republic of Georgia recover from the whipping it took after it attacked Russian peace keeping forces in South Ossetia, a breakaway province of Georgia near the Russian border. That region experienced a major war in 1991 and varying tensions since.

Russian personnel were in Georgia as part of a multi-national peace keeping regime created by the United Nations and endorsed by the European Union in 2006.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, Georgia was one the few Soviet republics to successfully declare its independence. This resulted in tensions with the Russian government and also generated real concern among those living in South Osettia. They’re not ethnic Georgians and have experienced periodic conflict with the government. As a result of war related violence in 1991, for example, 100,000 fled South Ossetia for refuge and safety in Russia.

South Ossetia held two national elections which endorsed independence form Georgia. The Georgians refuse to recognize this claim and, unlike Kosovo, which had no elections, there was little international support for the aspiring nation. As a result, there have been ongoing skirmishes and political conflicts between the South Ossetia and Georgia from 1991 on.

Tensions between Russia and Georgia had been building in recent months. On Aug. 7, 2008, the Georgian president issued orders to his negotiators to meet with the chief Russian negotiator.

We should find all the means to stop incidents and to stop the violence, to stop threats and creating of problems to the peaceful population. Of course, we will show maximum restraint, but we do not recommend anyone to continue provocations.
– Mikheil Saakashvili, Aug, 7, 2008, 12:45

A few hours later, the government of Georgia said it had “decided to restore constitutional order in the entire region” of South Ossetia” through military efforts. By the afternoon of Aug, 8, officials in South Ossetia confirmed that, “Numerous Georgian military units are moving towards the border [with the breakaway region]” and that Georgia was carrying out “large scale military attacks” against their country.

The TimesOnline (London) reported that this was the start of military conflict. They’re clear that the conflict was initiated by the military actions announced by the Georgian government on August 8, 2008.

“Russia and Georgia edged dangerously close to direct conflict today after Tbilisi (Georgia) launched an overnight offensive to regain control over the breakaway province of South Ossetia.

“Fighting raged around the city of Tskhinvali, the South Ossetians capital, as Georgian troops backed by tanks and warplanes pounded separatist forces. At least 15 people were reported to have been killed.”

Those who insist that Russia started the military phase of this conflict need only check in with the government of Georgia. On Aug. 8, 2008, at 12:35, a Georgia news agency reported that “A senior official from the Georgian Ministry of Defense said Georgia had ‘decided to restore constitutional order in the entire region’ of South Ossetia.” The release went on to say that Georgia took the military action after the South Ossetia refused to accept a cease fire.

Russian military actions came after the attacks on South Ossetia by the Republic of Georgia. The only people who fail to acknowledge this are found in the U.S. political and media establishment.

Today, we’re all Georgians!
– Sen. John McCain, Republican Presidential Candidate, Associated Press, Aug., 12, 2008

McCain’s battle cry drew little response form the general public. It did fall in line with Bush administration policies, however.

The leader of Georgia responsible for initiating the conflict, President Mikheil Saakashvili, is a U.S. trained lawyer who took power in Georgia in 2004 through the “Rose Revolution.” The Bush administration and private groups helped advance the claim that Georgia’s government had committed election fraud and lacked legitimacy.

George Soros, the activist billionaire, provided $42 million to oust the former government with the help of Freedom House, headed at that time by former CIA Director James Woolsey. Other private foundation funded “democracy” groups helped as well. Saakashvili had the foresight to hire Sen. John McCain’s current foreign policy adviser as his DC lobbyist, Randy Scheunemann.

There were well organized public protests in the capitol, a chorus of international pressure for change, and Saakashvili was swept into power.

With Saakashvili in charge, U.S. and European firms made major investments in the nation and then praised the new government for rapid economic growth accounted for by those investments. Improvements to ports and infrastructure for a U.S.- European oil pipeline, intended to bypass Russia, were a central focus of the investments.

Once in power, the proponents of democracy followed the path of those they’d replaced by turning the country into a virtual one party state. Charges of corruption like that under the old regime have become more common. There are also charges that Saakashvili and his party are engaged in election fraud like that of the previous rulers.

Nevertheless, U.S. support has been unwavering. On July 10, less than a month before Georgia’s attack on South Ossetia, Condoleezza Rice was in the Georgian capital lending U.S. support to Georgia’s “territorial integrity,” by which she meant the disputed area of South Ossetia.

Shortly after he attacked, President Saakashvili must have been further encouraged by White House orders to promptly fly 2,000 Georgian troops home from Iraq to help fight the Russians.

The Russians responded to the attack by Georgia in about the same way that the United States would be expected to respond if Cuba, for example, attacked U.S. military personnel conducting official business close to our borders. How hard was it to anticipate the disastrous outcome?

Hallucinogenic Politics

The volatile Georgian president held a bizarre press conference on Aug. 15 after it was clear that there would be no U.S. or other troops coming to his aid. Speaking at a joint press conference with Condoleezza Rice, Saakashvili blamed the Russian invasion on a NATO meeting in April 2008 where Georgia failed to gain admission to that organization. He said that Russia began a military buildup along the border that somehow made it clear that Russia intended to attack his tiny republic.

He skipped over some important events (like his troops attacking South Ossetia) and lashed out at the United States and Europe with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice next to him: “So who invited the trouble here? Who invited this arrogance here? Who invited these innocent deaths here? Who is – not only those people who perpetrate them are responsible, but also those people who failed to stop it.”

In a clear contradiction to his claimed knowledge of an imminent threat of invasion, the president of Georgia indicated that he had no idea that a Russian military action was about to take place: “When the thing started, I had to rush back, cut my holiday short when the tensions started to raise.”

The very odd gap in Saakashvili’s narrative concerns his orders for a Georgian attack on South Ossetia on Aug. 7, 2008. He knew that Russian personnel were present in South Ossetia. How could he forget about his order to restore Georgian “constitutional authority” by sending his troops on the offensive? What did he think the Russians would do? Did he actually expect that the United States would attack the Russians in response? And what kind of chief executive goes on holiday when he’s convinced that his country is about to be attacked?

After a joint press conference where he insulted the United States for inviting “these innocent deaths” by inaction, the Bush administration decided to give him $1.1 billion to repair the damage that resulted from the rash actions by the Georgian president.

So Why are We Giving Georgia $1.1 Billion Dollars?

Sen. McCain had a point when he said that “Today, we’re all Georgians.” In fact, the Bush-Cheney regime and the cooperating “democracy” groups gave birth, so to speak, to the current Georgian state.
Could it be that some of the patrons of those who helped create Georgia will benefit from the $1.1 billion dollar aid bill?

If so, then a portion of the billion dollars will subsidize those firms that made the initial investments after Saakashvili s rise to power. These folks were truly Georgians on Aug. 12 when Georgia was put in its place. They’ll surely be in line for the largess handed out by the fathers of Georgian democracy, the president and vice president of the United States of America.

The Russian response to Georgia’s attack on August 8 was predictable. They have a number of vital interests in the region. The provocation by the tiny Republic of Georgia was a gift. It created an opportunity to extend Russian influence in response to an attack on their peace keeping personnel. In retrospect, this outcome was probably guaranteed with the installation of an intemperate, rash leader who received nothing but praise as he replicated the policies and tactics of the corrupt regime that he helped remove from power.

