In the run-up to the demonstrations against the NATO summit in Chicago this month, Ashley Smith interviewed the State Department official-turned-antiwar activist.

Ashley Smith: You had been a career military officer and State Department official. What compelled you to resign and join the antiwar movement?

Ann Wright: I was in the military for 29 years –13 years on active duty and 16 years in the reserves, and then another 16 years while I was in the State Department as a U.S. diplomat. So I was a part of the system under seven different presidents, from Lyndon Johnson all the way to George Bush Jr.

I didn’t believe in, or agree with, all the policies of all these administrations. I disagreed with many of them, but I never resigned. I always found other things I could work on that I felt were not harming people. It was only at the end of my government career that I finally resigned over something, because there were plenty of things I could have resigned over earlier, but I didn’t. I held my nose about them, like most government employees do.

The tipping point for me was the decision of the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq. They used the excuse of weapons of mass destruction. I didn’t believe them. We all knew that there had been two no-fly zones over the country over a period of 10 years. There had been quarantine, a blockade around the country, and there had been endless inspections for weapons of mass destruction.

On top of that, the UN inspectors, most of whom were U.S. intelligence agents, didn’t find anything, or the few weapons they found they destroyed. But, in general, the consensus of the international community was that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in the country.

So I just didn’t believe what the Bush administration was saying. When Colin Powell gave that lengthy address to the General Assembly in February 2003, I remember sitting in our embassy in Ulan Bator, Mongolia. I watched it on live TV with all of our staff around, because we all realized that this was a momentous event, and we knew that our lives would again be changing if the U.S. decided to invade and occupy Iraq.

With the buildup of rhetoric that was coming out of Washington in the fall of 2002, I was very, very uneasy, and I had trouble sleeping. I ended up having to be medically evacuated to Singapore because they thought I was suffering symptoms that are often the precursor of a stroke. I was having all sorts of light-headedness, shortness of breath, and I had arrived at the age where you need to watch out for this sort of stuff.

After an intense week of every type of medical exam possible, the doctor said, “Are you under any particular stress?” And I said, “Well, yes, I’m under stress. My nation is about to blast the hell out of another country.”

I continued waking up in the middle of the night, not being able to go back to sleep, and then staying up and just reading and writing out my concerns about what was going on. Every night I was reading materials, underlining passages and writing comments in the margins like, “This is the stupidest thing they could ever think up!” I was piling up pages and pages of writing detailing all my disagreements with Bush’s policy.

When I finally resigned, I ended up writing what I’ve been told was the longest resignation letter in the history of the State Department. It’s about three pages long and it not only talks about the war in Iraq, but other concerns about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, the Bush administration’s lack of effort to engage North Korea, and its unnecessary curtailing of civil liberties under the Patriot Act.

When I resigned, I got over 400 e-mails from friends and colleagues in the State Department and other agencies saying, “You’re doing the right thing. We wish we could resign, but we’ve got kids in college, mortgages, you know, the whole financial thing.” But there are plenty of people in the government I think that have retired early and with severe cases of ulcers from having had to go through all of the horrors of the Bush administration.

AS: After you resigned, you became an antiwar leader while Bush was in office, but you did not stop when Obama was elected. What’s your assessment of Obama and his policies?

AW:  Everyone was hoping for a real change from what George Bush had dished out during his eight-year reign. But let’s remember that even during the campaign, candidate Obama did tell us that he felt the Afghanistan war was a good war, and he intended to escalate it. On that bad promise he’s delivered, but on many other good ones he has not.

He’s not closed Guantánamo. We still have the military commissions trying a few prisoners in Guantánamo. Virtually nobody has been released during the Obama administration, or even put on trial — these people are in imprisoned with no hope of resolution of their cases.

On the issue of curtailing of civil liberties, it’s worse under the Obama administration. Whistleblowers are getting the worst of the raw deals — six people have now been charged with espionage for revealing classified information that shows government malfeasance and criminal acts.

I’ve been very disappointed and displeased with Obama’s tenure. Like many other people, I have been challenging those policies, and writing and speaking and having endless vigils out in front of the White House. I, like many others, have gone to protest the president at various events, disrupting them over a variety of issues and getting arrested, just as we did under the Bush administration.

How to deal with the Obama administration has been a big debate in the movement. At our recent Veterans for Peace convention, we had a long and good discussion about whether we should call for the impeachment of President Obama as we had called for the impeachment of President Bush. While we were hesitant to come out against the first Black president, after we laid out all the evidence we decided that we had no choice but to call for Obama’s impeachment.