Giving Georgia a billion dollars may simply recycle those funds to U.S. firms that are doing business there. In addition, this financial reward will reinforce the tactically challenged president of Georgia for his grandiosity and lack of restraint. It may even create the opportunity for yet another Russian smack down followed by outraged reaction from those whose tears are more likely from joy at the ever expanding opportunity to promote the cycle of war and rebuilding around the world paid for by the hard work and taxes of the citizens of the United States.

A Los Angeles Times editorial observed last month that China had persuaded world leaders to attend the Olympic Games “despite their misgivings about Beijing’s horrific human rights record both domestically and abroad”. The horror, the editors noted, could not be entirely suppressed:

“What planners in Beijing miscalculated is that no matter how well you teach performers to smile, the strain behind the lips is still detectable.”

Needless to say, no mainstream British or American journalist referred to the host nation’s “horrific human rights record” at the time of the US Games in Atlanta in 1996, or of the Los Angeles Games in 1984. And of course no media outlet has discussed “misgivings” about the awarding of the 2012 Games to Britain. But why on earth would they? Historian Mark Curtis explains:

Since 1945, rather than occasionally deviating from the promotion of peace, democracy, human rights and economic development in the Third World, British (and US) foreign policy has been systematically opposed to them, whether the Conservatives or Labour (or Republicans or Democrats) have been in power. This has had grave consequences for those on the receiving end of Western policies abroad.¹

A Guardian leader in July described how “western leaders rightly remain uneasy about giving their imprimatur to a [Chinese] regime which jails dissidents, persecutes religious groups, backs Burma and bankrolls Darfur.”²

On the other hand, the Guardian leader writers might have felt uneasy about giving their imprimatur to “western leaders” who are the destroyers of Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul, and who have promoted chaos and terror in Afghanistan, Haiti, Serbia and Somalia, among many other places.

An Independent leader naturally shared the Guardian’s view:

“The outside world will have a crucial role to play in the coming years. Engagement will produce much better results than isolation. But at the same time, the developed world must guard against soft-pedalling sensitive issues such as the treatment of Tibet, or Beijing’s sponsorship of vile regimes in Africa.”³

It is taken for granted that “the developed world” is the great hope for human rights. Again, comparable Independent editorials did not appear ahead of the Atlanta and Los Angeles Games condemning Washington’s “sponsorship of vile regimes”.

Everything in the media starts from the assumption that ’We mean well,’ and from the unspoken, indeed unthought, assumption that this claim need never be questioned. This isn’t just a matter of choice — career success depends on it. Senior journalists like the BBC’s Huw Edwards have to be willing to make the Soviet-style claim that British troops are in Afghanistan “to try to help in the country’s rebuilding programme.”⁴

Respecting Sovereignty

One tragicomic consequence of this self-imposed simple-mindedness is the inability of the mainstream media to make sense of last month’s war in Georgia. Journalists kept a straight face as they communicated George Bush’s demand that “Russia’s government must respect Georgia’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.” Few felt inclined to mention the small matter of Bush’s own invasion of sovereign Iraq, or the US-driven separation of Kosovo from sovereign Serbia.

Gordon Brown, proud ’liberator’ of Iraq, or what remains of it, somehow avoided choking on his own hypocrisy as he insisted: “when Russia has a grievance over an issue such as South Ossetia, it should act multilaterally by consent rather than unilaterally by force.”

Occasional mentions have been made of the fact that the largest pipeline between the Black Sea and the Caspian oil fields and Europe is the 1.2 million barrels a day BP Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) line that passes through Georgia and parts of Abkhazia, and which happens to be the only pipeline not under Russian control. The Christian Science Monitor recently described the politics of the pipeline:

The $4 billion BTC pipeline, managed by and 30 percent owned by British Petroleum, was routed through Georgia to avoid sending Caspian oil through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, or Russia. A 10-mile pipeline could have connected Caspian oil to the well-developed Iranian pipeline system.

In 2000, Bill Clinton described the pipeline as “the most important achievement at the end of the twentieth century.”

Securing this “achievement” has involved intense US efforts to manipulate Georgian political and military elites. The US and France are the main suppliers of Georgia’s military, but the prime US ally, Israel, has also supplied some $200 million worth of equipment since 2000. This has included remotely piloted drones, rockets, night-vision equipment, electronic systems, and training by former senior Israeli officers.

To be sure, media hints that oil might help explain American and Israeli involvement have far exceeded mentions of the even more embarrassing reasons behind the British and American attack on Iraq in 2003, when the subject of oil was completely off the news agenda. Patrick Collinson wrote in the Guardian of the Georgian crisis:

“It’s a superpower confrontation in a region criss-crossed with oil pipelines vital to the west.”⁵

An article in the Observer last month was titled: “Europe’s energy source lies in the shadow of Russia’s anger: Behind the tanks in Ossetia are key oil and gas pipelines.”⁶

In the Times, Richard Beeston wrote a piece headed: “Oil supplies and Kremlin’s relations with the West at stake.” (Beeston, The Times, August 9, 2008)

The media have presented the West as innocently seeking to protect its energy supplies from an erratic Russian predator — we just want to keep our economies running. Perhaps the insatiably greedy Western interests that have wrecked havoc across the world in the post-1945 period are busy elsewhere.

In the Guardian, Jeremy Leggett wrote:

The Kremlin has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. Dmitry Medvedev, lest we forget, used to run Gazprom. The Georgia crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits.⁷

Recall, by contrast, the almost complete media taboo on identifying oil as a factor in the US-UK invasion of Iraq. We can imagine a companion piece by Leggett from, say, 2002:

“The White House has a strategy to control a vast slab of the world economy via oil and gas. George W. Bush, lest we forget, was the founder of Arbusto Oil, and chairman and CEO of energy company Spectrum 7. The Iraq crisis, if not a planned piece in the strategy, certainly fits.”

In the real world, Johann Hari wrote of Iraq in the Independent in 2003:

“Blair went into this with the best of intentions. It is just silly to claim that Blair cooked up all these arguments to justify a grab for oil, or a straight-forward imperialist project.”⁸

A year earlier, David Aaronovitch manufactured the required sneer:

Over in the New Statesman, John Pilger cranks out, as though Xeroxing on an old machine, piece after repetitive piece telling us that it’s all about oil and money and greed and imperialism.⁹

“The UK, meanwhile,” Leggett added sagely in his actual article, “has no energy strategy”. Certainly not in Iraq, where, in late June, Iraqi oil minister Mohamad Sharastani announced that contracts had been drawn up between the Maliki government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq. Edward Herman takes up the wretched tale:

No competitive bidding was allowed, and the terms announced were very poor by existing international contract standards. The contracts were written with the help of ‘a group of American advisers led by a small State department team.’ This was all in conformity with the Declaration of Principles of November 26, 2007, whereby the ‘sovereign country’ of Iraq would use ‘especially American investments’ in its attempt to recover from the effects of the American aggression. The contracts have not yet been signed, and the internal protests are loud, but clearly the fig leaf of WMD and democracy has been stripped away as an ‘enduring’ occupation and a systematic looting of Iraq’s oil are arranged under a non-democratic tool of the occupation.¹⁰

The BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent, Paul Reynolds, found no difficulty this week in recognising the realpolitik in Russian policy:

In some ways, we are going back to the century before last, with a nationalistic Russia very much looking out for its own interests, but open to co-operation with the outside world on issues where it is willing to be flexible.¹¹

By contrast, Reynolds wrote in 2006:

The third anniversary of the invasion of Iraq prompts some melancholy thoughts about how it was supposed to be — and how it has turned out.

By now, according to the plan, Iraq should have emerged into a peaceful, stable representative democracy, an example to dictatorships and authoritarian regimes across the Middle East.¹²

Russia’s plan is to look out for ‘number one’; the US-UK plan was to spread peace, love and understanding to Iraq and the region. Not a trace of recognition was allowed that the Iraq invasion was fundamentally about American profit and power, and certainly not the welfare of the Iraqi people, about whom, traditionally, US policymakers have not given a damn.

Mostly the level of analysis of last month’s conflict has been pitifully thin, as in this comment from Bronwen Maddox in the Times:

“Why now? The main reason is Georgia’s desire to throw in its lot with Nato, the US’s enthusiastic support for that, and Russia’s passionate opposition.”¹³

It simply isn’t done for corporate journalism to expose the true goals of Western corporate titans and their militant state allies. The preferred realm of discourse is restricted to nonsense about “security”, “democracy” and other “humanitarian” goals.

Favouring Georgia

Britain isn’t afflicted with a state-controlled media system, although one would hardly know it from press performance. Typically, a country identified as ‘nice’ by the British government is also ‘nice’ for our ‘free press’. The same is true of governments labelled ‘nasty’. The media have therefore presented the Georgia/South Ossetia conflict as the result of irrational Russian bullying. Max Hastings emphasised in the Guardian that, “The Russians yearn for respect, in the same fashion as any inner-city street kid with a knife.”

In a rare example of independent thought in the Guardian, Peter Wilby noted the consistent bias:

“Russia’s behaviour, newspapers implied, was in a quite different category from Georgia’s. In the Sunday Times, Russian tanks went ‘rampaging’ in South Ossetia, while Georgian tanks merely ‘moved‘. If Georgian forces had bombarded civilians, it was ‘reprehensible’, the Telegraph allowed. Russia, however, was ‘offending every canon of international behaviour’.”¹⁴

Wilby added:

“Georgia’s actions in South Ossetia went largely unexamined, and it was hard to find, from press accounts, what refugees from the province were fleeing from.”

Indeed, an August 19 ITV News report explained the tragic results of the fighting for the people of Georgia. But as in so much reporting, no mention was made of the initial Georgian attack or the consequences for the people of South Ossetia. In fact, Georgian forces had bombed the South Ossetian capital, Tskhinvali, for 72 hours. An August 20 article in the Times reported how a “makeshift operating table lay under a weak lightbulb in the corridor of a dank basement that smelt strongly of excrement.” Dina Zhakarova, a doctor in South Ossetia, commented:

“This is where we had to try to save people’s lives. The whole place was a sea of blood while the Georgians were bombing our hospital.”

Dr Zhakarova described how staff had treated more than 250 people underground after the Georgian Army’s assault, adding:

“All the staff gave blood for the patients because there were so many wounded. The Georgians knew very well that this was a hospital, so how could they say that we are their fellow citizens when they were firing rockets at us? It’s nonsense.”

Such commentary has been vanishingly rare.

The bias is clear, but the deeper point is far more interesting — the entrenched propaganda function of the mainstream media renders it incapable of making sense of events in Georgia and South Ossetia. References to Russian self-interest are allowed, and to Western concerns about energy security. But on the real reasons why people were killing and dying, on how Western state violence consistently supports Western corporate greed, journalists have had next to nothing to say. In a world where rational understanding conflicts with the ’ideals’ of propaganda, “news” is often little more than noise.

1. Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.3
2. Leader, ‘Beijing Olympics: Faster, higher – but freer?,’ The Guardian, July 12, 2008.
3. Leader, ‘China must not let its brief democratic light go out,’ The Independent, August 2, 2008.
4. Edwards, BBC 1, News at Ten, July 28, 2008.
5. Collinson, ‘Money: Sell oil, buy banks?: Crude prices are falling and commodities are plummeting,’ The Guardian, August 16, 2008.
6. Alex Brett, The Observer, August 17, 2008.
7. Leggett ‘Beware the bear trap: Britain, like most of Europe, is at risk of being the target of Russia’s energy export weaponry,’ The Guardian, August 30, 2008
8. Hari, ‘What Monica Lewinsky Was For Clinton The Hutton Inquiry Is For Tony Blair,’ The Independent, August 27, 2003.
9. Aaronovitch, ‘You couldn’t be sure what anyone would end up saying,’ The Independent, September 10, 2002.
10. Herman, ‘Further Nuggets From the Nuthouse: The Law of Conservation of the Level of Violence,’ Z Magazine, September 2008.
11. Reynolds, ‘New Russian world order: the five principles,’ September 1, 2008.
12. Reynolds, ‘Iraq three years on: A bleak tale,’ March 17, 2006.
13. Maddox, ’Simmering dispute could turn Russia against the West,’ The Times, August 6, 2008.
14. Wilby, ‘Georgia has won the PR war,’ The Guardian, August 18, 2008

When asked by CNN if he would stop threatening neighbors now that the Ossetian crisis was over, he angrily dismissed the question as preposterous, saying it was up to the US and its new Eastern European clients to stop threatening Russia. It is the Polish and Czech missile bases and Ukrainian and Georgian pretenses to join in the nuclear-tipped encirclement of Russia that are the destabilizing developments forcing Russia to batten the hatches. The Russians see the bases as a precursor to a much larger system that would undermine the already seriously eroded Russian nuclear deterrent. “For the first time in history — and I want to emphasize this — there will be elements of the US nuclear capability on the European continent. It simply changes the whole configuration of international security. Of course, we have to respond to that,” said Putin at a press conference last year, which was also not reported in the mainstream US media.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov underlined Putin’s words Monday, referring to “the reality of the post-America world” and warning that, “in the absence of a reasonable multilateral dialogue we will be forced to react unilaterally.” Europe’s inability to produce a new collective security system, “open for everyone and taking into account everyone’s interests,” was to blame for the Georgia crisis. He added: “There is a feeling that NATO again needs frontline states to justify its existence.”

As if to make his point, the Russian military carried out a successful test of a Topol RS-12M nuclear capable stealth rocket from the Plesetsk space centre. Analysts are already speculating that Putin (OK, Medvedev) may well “take out” the Polish missile site. “He has no other option. The proposed system integrates the entire US nuclear arsenal into one operational-unit a mere 115 miles from the Russian border. It’s no different than Khrushchev’s plan to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba in the 1960s,” writes Mike Whitney at Online Journal. At the very least he “will be forced to raise the stakes and send warplanes over the construction site. That is the logical first-step that any responsible leader would take before removing the site altogether.” So if Cold War II keeps accelerating and something like this happens later this year, what should we make of it? Is this Russia threatening and even invading its neighbor, or is it a justifiable warning to the US to back down from its attempts to instigate WWIII?