AS: What do you think of Obama’s policies in his Afghanistan?

AW: I think his escalation of the war in Afghanistan is perhaps his worst decision. He’s caused a huge number of civilian casualties, wasted a tremendous amount of money on sweetheart deals for private contractors, and enabled enormous amounts of corruption among Afghan businessmen as well as in the Afghan government itself.

Many of these Afghan corporate and governmental elites are part of the warlord class. We’re training and equipping their militias in the police and army. They will be there to fight not for the country of Afghanistan, but for the warlords to whom they belong.

Obama has decided to extend his patronage of the corrupt Afghan elite with this new 10-year strategic pact. He’s supposedly closing the door in Afghanistan as he supposedly had closed the door in Iraq. This is all, in fact, a public relations ploy. Behind the supposedly closed door, the U.S. is spending billions of dollars in Iraq and there will be billions for the next 10 years in Afghanistan.

AS: What’s your analysis of Obama’s new focus on Asia to contain Chinese power?

AW: Obama sees China as a rising rival, a huge economic powerhouse as well as a regional military power with the largest land army in the world and with an increasingly advanced air force and the navy. As you said, he wants to contain it.

He and the Congress are whipping up anti-Chinese rhetoric here in the U.S. Just recently the administration denounced the Chinese for building their first aircraft carrier. This is pure hypocrisy. The U.S. already has 14 of them. And for the first time, the Chinese have one, and they talk about it as that’s the greatest threat to all of the world.

That’s not to absolve the Chinese government of its problems and its own bad policies. But the U.S. should not be adding them to the “axis of evil.” This pivot to Asia will only push China into a corner and may lead them to do something that will give the excuse for the U.S. to make even more hostile policies.

And the U.S. pivot seems almost designed to provoke China. Obama has increased the military to military relationships with the Philippines. We still have a huge number of soldiers stationed in Okinawa in Japan.

He’s opened a new base for 2,500 Marines in Australia and an airfield that will be dedicated toward big Global Hawk drones that can stay indefinitely in the air for surveillance in Asia. And in South Korea, we still have over 30,000 troops and he’s pushing for a new naval base in a pristine place called Jeju Island. Obama wants that to be the homeport for Asia’s part of America’s worldwide missile defense system.

This last decision is very significant since it will increase tensions with not only the Chinese but also Russians. The missile shield in Europe as well as the new one proposed for Asia is one of the reasons that Putin did not attend the G8 meeting. He wanted to send a signal that he is going to be putting more and more pressure on the U.S. to stop this missile defense system. Otherwise, he’s going to put one in, too, which will not be good for world security.

AS: Why is the U.S. putting an increasing emphasis on drones as a central part of its new strategy?

AW: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones are an easy, clean way for the U.S. to wage war. You don’t have to have your own military on the ground. These drones are capable of flying long distances, they can be refueled in the air, and they can do the dirty work of the U.S. without any American’s life being risked.

They are automating warfare. Some of these drones are as large as the 727 and can carry payloads that are enormous. They can put big bunker buster bombs under these things and fly them over and just drop wherever they want.

But this new automated military will not, in fact, protect American lives. Just like traditional military actions or missile strikes, drone warfare will inevitably precipitate blowback. We’ve already seen attacks on U.S. embassies and consulates specifically in response to drone attacks. So, the administration’s claim that these are the safest things that we could be using isn’t true.

We’ve already had examples of blowback from Obama’s drone war. Remember the young Pakistani-American guy who had planned to detonate a carload of explosive in Times Square. Luckily a hot-dog vendor thwarted his plot, but afterward when he was asked why he planned the attack, he explained, “Well, it’s the drones. The U.S. is using them to kill families in Pakistan.”

We also have the incident of the Jordanian doctor who was recruited to be an asset of the CIA. The CIA wanted him to infiltrate al-Qaeda and bring back information. But, this agent became horrified by the U.S. drone war. So he went to a CIA base in Afghanistan and blew himself up and killed all eight CIA agents.

Afterward it came out that he left a letter for his wife saying, “I am so horrified about what the U.S. is doing with these drones in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I refuse to work with them anymore.”

The drone war is even complicating U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Pakistan closed the main supply route for over three months in protest against CIA drone strikes. The U.S. has been forced to bring in equipment into Afghanistan through the northern road network from Latvia, which is extraordinarily expensive. Despite Obama’s hopes, war, including drone war, will never be bloodless and clean.

AS:  A lot of people think that Obama is bringing an end to the wars Bush’s started. What is the real picture of U.S. militarism today?

AW: First of all, we have to be very watchful of what the Obama is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The truth is he has not really ended the U.S. domination over either of those countries. The U.S. has hoards of American private contractors in each of those countries, and many of them are private security firms who have every bit as much firepower as the U.S. military.

Beyond that, the U.S. has increased its bases throughout the Middle East. We don’t even know the total number of bases, outposts, runways and landing strips in Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. We do know that there are CIA and U.S. military bases in Yemen. There’s a huge base in Qatar. There are, I think, seven bases now in Oman.

In Africa, the U.S. has established a military base in Somalia. They are using various alibis to justify increased military presence throughout the continent. The U.S. is sending the military into Ethiopia all the time. We have U.S. military forces in Kenya. And then we have U.S. Special Forces in Uganda to supposedly to go after Kony. Well, you can be sure that once they’re in, they’ll never leave.

Over in Mali and West Africa, the U.S. always has what they call mobile training teams, groups of Special Forces that will come in and do specialized training for militaries. That’s their way to establish relationships between senior leaders of the military, to try to get some sort of compatibility with the military in case the U.S. decides it needs to go in there. So the U.S. has a large number of small groups of military all over Africa.

In Asia, the U.S. pivot against China is ratcheting up tensions throughout the region. We have Special Forces in the Philippines, down in the island of Mindanao that are using drones and have assassinated 11 people already. And there are members of the Philippine government and legislature, their parliament, who are outraged about what’s going on.

Walden Bello, one of the wonderful international activists and member of the Philippine parliament, has already written to his government saying, “What’s going on? These are things you’re doing without any consultation — allowing U.S. military and armies, military operations that are killing Filipino people.”

And then, of course, we have many U.S. military forces in Korea, Japan and Okinawa. We’ve had a large naval base down in Singapore for a long time. We do have military to military relationships now with Vietnam, with Laos, Cambodia. So, the U.S. has its tentacles everywhere and, depending on who gets out of line, the U.S. may put great military as well as economic pressure on that country. And the U.S. will use the global “war on terror” to declare its right to go anywhere, anytime, do anything.

AS: So what do you think the key tasks for the antiwar movement today?

AW: Well, to be vigilant, to be vocal, to be on the streets, to keep after the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan. Don’t let them fade out of view. And one can use a variety of levers on it, because we’ve got to have some hook to make the public aware. In Iraq, we have to call attention to the issue of private contractors and the numbers that are there — who they are and what they’re doing — and also where U.S. oil companies are and what sort of contracts they’ve got there.

And in Afghanistan, we will be seeing war sponsored by the U.S. well after 2014. We have to debunk the idea that U.S. forces will be leaving behind an independent country. I think that the next 10-year period we will see U.S. forces there in large numbers fighting Taliban, conducting night raids and drone strikes, and violating the sovereignty of Pakistan. We should also watch out for U.S. using its power to control pipeline routes in the region as well as exploit the natural resources of Afghanistan.

Pakistan will likely be the most volatile of all of the areas. What the U.S. is doing there just has the potential to be a greater catastrophe than even Afghanistan. The U.S. is killing untold numbers of people with drones and essentially thumbing its nose at the Pakistani government, which has pleaded with us to stop because of the reaction that they are getting from their own people.

I mean it could explode in just so many horrific ways. People are furious with the U.S. The U.S. embassy in Pakistan has already been burned twice over the past decades.

We really have to follow what the U.S. is up to in Asia and the Pacific. We have to be watchful of the rhetoric of the administration and do everything we can to tamp it down, to call the hand of the government.

We also need to keep agitating against the occupation of Palestine. We need all sorts of international citizen activism to highlight the illegal settlements in the West Bank, the apartheid wall, and the treatment of Palestinians within Israel and the blockade of Gaza. I think that campus activists have played a key role doing all sorts of things like building walls to bring home what the apartheid structure of Israel is like.

We have to keep up the international effort to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Very soon, we’ll be announcing a new project called Gaza’s Ark. Rather than trying to get boats to break the blockade from outside, we are going to work with Palestinians to break the blockade from the inside. We’re going to help sponsor a Gaza boat building and sailing school. This will provide some much needed jobs for the people of Gaza.

This is an important shift. We all have felt badly about spending so much money on flotillas from the outside that gets a lot of publicity for the issue but they don’t really help the people inside Gaza that much. With this new approach, we can get work for people and help stimulate the economy to a small degree.