Is it possible that all this furfural is really just an early “October Surprise”, in the US electoral tradition that both Reagan and Bush II made such masterful use of? Recall that Ronald Reagan’s advisors orchestrated a delay in returning US hostages from Iran in 1980, tipping the balance in his favor in the elections that year. President George W Bush got a letter purportedly from Osama bin Laden weeks before the elections in 2004, conveniently reminding Americans that he is their defender against terrorists. This was the inspiration for the 1998 movie “Wag the Dog”, where a few weeks before the elections, a presidential advisor hires a Hollywood producer to fabricate and market a war in an ex-socialist bloc country (Albania) and ensure the incumbent’s re-election.

In the current “reality show” version, discretion is thrown completely to the wind, with a certain Randy Scheunemann playing both doctor and advisor to Republican “incumbent” Senator John McCain. Scheunemann’s two-man Orion Strategies lobby firm has been advising Latvia since 2001 and more recently, Georgia. Georgia hopes to following Latvia’s success in joining NATO and — why not? — the European Union. It has already paid Orion Strategies $300,000 to this end.

Putin firmly declared in his CNN interview that the attack on Russian peacekeepers by Georgia was given the green light by US officials as part of an US election campaign ploy. He was most likely referring to McCain, a personal friend of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, and Scheunemann, McCain’s chief foreign policy advisor. Or possibly Joseph Wood, Cheney’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, who was in Georgia shortly before the war began. Or both.

But Putin is caught between a rock and a hard place in this US election year. Even if he’s right about Scheunemann, McCain’s advisor has his counterpart in Senator Barack Obama’s chief foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who while being no fan of Bush, is rubbing his hands in glee over the Russian move to protect Ossetia . So whoever wins in November will undoubtedly push CWII into high gear, come what may.

Will this “Wag the Dog” Part II bring in the votes for McCain? That is far from certain considering his admiration for the now-despised Bush, his endless gaffes and his patent lack of intelligence. However, the key to US elections — the Israeli lobby — is not happy with Brzezinski, and could scuttle Obama’s candidacy, despite Obama’s choice of self-proclaimed Zionist Senator Joe Biden as his running mate. Recall that Brzezinski was foreign policy advisor to ex-president Jimmy Carter, whose Camp David accords forced Israel to give the Sinai back to Egypt.

Enter Scheunemann. He has no such skeletons in his closet. And he is a big fan of the current Middle East makeover designed to ensure Israeli supremacy. As director of Chalabi’s Committee for the Liberation of Iraq he pushed for the invasion in 2003. Mission accomplished, he found his new warrior prince in Tbilisi. Scheunemann is just one of dozens of US and Israeli advisors to the trigger-happy Georgian president. Israel has been actively supporting Saakashvili, eager to see the Georgian pipeline project bypassing Russia completed. Georgian Defence Minister Davit Kezerashvili and Minister of Reintegration Temur Yakobashvili are both Israeli citizens who returned to Georgia to enter politics.

If in fact the US Israeli lobby has decided on McCain for president, and passed the word on to Sheunemann, this could well account for the green light that Saakashvili clearly thought he had to attack Russian peacekeeping troops and Ossetia civilians, killing hundreds if not the 1,500 claimed by Russia. And what better way to force both candidates to shore up Bush’s policy of war and death, just in case by some fluke the suspicious Obama overcomes the many hurdles to a candidate not enjoying the full confidence (i.e., control) of “the lobby”.

You can’t fault Obama for trying to please them, short of firing his patron Brzezinski. Already, he has dropped his willingness to talk to “the enemy”, which clearly means Russia these days, every bit as much as Iran. Under him, Iraq will keep its US bases and Afghanistan will absorb any troops who leave Iraq. Whether or not Washington succeeds in bringing Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is the only moot point in all this, and this really depends more on Russia than on who inhabits the White House for the next four years.

This is all very much like Brzezinski’s scheming as advisor to president Carter. He now boasts that by orchestrating US funding of Islamic extremists like bin Laden from 1979 on, he was responsible for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union. This did nothing to wag Carter’s dog back into power in 1980, but that is of little consequence to these shadowy advisors, who are never without work in the higher echelons of US politics, just as Scheunemann will not suffer in the least if his candidate is found to have Alzheimer’s and forgets to show for his inauguration next January. And if Obama wins, he will merely cede his White House pass to Brzezinski and continue advising world leaders such as the hapless Georgian president.

It’s quite possible that this ratcheting up of tensions in the Caucasus is intentional. It clinched the Polish missile deal in a hurry and put Russia in a bad light, giving succor to those planning to make the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline the key link in a network bypassing Russia. But the Georgian pipeline was shut down by BP during the recent conflict, and it is far from clear that spin doctors and tweaking the Russian bear’s nose will bring the US any closer to cutting Russia down to size. What this episode and Putin’s steely evaluation did was to further expose the poison at the heart of American politics and confirm the world’s suspicions that Russia is not afraid to stand up for itself.

Russia As Enemy

All that being said, the question arises: is Russia really an enemy? Or are the recent machinations by the US military and diplomatic corps merely the result of a desire by Washington’s to have a really big enemy to justify its bloated military budget? After all, it seems that the occupation of Iraq has failed to maintain the support of the people in the the US and that the battle for Afghanistan will never be on a grand enough scale to continue justifying the massive expenditures the war industry demands. Russia, however, is not only a very big country that likes to use its military, it also has the historical role as an enemy of Washington. It doesn’t matter that the previous Russian enemy was a vastly different government that not only opposed Washington’s moves around the world but also claimed to be Washington’s ideological opposite. No, the fact that the Russian government that sent its military into Georgia and warned Poland not to allow US missiles on its soil is not about ideology, it’s about territory. Territory that Washington has been trying to make part of its sphere of influence since at least the end of World War Two. Stalin and his successors repelled Washington’s designs for almost fifty years.

However, as soon as the government they built disintegrated after decades of cold war pressures, the politicians and generals inside the Beltway saw their moment and attacked. Global capitalist institutions demanded payments and starvation while their diplomatic and military protectors demanded territory and allegiance from Moscow’s former states. NATO became a weapon in this crusade to remove Moscow’s former allies from its enforced protection. Yugoslavia was plucked and deboned under NATO’s warplanes. The US dollar and the Euro were waved in front of the new governments that accepted the demands of Wall Street and the European bourses. The former Stalinist leaders of the Soviet provinces were now venture capitalists beholden to the West and the occasional international gangster. Russia did its best to hold on to those regions it considered necessary for trade, launching a bloody war in Chechnya and creating havoc inside Georgia and other former republics whose ports and resources Russia wanted to keep out of the West’s hands. Then energy costs went through the roof. Moscow began to see riches it could only have hoped for back in those dreadful days after Gorbachev. Europe needed oil and natural gas and Moscow was able to provide it. Washington was none too happy because this created a wild card that got in the way of its plans for a US/ Europe alliance under the NATO banner against Moscow and any hopes it might have for a new empire. Simultaneously, Moscow began to flex its new economic power, challenging the encroachment of NATO, opposing Washington’s desire to isolate Iran, and ultimately responding militarily to the attack on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. If Washington was surprised by this move, they should not have been. It was as predictable as the gratuitous violence in a Dirty Harry movie.