Once the boats get built, we’ll solicit people all over the world to order products from Gaza. We’ll put these products on the boat and have them set sail from Gaza to deliver them to the world. Everyone will know that the probability of ever getting this stuff is pretty low, but they can be a part of helping break the blockade and also help the people of Gaza earn money for the beautiful work that they do. It’s an important new step for the continuing struggle to liberate Palestinians from Israeli occupation.

Finally, we need to keep the pressure on the American government and the Israeli government to stop any drive to war against Iran. We really need to pester the hell out of the Obama administration on this rhetoric that they’ve been saying about Iran developing weapons of mass destruction.

I mean we’ve heard all of this before. These same allegations against Iraq lead me to resign my post. Instead we should be encouraging them to talk with Iran. We should be in dialogue, not in military confrontation.

*  This article first appeared at Socialist Worker.

1. If President Barack Obama is re-elected, with the Democratic Party retaining control of at least one chamber of Congress, there probably will be four more years of economic stagnation, high unemployment, increasing poverty and inequality, more wars, erosions of civil liberties and global warming.

2. If Mitt Romney is elected, with the right/far right Republican Party dominating either House or Senate, every particular of the travail afflicting the country today will be multiplied, with emphasis on fulfilling the desires of the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

What else could be expected during the present conservative era? Paul Krugman, the liberal Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times columnist, recently described Obama, whom he supports, as having ruled like “a moderate Republican circa 1992″. Viewing the ultra-conservatives, African American professor and left intellectual Cornell West detected “creeping fascism.”

In today’s society — based on gross economic inequality facilitated by a two-party political system spanning center right to far right and where big money is the decisive factor in the electoral process — an ostensibly democratic election can hardly mitigate the worst of abuses afflicting working people and their families much less bring about substantial reform.

This dreary reality is offset by an important new development. For the first time over the last several presidential elections — when voters are usually cheering exclusively for their candidate — masses of people are protesting in the streets against inequality of income and opportunity, and the class war waged by the wealthy, as well as global warming, ending wars, dismantling NATO and the like. Some unions, too, are not simply backing Obama but protesting on their own against Wall Street’s depredations.

Thirty years of wage stagnation, the growing rich-poor chasm, evisceration of the so-called American Dream and the long, painful effects of the Great Recession are the objective conditions behind the developing political consciousness of many Americans. Like the Roman Catholic church after widespread evidence of priests molesting children, sacrosanct capitalism — the economic holy of holies — is finally attracting public criticism for its crimes and hypocrisy, not yet on a huge scale but growing.

The sudden entrance of Occupy Wall St. last September with an open critique of the substantial excesses of capitalism in American society, following the democratic Arab Spring and Wisconsin uprising, has energized much of the left and progressive forces. Nationwide May Day actions and the 15,000 who demonstrated against NATO in Chicago later in May, among other protests, including civil disobedience, are encouraging harbingers that many more people eventually will take their grievances to the streets and meeting halls, where all social progress begins. If this momentum manages to continue for the next few years it could become a broad and diverse national movement for social change — but it’s still a big “if.”

The political system seems no longer accountable to the public. Several matters of great importance to the American people do not even figure in this year’s election because both ruling parties basically agree  about them and there’s little to squabble about but details. The administration has taken the U.S. up to its elbows in the quagmire of war, so the conservatives cry, “up to the shoulders!” Here are some issues the voters won’t be able to influence at the ballot box:

• President Obama is presiding over U.S. wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, killing “terrorist suspects” in Somalia and wherever the CIA’s drones wander. May opinion polls show 66% of the American people want the expensive 10-year-old stalemated Afghan conflict to end, and 40% — many of whom want it terminated now — are strongly opposed. Only 27% support the war, 8% strongly. For all the chatter about nearing the end of the Afghan war at the NATO summit in Chicago May 20, Obama, days earlier, announced that he was prolonging the war a decade after his “final” pullout date at the end of 2014. An undetermined number of special forces combat troops, military trainers, and CIA paramilitaries will “defend” the corrupt Kabul government until 2024. American taxpayers will foot the bills — several billion a year. Progressive Democrats in Congress seek to restrain Washington’s penchant for wars, but they are consistently ignored and occasionally berated by the Obama Administration for their efforts.