Terrorism: The Other Enemy

The rising possibility of a Russian enemy does not preclude the fact of the existing enemy we are told Washington’s military is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, as long as the United States keeps up its killing and occupation of those countries, the elusive enemy known as “the terrorists” will exist. Despite the obvious semantic complications arising from doing battle with a strategy (terrorism), Washington has done an exceedingly good job convincing the world that the best way to deal with religiously inspired groups hoping to install a system of governance they consider to be more just than the planet’s current regimes is to kill as many members of those groups and the people they live amongst. Naturally, this strategy convinced many of those who have lost loved ones to join the groups whose name their loved ones died in (even if their loved ones had nothing to do with said group). Furthermore, the ideology of such groups is now seen by many as an ideology of national liberation and anti-imperialism.

The convenience of a battle against “terrorism” is that one can make any group or nation part of the enemy. This is what George Bush knew when he told the world in 2001 that “you are either with us or you are against us.” There is no room for neutrality in the eyes of this empire. Consequently, one is an enemy even if one has no opinion for or against. Indeed, sometimes one is an enemy even if one opposes the “terrorists.” A recent example of this latter reality can be found in an August 28, 2008 news report from the Los Angeles Times about Venezuela and Hezbollah. Although Hezbollah is seen as a legitimate entity and not considered a “terrorist” group by many around the world, Washington and Tel Aviv (who seem to be the final arbiters of such things) differ with that opinion. Consequently, it is one as far as Washington and some other capitals are concerned.

Anyhow, back to the article. Its essence is that because of Venezuela’s relations with Tehran, US and Israeli intelligence “worry that Venezuela is emerging as a base for anti-US militant groups and spy services.” In what can only be described as a very poor attempt to link together a number of suppositions, rumors and statements by Tel Aviv, the article draws the conclusion that some Hezbollah supporters may be living in Venezuela. Since they may be living there, they may also be conducting fundraising and other operations from their residences there. Furthermore, the article continues, even though the Venezuelan government has tightened up its oversight of any possible fundraising activities by Hezbollah, the fact that there are various Iranian-Venezuelan joint business enterprises opens the possibility that Venezuela is still being used as a fundraising base.

Given that the United States is also the site of fundraising by various groups Washington considers enemies, this article can serve only one purpose–to create a link between “terrorists” and Hugo Chavez. It is a link that of course does not exist but, like the nonexistent link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda, if it is repeated enough there will be many people who accept it as fact. In addition, it may even be used as a basis for policy, much like nonexistent Hussein-Al-Queda link was. Despite the fact that Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution has been proven to have no connection to terrorism of any kind, the intention of stories like this is to insinuate that it does. Furthermore, the intention of those insinuations is to isolate governments like Venezuela’s that oppose the imperial designs of Washington by linking them to groups that no government would publicly claim as allies. By creating this imaginary link, an enemy of Washington is enhanced. By enhancing that enemy, the war industry enhances the perception that it is needed to protect us from those enemies our government has created. In turn, the war industry’s profits are enhanced at our expense.

It’s hard not to be reminded of this when the United States and the European countries cry out against Russia’s recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two provinces which seceded from the Republic of Sakartvelo, known in the West as Georgia.

Not so long ago, the Western countries recognized the Republic of Kosovo, which seceded from Serbia. The West argued that the population of Kosovo is not Serbian, its culture and language is not Serbian, and that therefore it has a right to independence from Serbia. Especially after Serbia had conducted a grievous campaign of oppression against them. I supported this view with all my heart. Unlike many of my friends, I even supported the military operation that helped the Kosovars to free themselves.

But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, as the saying goes. What’s true for Kosovo is no less true for Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The population in these provinces is not Georgian, they have their own languages and ancient civilizations. They were annexed to Georgia almost by whim, and they have no desire to be part of it.

So what is the difference between the two cases? A huge one, indeed: the independence of Kosovo is supported by the Americans and opposed by the Russians. Therefore it’s good. The independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is supported by the Russians and opposed by the Americans. Therefore it’s bad. As the Romans said: Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi, what’s allowed to Jupiter is not allowed to an ox.

I do not accept this moral code. I support the independence of all these regions.

In my view, there is one simple principle, and it applies to everybody: every province that wants to secede from any country has a right to do so. In this respect there is, for me, no difference between Kosovars, Abkhazians, Basques, Scots and Palestinians. One rule for all.

There was a time when this principle could not be implemented. A state of a few hundred thousand people was not viable economically, and could not defend itself militarily.

That was the era of the “nation state”, when a strong people imposed itself, its culture and its language, on weaker peoples, in order to create a state big enough to safeguard security, order and a proper standard of living. France imposed itself on Bretons and Corsicans, Spain on Catalans and Basques, England on Welsh, Scots and Irish, and so forth.

That reality has been superseded. Most of the functions of the “nation state” have moved to super-national structures: large federations like the USA, large partnerships like the EU. In those there is room for small countries like Luxemburg beside larger ones like Germany. If Belgium falls apart and a Flemish state comes into being beside a Walloon state, both will be received into the EU, and nobody will be hurt. Yugoslavia has disintegrated, and each of its parts will eventually belong to the European Union.

That has happened to the former Soviet Union, too. Georgia freed itself from Russia. By the same right and the same logic, Abkhazia can free itself from Georgia.

But then, how can a country avoid disintegration? Very simple: it must convince the smaller peoples which live under its wings that it is worthwhile for them to remain there. If the Scots feel that they enjoy full equality in the United Kingdom, that they have been accorded sufficient autonomy and a fair slice of the common cake, that their culture and traditions are being respected, they may decide to remain there. Such a debate has been going on for decades in the French-speaking Canadian province of Quebec.

The general trend in the world is to enlarge the functions of the big regional organizations, and at the same time allow peoples to secede from their mother countries and establish their own states. That is what happened in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Serbia and Georgia. That is bound to happen in many other countries.

Those who want to go in the opposite direction and establish, for example, a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state, are going against the Zeitgeist — to say the least.

This is the historical background to the recent spat between Georgia and Russia. There are no Righteous Ones here. It is rather funny to hear Vladimir Putin, whose hands are dripping with the blood of Chechen freedom fighters, extolling the right of South Ossetia to secession. It’s no less funny to hear Micheil Saakashvili likening the freedom fight of the two separatist regions to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The fighting reminded me of our own history. In the spring of 1967, I heard a senior Israeli general saying that he prayed every night for the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, to send his troops into the Sinai peninsula. There, he said, we shall annihilate them. Some months later, Nasser marched into the trap. The rest is history.

Now Saakashvili has done precisely the same. The Russians prayed for him to invade South Ossetia. When he walked into this trap, the Russians did to him what we did to the Egyptians. It took the Russians six days, the same as it took us.

Nobody can know what was passing through the mind of Saakashvili. He is an inexperienced person, educated in the United States, a politician who came to power on the strength of his promise to bring the separatist regions back to the homeland. The world is full of such demagogues, who build a career on hatred, super-nationalism and racism. We have more than enough of them here, too.

But even a demagogue does not have to be an idiot. Did he believe that President Bush, who is bankrupt in all fields, would rush to his aid? Did he not know that America has no soldiers to spare? That Bush’s warlike speeches are being carried away by the wind? That NATO is a paper tiger? That the Georgian army would melt like butter in the fire of war?

I am curious about our part in this story.

In the Georgian government there are several ministers who grew up and received their education in Israel. It seems that the Minister of Defense and the Minister for Integration (of the separatist regions) are also Israeli citizens. And most importantly: that the elite units of the Georgian army have been trained by Israeli officers, including the one who was blamed for losing Lebanon War II. The Americans, too, invested much effort in training the Georgians.

I am always amused by the idea that it is possible to train a foreign army. One can, of course, teach technicalities: how to use particular weapons or how to conduct a battalion-scale maneuver. But anyone who has taken part in a real war (as distinct from policing an occupied population) knows that the technical aspects are secondary. What matters is the spirit of the soldiers, their readiness to risk their lives for the cause, their motivation, the human quality of the fighting units and the command echelon.

Such things cannot be imparted by foreigners. Every army is a part of its society, and the quality of the society decides the quality of the army. That is particularly true in a war against an enemy who enjoys a decisive numerical superiority. We experienced that in the 1948 war, when David Ben-Gurion wanted to impose on us officers who were trained in the British army, and we, the combat soldiers, preferred our own commanders, who were trained in our underground army and had never seen a military academy in their lives.

Only professional generals, whose whole outlook is technical, imagine that they could “train” soldiers of another people and another culture – in Afghanistan, Iraq or Georgia.

A well developed trait among our officers is arrogance. In our case, it is generally connected with a reasonable standard of the army. If the Israeli officers infected their Georgian colleagues with this arrogance, convincing them that they could beat the mighty Russian army, they committed a grievous sin against them.

I do not believe that this is the beginning of Cold War II, as has been suggested. But this is certainly a continuation of the Great Game.

This appellation was given to the relentless secret struggle that went on all through the 19th century along Russia’s southern border between the two great empires of the time: the British and the Russian. Secret agents and not so secret armies were active in the border regions of India (including today’s Pakistan), Afghanistan, Persia and so on. The “North-West Frontier” (of Pakistan), which is starring now in the war against the Taliban, was already legendary then.

Today, the Great Game between the current two great empires – the USA and Russia – is going on all over the place from the Ukraine to Pakistan. It proves that geography is more important than ideology: Communism has come and gone, but the struggle goes on as if nothing has happened.

Georgia is a mere pawn in the chess game. The initiative belongs to the US: it wants to encircle Russia by expanding NATO, an arm of US policy, all along the border. That is a direct threat to the rival empire. Russia, on its part, is trying to extend its control over the resources most vital to the West, oil and gas, as well as their routes of transportation. That can lead to disaster.

When Henry Kissinger was still a wise historian, before he became a foolish statesman, he expounded an important principle: in order to maintain stability in the world, a system has to be formed that includes all the parties. If one party is left outside, stability is in danger.

He cited as an example the “Holy Alliance” of the great powers that came into being after the Napoleonic wars. The wise statesmen of the time, headed by the Austrian Prince Clemens von Metternich, took care not to leave the defeated French outside, but, on the contrary, gave them an important place in the Concert of Europe.

The present American policy, with its attempt to push Russia out, is a danger to the whole world. (And I have not even mentioned the rising power of China.)

A small country which gets involved in the struggle between the big bullies risks being squashed. That has happened in the past to Poland, and it seems that it has not learned from that experience. One should advise Georgia, and also the Ukraine, not to emulate the Poles but rather the Finns, who since world War II have pursued a wise policy: they guard their independence but endeavor to take the interest of their mighty neighbor into account.

We Israelis can, perhaps, also learn something from all of this: that it is not safe to be a vassal of one great Empire and provoke the rival empire. Russia is returning to our region, and every move we make to further American expansion will surely be countered by a Russian move in favor of Syria and Iran.

So let’s not adopt the “Hottentot morality”. It is not wise, and certainly not moral.

Regarding the nature of history being made first as tragedy and then as farce, Marx implies that the effects of the tragic interlude leave their mark on the farcical moment that comes later. In fact it is the tragedy that lays the potential groundwork for the farce. This is certainly the case in the latest proof of Marx’s words–the Georgian attack on its breakaway provinces and the counterattack by Russia. Historically, Georgia has always been a recalcitrant part of the Russian empire. First annexed by Russia in the 1800s as a way to protect itself from Persian and Ottoman attacks, Georgia declared itself an independent nation in 1918 during the early months of the Russian Revolution. The Menshevik government than aligned itself with Western capitalist powers intent on destroying the Bolshevik government and was invaded by the Soviet Red Army in 1921. By 1936, Georgia was once again ruled by Moscow and the leader of the Soviet Union was the Georgian Josef Stalin. World War Two began not long afterwards. The Soviet Union suffered incredible casualties while fighting against Nazi Germany in an alliance with the capitalist nations led by Britain and the United States. After the surrender of the Germans, Washington and London restarted their struggle against the Soviet Union and its economic and political systems. This became known as the Cold War.

It was a period of threats, militarization, proxy wars in third world nations and the occasional nuclear showdown. Washington ultimately won when the Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 20th century due to economic and political contradictions that could not be resolved. The role played by Washington was great and its victory provided US apologists for empire with a golden opportunity they called the “unipolar moment.” This historical “moment” was seized by the imperial apologists on both sides of the aisle and brought the world the first invasion of Iraq in 1991, the Yugoslavian wars that culminated in the bombing of Serbia and Kosovo and the eventual installation of US forces in the latter province, the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the establishment of hundreds of US military bases around the world, including in countries that were formerly part of the USSR. Meanwhile, the Russian economy was reforming itself into a harsh capitalist system that saw the destruction of the social safety net created and maintained under Soviet rule. Naturally, this lead to an increase in the number of Russian poor and, conversely, an increase in the number of the very rich. US and other corporations moved into Russia taking advantage of the failure of the Soviet structure and began looting its wealth and resources. On the diplomatic front, Russia soft-pedaled its opposition to the imperialist moves by Washington.

But, Moscow had not gone quietly into the global capitalist night. Elements of its political establishment were rebuilding alliances with various nations, while simultaneously making economic deals for energy products and other goods. Like the bear that symbolizes the Russian nation, the desire for empire had only been in hibernation. The assumption of George Bush and his neocons to the US White House and their militaristic aggression and bombast stirred the bear from its rest. As the US eagle spread its wings further and further around the globe leaving its imperial droppings in nations once thought to be in Moscow’s domain, the Russian power elites found their strength and began to oppose the eagle’s moves. The move by Washington to expand NATO up to Russia’s borders and the refusal by the Western nations to allow Russia into the World Trade Organization are but two of Washington’s moves that riled the bear. That cold war we had hoped was forever gone was coming back. Would Karl Marx be right once again? Will we see the standoff between Moscow and Washington repeat itself as farce?