• Most citizens want cuts in the war budget. But as they go to the polls, the American people will be lugging a military and national security behemoth on their recession-bent backs, costing about $1.2 trillion a year. Rumors of meaningful reductions are illusory. The Pentagon accounts for over half of this amount (about $642 billion for fiscal 2013); the rest goes to Homeland Security, 17 spy agencies, nuclear weapons, interest on past war debts, and so on.

• Global warming is here and getting worse while the White House is opening up new areas to drill for oil and supports massive development of shale-derived natural gas (which requires fracking), “clean” coal (though it does not yet exist), nuclear power, and dirty tar sands fuel. The Obama Administration’s support for alternative non-carbon development is a token tossed to the environmental movement. Meanwhile, the U.S. — which demands to be recognized as world leader — is using its leadership to undermine international progress in fighting climate change. Big business and Wall St., primarily concerned with expansion and greater profits, heartily approve. Like Rhett Butler, the conservatives, frankly, just don’t give a damn.

• Since he has borrowed populist phrases for the election, some of from Occupy, President Obama has finally at least mentioned poverty, inequality and low wages, but he has done nothing about this situation since taking office and will not put forward an anti-poverty program if reelected. The United States is the most economically unequal of the top 20 advanced, industrialized capitalist economies in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The U.S. also pays the lowest wages to its working class compared with OECD countries. Almost 25% of the American work force receives low wages (about $10 an hour down to minimum wage and below), usually without any benefits or health care. One in two Americans is low income or poor. The poor account for one in seven people. About 47 million Americans require food stamps to eat. Food stamps are the only “income” for six million of them. This has not come about by mistake; it’s the political system’s payoff to the ever-richer plutocracy and its minions.

• The Obama Administration has responded more resourcefully to the Great Recession than the conservative opposition, but it only goes a quarter or half  way in remedial action, which adds to the stagnation and prolongs the pain for the working class, lower middle class and a large sector of the middle class as well. When Obama delivers on the economy — whether in the stimulus, jobs, foreclosures, bank regulations, or infrastructure — it’s always partial and inadequate because the main concessions are made with the power structure up front before the inevitable compromises with the right wing. There’s a difference between talking like a fighter when trawling for votes, and avoiding confrontation as president. Krugman says “we have responded to crisis with a mix of paralysis and confusion.” This is a major reason why over 22 million Americas need but cannot secure full time work.

• President Obama has retained all former President Bush’s many erosions of civil liberties, particularly the onerous Patriot Act, and added many of his own, such as when he approved of indefinite detention for suspects, including American citizens. A unique coalition of liberals and conservatives in the House tried to pass legislation to reject indefinite detention May 18, but the effort was defeated. The U.S., under Obama, is becoming a full fledged surveillance state. Tom Engelhardt writes that “30,000 people [are] hired to listen in on conversations and other communications in this country.”

• Any listing of the important issues that are not part of the election campaign and over which the citizenry has no say must include a foreign/military/national security policy based on exercising world hegemony backed by military power. What’s the “pivot” to East Asia really all about, other than to weaken China in its own sphere of possible influence and cling to world domination? Why has the U.S. been taking steps to bring about regime change in Syria, other than to dominate yet another country and weaken Iran in the process? Why did Obama facilitate a violent civil war for regime change in Libya, other than to gain another oil-rich client state, but this time with an enormous aquifer under its sands which may become more precious than the oil as water supplies dwindle through North Africa? Why did the president get behind the coup in Honduras, other than to dispatch a potentially progressive regime friendly to Venezuela?

Further, why does Obama still maintain Cold War sanctions and a trade blockade against Cuba, other than to win Florida votes in November? Why is Washington supporting the vicious Sunni monarchy in Bahrain which routinely oppresses and attacks the Shi’ite majority seeking equality, other than satisfying the obnoxious rulers of Saudi Arabia? Why is Obama now fighting a war in Yemen, other than to keep the new president, who ran unopposed with strong U.S. support, in his pocket, and to bestow another favor upon the Saudi lords? Why is the administration seeking to strangle Iran, other than to prevent an Iran-Iraq alliance that might compromise U.S. hegemony in the Middle East, especially the Persian Gulf, through which 40% of the world’s oil must pass? And what is the real purpose of the Oval Office’s new “scramble for Africa,” other than establishing a military presence throughout the continent while elbowing China out of the way to grab natural resources, trade and markets.

President Obama blames all his failures in office on the conservatives and the recession, and most Democrats accept this explanation. Even progressive Democrats, well aware of Obama’s abundant shortcomings, will cut him slack for fear of the “greater evil.”