The events in Georgia do not bode well for a negative response to this question. The stakes have certainly been raised. The sycophantic leader of Georgia–put into place by the CIA and its front organization the National Endowment for Democracy(NED)–looks to Washington for support in his insistence that the breakaway provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia must remain part of the country he leads. Russia insists on the opposite, just like Washington insisted about the Serbian province of Kosovo in 1999. Naturally, every politician inside the Beltway misses the aforementioned contradiction and agrees with Dick Cheney that the Russians must not be allowed to have their way. After all, it is Washington’s world now and, even if there is hardly a horse’s hair worth of difference between the governments in Washington and Moscow, Moscow can not be allowed to think that it can be Washington’s equal on the world stage.

It is in historical moments like this that the citizen can truly see how little they matter. We have two powerful regimes trifling over a piece of territory that most of the world could care less about. Both of these regimes have proven that they are more than willing to kill thousands of people, destroy hundreds of square miles of land and water, and waste billions of dollars in doing so just so they can establish their position in their battle to control their world. It is their world because no matter how it turns out they will profit and we will pay. That is a scenario that Karl Marx also addressed when he stated, in essence, that it is the regular people that make history.

John McCain, of course, wins the prize for setting the most outrageous double standard. “In the 21st century,” he informed us, “nations don’t invade other nations.” Unless, of course, we’re talking about Afghanistan or Iraq, and the invading power happens to be the United States. McCain demanded and immediate pullout of all Russian forces from Georgia and insisted upon its “territorial integrity”–even as he claims the right for the U.S. to occupy Iraq for the next 100 years.

The supposedly progressive Barack Obama sounded little different. “I have condemned Russian aggression, and today I reiterate my demand that Russia abide by the cease-fire,” he said. “Russia must know that its actions will have consequences.”

One can imagine how a President Obama would respond if Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or President Dimitri Medvedev declared that he wouldn’t withdraw all troops from Georgia right away, but would leave behind a large occupation force in order to be “as careful in getting out of Georgia as we were careless in getting in.” That, of course, is Obama’s excuse for keeping up to 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq for “force protection,” the defense of U.S. military personnel and “anti-terrorist” missions–the same kind of pretext that Russia used to move beyond Georgia’s disputed South Ossetia region to a full-fledged invasion.

The media has been even more two-faced than the politicians. The same news outlets that parroted the Pentagon whitewash of civilian casualties in the horrific U.S. blitz on Falluja in Iraq in 2004 or aerial bombardment of wedding parties in Afghanistan now breathlessly report on the Russian bombs and artillery shells that hit apartment buildings and markets.

For the U.S. media, when Washington military action causes civilian deaths–between 600,000 and more than 1 million in Iraq, according to some estimates–it’s “collateral damage,” a regrettable but unavoidable part of modern warfare. Yet when a Russian plane drops a bomb that kills innocent bystanders, it’s a barbaric disregard for human life. One wonders just how much more unpopular the U.S. war in Iraq would be if the media worked as hard at exposing civilian casualties in that country as it has in Georgia.

To point out this U.S. hypocrisy isn’t to downplay the imperial nature of Russia’s latest occupation of Georgia. Georgia may have initiated the conflict by trying to smash the Russian-backed separatists among the Ossetian minority–and likely did so with a green light from the U.S. But Russia seized the opportunity to make an example of Georgia through military might–and not for the first time.

The Tsarist rulers of old Russia conquered Georgia more than two centuries ago. After a brief interlude following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Georgia was again imprisoned in Stalin’s USSR. The Georgian nationalist movement revived in the 1980s despite murderous repression by the supposedly liberal Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the USSR.

The 1991 collapse of the USSR saw the non-Russian “federal republics,” including Georgia, gain independence. With Russian imperialism in crisis, U.S. imperialism was determined to fill the vacuum, not only in Moscow’s former puppet states in Eastern Europe, but in countries formerly part of the USSR.

Georgia, however, was slow going for the U.S. The pro-Western Georgian nationalist leader, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, pushed a “Georgia for the Georgians” line that frightened the 30 percent of the population that was non-Georgian–people whom Gamsakhurdia ominously referred to as “guests.” The first non-Communist Party head of Georgia in the waning days of the USSR, Gamsakhurdia went on to revoke the autonomous status of Abkhazia and North Ossetia, which had been enshrined in the USSR’s constitution. Resistance from the Abkhazians and Ossetians led to civil war and ethnic cleansing and, with Russian intervention, de facto independence for both regions since 1993.

The situation was little changed under the regime of Eduard Schevardnadze, the former foreign minister of the USSR who returned home to Georgia to take over the presidency after Gamsakhurdia was ousted in a coup. During Schevardnadze’s decade in power, Russia and the U.S. jockeyed for influence in Georgia.

Washington found a willing business partner in Schevardnadze. He was in favor of an oil pipeline that would bypass Russia. He was also a career Soviet politician who had run Georgia in the 1970s and who refused to take a consistent anti-Moscow line. In 2003, an election year in Georgia, Schevardnadze set off alarm bells in Washington by making a deal with the Russian electrical power monopoly AES, which followed an earlier “strategic partnership” with the huge Russian gas company Gazprom.

In late 2003, the U.S., then still in the confident “Mission Accomplished” phase of the Iraq war, decided to up the ante. It backed the U.S.-educated lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, the leader of the mass protests of the “Rose Revolution” that ousted Schevardnadze after his party tried to rig parliamentary election results. Modeled on the rebellion that drove Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia in 2000, the Rose Revolution was sustained in part by money from the foundation controlled by billionaire financier George Soros. In the wake of the Rose Revolution the Soros foundation and other donors, as well as the United Nations Development Project, even paid salaries for 11,000 civil servants as part of a three-year aid program.

The U.S. saw the Saakashvili government as a means to accelerate its energy and defense plans for Georgia. Saakashvili’s presidential inauguration in 2004 was attended by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, who announced $166 million in immediate aid as well as a three-year, $500 million aid package to promote “economic reforms.” This was only part of a steady stream of U.S. dollars to a country of just 4.6 million people. According to one study, Georgia is the second highest recipient of U.S. aid per capita in the world. Meanwhile, the European Union and the World Bank pledged another $1 billion in assistance to Saakashvili’s government.

Soon, the White House was ready to plant the U.S. flag in the heart of the South Caucasus. George W. Bush visited Tbilisi in May 2005 to “underscore his support for democracy, historic reform and peaceful conflict resolution,” as the U.S. Embassy in Georgia put it in a press release. These “reforms,” according to Kakha Bendukidze, the Russia-based industrial oligarch turned Georgian economy minister, meant that the Georgian state would privatize “everything that can be sold, except its conscience.”

With Saakashvili in power, Washington moved aggressively to create in Georgia a crucial gateway for oil and gas pipelines that could bypass Russia on the north and Iran on the south. It was under Saakashvili that the long-sought Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline was finally completed in 2005, providing a means to get oil from Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea across Georgia to a Turkish port on the Mediterranean.

The U.S. had to strong-arm Western oil companies into building BTC–ultimately, BP agreed to take the lead. The U.S. also had to pressure the International Finance Corporation, the private development arm of the World Bank, to loan $250 million for construction of the pipeline.

“In the South Caucasus, U.S. and European state interests are bound up with the commercial interests of major oil companies that form the principal Caspian energy consortia,” wrote Damien Helly and Giorgi Gogia, two experts on Georgian politics. “To secure their investments in the Caspian Sea Basin, these companies have found allies among U.S. geostrategists who support a strong U.S. presence among Russia’s neighbors. High-level former officials such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, John Sununu, James Baker and Richard Cheney (when he was head of Halliburton) have all visited Baku [Azerbaijan] and the Caspian region and lobbied in favor of the oil companies.”

These U.S. economic and political projects had to be secured militarily. Thus, in the wake of 9/11, the U.S. began to send military advisers to Georgia. That move rankled Moscow, which also accused Georgia of doing too little to stop the flow of arms and insurgents across its border into neighboring Chechnya, where separatists were fighting the Russian armed forces.

For Russia, Georgia was seen as a red line that the U.S. and NATO could not cross. In the early 1990s, Russia had no choice but to allow the expansion of NATO to include its former satellites in Eastern Europe and the three former Soviet Republics on the Baltic. But the U.S. push to include Georgia and Ukraine in the alliance–as well as efforts to place anti-missile systems in the Czech Republic and Poland–was too much for the Kremlin.

After Saakashvili took over in Tbilisi, U.S.-Russian tensions over Georgia increased dramatically. In 2004, NATO approved Georgia’s “Individual Action Partnership Plan,” the first step toward membership of the alliance, and stationed a liaison officer in Tbilisi. In the years since, the U.S. and Israel have sent military trainers to upgrade Georgia’s military to NATO standards, and Saakashvili has showed his loyalty to the U.S. by sending 2,500 Georgian troops to participate in the occupation of Iraq. By 2007, the Georgian armed forces, previously a ragtag outfit unable to defeat irregular militias in South Ossetia or Abkhazia, was well-drilled, lavishly equipped and NATO-ready. The U.S. pushed for a fast-track acceptance into the alliance.

All that state-of-the-art weaponry, of course, is now smashed or captured by the Russian army, and the armed forces shattered by the Russian occupation. What began as the latest U.S. attempt to use a small nation as an outpost of the American Empire has ended with a brutal invasion by a rival empire, one just as determined to police its own “backyard” as the U.S. has been in Latin America. And in the wake of the Russia-Georgia war, oil-rich Azerbaijan–which has its own separatist region populated by ethnic Armenians allied with Russia–will think twice about crossing Moscow to sign up with the U.S. and NATO.

But the consequences of the Russian invasion go far beyond the South Caucasus region. The war has exposed the expanded NATO as a hollow organization. “For an organization that has come to rely heavily on words and symbolism, NATO issued a disconcertingly evasive communiqué at its emergency meeting on Georgia,” journalist Vladimir Socor wrote. “The first mention of Russia appears only in the second paragraph, and it is a positive mention: NATO ‘welcomes the [armistice] agreement reached and signed by Georgia and Russia.’ No reference to the Russian military duress, under which this flawed armistice was ‘reached.’ The communiqué urges prompt, good-faith implementation of the armistice, politely ignoring its loopholes.”

So much for NATO’s vaunted “one-for-all, all-for-one” principle. The U.S. and NATO have bankrolled and armed a tiny nation, encouraged or tolerated a military attack that was bound to trigger a response from a neighboring great power–and, when that small country was invaded and occupied, the U.S. stood back and did nothing.

So much for the neoconservative dream of a “new world order” under U.S. domination, guaranteed by pre-emptive warfare and regime change. The U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were intended to allow Washington to consolidate its grip on the Middle East and project its power into the Caucusus and Central Asia. Instead, the U.S. finds itself militarily overstretched, incapable of protecting its new client states and unable even to get a strong resolution out of NATO condemning Russia’s invasion of Georgia–to say nothing of NATO countries’ reluctance to commit troops to the losing war in Afghanistan.

There are other examples of waning U.S. imperial clout–the ouster of Pervez Musharraf as dictator of Pakistan being the latest serious example. The cracks in the empire, in turn, are widened by the ongoing U.S. financial crisis which is increasingly dragging down the entire world economy. The entire U.S. economic model–the pro-business, free-trade neoliberal program–is being discredited. The recent collapse of the latest World Trade Organization negotiations is a case in point.

U.S. imperialism is far from a spent force, of course. The country still has enormous military might and economic resources, and a President Obama would likely bring in a foreign policy and military team that’s more competent than the Bush administration hacks. But no matter who’s in charge in the White House, the shift in the world balance of power–economically, militarily and politically–is bound to lead to further instability and crises.

Out of the recent Caucasian (sic) war, a clear winner rises. Whether you look to Russia, Georgia, Poland, or the USA, the victor stands waving flags. His name is nationalism. And in the face of this victory, what are the chances that the people of the USA will be able to choose internationalism instead?

George Bush betrays USA commitments to internationalism, but he could not act alone. What he goes for is nationalism in alliance. What he calls coalition should be more properly termed a cartel, because a coalition is something you put together to fight a cartel, if you want language that respects liberation.

The Georgian (was the pun intended?) assault on South Ossetia was a repudiation of internationalism, and in that sense, it worked perfectly well. Prior to the Georgian glare of rockets, there was an international arrangement in place for the peace of South Ossetia. It was a weak arrangement, as we see. And it was dominated by Russian influence. Nevertheless, the peace of South Ossetia was formally monitored by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). And compared to this week, we can see that it was working in important ways.

The war over South Ossetia makes official what George Bush has been telling us all along. The cold war cannot be over, so long as there is an unstoppable nationalism on the loose. The cleverness of last week’s gun show was how it (once again) transferred the reality of that nationalism over to one side. My god! Look at what the Russians are doing!

What Russia’s doing is criminal. It counts as collective punishment of the Georgian people. But the problem is finding any principle of wrongdoing that George Bush has not already shredded. What Georgia did on Aug. 7 was criminal also, in violation of tautly stretched peace agreements. And when Georgian troops were retrieved from Iraq, who could not be reminded of the criminal-in-chief?

In place of this never-ending spiral of gang violence, I think there is a real and present yearning for a global neighborhood that thugs don’t shove around. Which brings us back to the roots of the Alinsky dream and the half-conscious attempt by the Obama movement to globalize it.

As Socrates once said to sweet Phaedrus, before you can persuade a person to do anything good for himself, you have to figure out how to speak to his particular kind of soul. In the language of the political battlefield last week, we learned something we might have thought we could ignore about the soul of America until November, 2008. Something, dare we say it, that Jeremiah Wright was on to.

The textbook answer to cycle of national belligerence, of course, is to get back in the business of international power and peace. A textbook answer won’t work, you say? In fact, the American voters have for the past several elections desired something other than a Bush-whacking nation. Getting who you vote for is difficult enough these days. But then getting why you voted for them? That’s the ultimate challenge that the movement for “change” faces in the world today.