The corrosive impact of far right ideology in America must not be underestimated. But despite Don’t-tread-on-me Tea Party reactionaries and conservative obstruction in Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate remain responsible for many unmet objectives and a weak legislative record. Led by Obama, they would not fight for progressive goals and spent much of the time trying to fulfill the naïve presidential fantasy of “governing like Americans, not Republicans or Democrats.” Once the conservatives understood Obama would rather compromise than fight they attacked full force and virtually paralyzed the Democratic agenda.

The silence of some Democratic politicians toward the erosion of civil liberties, indifference to climate change and support for unnecessary wars — a silence many would have broken had a Republican been in the White House — should subject them to publicly wearing scarlet letters inscribed with a “C” (for craven) around their necks.

Despite the stagnant economy —  the main issue in the election according to 86% of potential voters — the Republican Party’s lurch to the far right and the bizarre legislative behavior of the Tea Party-influenced GOP House majority led by the ineffable Speaker John Boehner seem to have at least evened the election odds. Stranger things have happened in American politics, but it remains very doubtful that the critically important independent voters will swing toward fringe conservatism. This factor, in our view, gives Obama the edge.

In this connection the April 28 international edition of Britain’s conservative magazine, The Economist, wondered “What happens to a two-party political system when one party goes mad?” The article quotes the following from the new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, a product of one author from the establishment Brookings Institute and the other from the conservative American Enterprise Institute: “The Republican Party has become an insurgent outlier — ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

Many right wing voters despise Romney, a shape-shifting opportunist whom they distrust, but they will stick with him because Republican leaders and funders insist he has the best chance to defeat the “big government socialist” whom many Tea Partiers scandalously allege conceals his “true” nationality and religion. Those funders, by the way, will see to it that — as opposed to 2008 — the Republicans will spend at least enough money to buy the election as the Democrats, so the race should be close.

Once a moderate Republican, Romney adopted far right positions on most issues to secure the nomination, calling for severe cutbacks in social programs for the poor, unemployed, foreclosed and similarly discarded, among a plethora of counterproductive social and economic nostrums satisfying to the Rush Limbaughs and Michele Bachmanns. Now he’s in a tight bind. It is absolutely necessary to gravitate partially toward the center, where the independent votes are, but he is under considerable restraint from his own unforgiving constituency.

Consistent with mendacious ultra-conservative propaganda, Romney attributes the economic crisis entirely to Obama’s presidency, without suggesting that the Great Recession emanated from the millionaire tax cuts, war spending and the huge deficits of his Republican predecessor (following years of Clinton Administration deregulations of banking and Wall St. that set the stage for what by now had become a “winner take all” economic system.)

Romney’s nonsensical economic speech in Iowa May 15 was an epic self-exposure. While promising to cut social spending, increase the war budget and not raise taxes, he declared:

President Obama is an old-school liberal whose first instinct is to see free enterprise as the villain and government as the hero…. America counted on President Obama to rescue the economy, tame the deficit and help create jobs. Instead, he bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.

Virtually every word was a lie, according to an analysis of the entire speech by the Associated Press the next day which pointed out that “the debt has gone up by about half under Obama. Under Ronald Reagan, it tripled.” AP didn’t mention Romney’s political characterization of Obama, but he’s hardly a liberal — as was clear during his first term, and his adhesion to “free enterprise” capitalism is indissoluble.

Romney has been sharply critical of Obama on two of the biggest issues of the campaign — health care and the Afghan war —  despite the fact that his own past positions on both matters were nearly identical to those of his rival. Obama’s health care plan is based on the program Romney implemented as governor of Massachusetts. And despite far more hawkish rhetoric to please the far right during the primaries, the Republican’s views on Afghanistan did not differ markedly from those of Obama. In recent weeks before and after the NATO summit, Romney has hardly spoken of the Afghan war, obviously recognizing that his primary views are anathema to the American people as a whole.

Obama and Romney have agreed on other issues. An article in Grist, April 24 by Lisa Hymas pointed out that  Obama’s “smart growth” initiative — the Partnership for Sustainable Communities — was also created in the mold of a Romney program…. As governor, Romney actively fought sprawl and promoted density. He ran on a smart-growth platform: ‘Sprawl is the most important quality-of-life issue facing Massachusetts,’ he said in 2002…. Under President Obama, the EPA moved from praising Romney’s smart-growth office to mimicking it.” It went into effect in June 2009. Romney also supported abortion rights, environmentalism and immigration as governor.

These “coincidences” are the outstanding ironies of the campaign so far. “Far right” Romney and “liberal populist” Obama have both resembled “moderate Republicans” when in power. Obama will revert to his center-right configuration if reelected, but if Romney ever gets to the White House his constituency will force him to largely govern as an ultra-conservative.

A principal Republican issue in the past several presidential elections has been that the Democrats were “weak on defense,” including in 2008 when Obama opposed the Iraq war, but the right wing has lowered the volume significantly because it can’t work this year.

The Democratic Party, of course, voted for, supported and funded the Afghan and Iraq wars, but Obama defeated pro-war Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination because his critique of the disastrous adventure in Iraq accorded with that of most Democratic primary voters — then turned around when elected and stole the Republican thunder by transforming into a war president. He governs foreign/military affairs as a hawk, juggling several bloody conflicts simultaneously, abjectly pandering to the armed forces and fostering the growth of militarism in American society. A year after the Arab Spring in the Middle East and North Africa, the Obama Administration has launched its own Imperialist Spring in the same region.

Many Democrats voted for Obama in the 2008 primaries because he was considered a “peace candidate” of sorts. A recent article by Atlantic Magazine staff writer Conor Friedersdorf compiled a brief partial account of Obama’s “peace” record:

• Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, adding tens of thousands of troops at a cost of many billions of dollars. • He committed American forces to a war in Libya, though he had neither approval from Congress nor reason to think events there threatened national security. • He ordered 250 drone strikes that killed at least 1,400 people in Pakistan. • He ordered the raid into Pakistan that killed Osama bin Laden. • He ordered the killings of multiple American citizens living abroad. • He expanded the definition of the War on Terrorism and asserted his worldwide power to indefinitely detain anyone he deems a terrorist. • He expanded drone attacks into Somalia. • He ordered a raid on pirates in Somalia. • He deployed military squads to fight the drug war throughout Latin America. • He expanded the drone war in Yemen, going so far as to give the CIA permission to kill people even when it doesn’t know their identities so long as they’re suspected of ties to terrorism. • He’s implied that he’d go to war with Iran rather than permitting them to get nuclear weapons.”

No matter who wins in November nothing listed above will change, except perhaps for the worse. If Obama returns to the White House, it will be to the same mess the U.S. finds itself in today, along with the wars, inequality and hardship. Should Romney get in it will be a mess on steroids.

Progressive change certainly remains possible in America, although neither ruling party is equipped to bring it about. These parties were not prepared to end the Vietnam war either, or to get rid of Jim Crow, or to implement the eight-hour day, or to allow women the democratic right to vote. But the people organized radical mass movements to fight for these goals and won.

The informal people’s struggles of various organizations that began coalescing early last year, propelled several months later by Occupy’s left critique of inequality, Wall St. and the 1% ruling plutocracy, has the potential to become a mass movement. Many such potentials have come along and faded for various reasons, including some that were co-opted or lost their vision. But such broad and deep movements — as long as they are massive, activist, radical and well organized — also have significantly changed American history. It may be a long, arduous struggle, but that’s the light at the end of this dismal electoral tunnel.

China has now surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy, and at its current rate of growth, relative to the U.S., it will overtake it within a couple of decades.  India, our champion in the emerging states rivalry, is also growing fast but is hobbled by mismanagement, endemic debilitating corruption, and a kind of laissez faire  capitalism that has further impoverished the already poor, including farmers and peasants, to the point where there is a Maoist rebellion in 20 out of its 28 states.

The economic issue is mind boggling.  The Chinese hold over $3 trillion in foreign exchange reserves of which an estimated $1.75 to $2 trillion is in U.S. debt.  However, China is increasingly trading in their own yuan or local currencies.  This, and China’s diversification of its reserves into gold and other currencies, are major reasons why the dollar’s role as a reserve currency has diminished from 85 percent of global reserves to now nearer 60 percent.  And, it has been the dollar as a reserve currency that has maintained its demand, allowing us to pump out money without becoming an Argentina of the past or a Greece of the present.

It is one thing to be borrowing this money for worthwhile investment that will pay off in the future — infrastructure or education and training for example — quite another, if we borrow to satiate the addictive appetites of our consumer culture, or pour it down the sinkhole of war and the military — both ineffective as we have seen in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After a trillion dollars, Iraq is a virtual Iranian satellite serving as a conduit for arms and goods traffic between Iran and Syria.  The Chinese have won the lucrative Iraqi oil contracts legitimately by bidding successfully for them.  And we are left with warmongers like Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, and others, who helped get us in the Iraq mess, now waving their arms wildly at Iran and yelling “fire” once again.

So the soldiers popped their shooters by Scarborough Shoal (Huang-yan Dao to the Chinese) and Secretary Clinton added a bellicose speech.  The main Spratly Island is occupied by the Philippines, and the archipelago’s worth lies in the resources within its territorial limit.  It is probably irrelevant to the Chinese who develops them as long as they have access … at a fair price.  Surely, all that can be negotiated without saber rattling.

By the way, are the Chinese planning a tit-for-tat, and holding joint military exercises with the Cubans in the Caribbean?  No, they are too smart for that.  They spent their energies building a pipeline from gas-rich Turkmenistan to Xinjiang supplying gas that they need to fuel their phenomenal growth, and in the process shut us out of Central Asia.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russians began to feel that the struggle for armaments had exhausted them, especially in the absence of the necessary energy sources needed by any industrial country. The American presence in the oil zones had for some decades enabled them to grow and have control over international political decision-making without much struggle. Therefore, the Russians turned toward energy sources, oil and gas. Since the international apportionment does not bear much competition in oil sectors, Moscow sought to manipulate gas in the areas of gas production, transportation, and marketing on a large scale.

The starting point was in 1995 when Putin set the strategy of Gasprom Co. to move within the area in which gas exists starting from Russia through Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iran (for marketing), and the Middle East. Certainly, the projects of the Nord Stream and South Stream will be a historical order of merit/insignia given to Vladimir Putin for his efforts in bringing Russia back to the international arena and for tightening the grip on the European economy which will depend, for decades, on gas as an alternative for oil or gas as well as oil, yet with prioritizing the first; i.e., gas. At this point, it was a must for Washington to hasten to create its peer project, Nabucco, to compete against the Russian project as to gain an international apportionment on the basis of which the next century will be politically and strategically determined.

Gas is the main source of energy in the twenty-first century whether as an alternative for oil, due to recession in oil reserves, or as a source of clean energy. Therefore, having control over the zones of gas reserves in the world is considered to be, for the old as well as modern powers, the basis of international conflict in its regional manifestation.

Obviously, Russia read the map well and learnt the lessons well, for the lack of world energy resources that are needed to inject industrial institutions with money and energy, and which were not under the control of the Soviet Union, was the reason behind its collapse. Therefore, Russia learnt that the source of energy of the coming century; i.e., the 21st Century, was GAS.

An initial reading of the gas map reveals that gas locates in the following areas, in terms of quantity and access to consumption areas:

1. Russia: beginning with Vyborg and Beregvya.

2. Annexed to Russia: Turkmenistan.

3. The near and further roundabouts of Russia: Azerbaijan and Iran.

4. Captured from Russia: Georgia.

5. Eastern Mediterranean: Syria and Lebanon.

6. Qatar and Egypt.

Moscow hastened to work on two strategic lines; the first of which is setting up a Russian-Chinese (Shanghai) century based on the economic growth of the Shanghai Bloc, on the one hand, and the control of gas resources, on the other hand.

Thus, Moscow set the grounds for two projects: the South Stream and the Nord (North) Stream in an attempt to face an American project that aimed at seizing the gas of the Black Sea and the gas of Azerbaijan; the Nabucco Project.

There is, then, a strategic race between two projects so as to have control over Europe and the gas resources.

• The American Project (Nabucco) which centres in Central Asia and the Black Sea and its surroundings. Its storage places are in Turkey while its path starts in Bulgaria, and moves through Romania, Hungary, Czech, Croatia, Slovenia and Italy. It was due to pass through Greece, but this idea was dropped for the sake of Turkey.
• The Russian projects — the Nord and South Streams:
a) Nord Stream: It starts in Russia and goes directly to Germany, and from Weinberg to Sasnetz across the Baltic Sea without penetrating Belarus. This helped ease the American pressure there.
b) South Stream: It starts in Russia and moves towards the Black Sea and Bulgaria, then it goes into Greece and then goes towards South Italy, Hungary, and Austria.

The Nabucco project was supposed to compete with the two Russian projects, but due to technical problems the project was delayed until 2017 though it was scheduled for 2014. This resolved the race in favor of Russia, at this stage in particular, and urged for the search of supplementary areas supporting either project:

1) The Iranian gas which the U.S. insists on making supportive of the Nabucco gas pipeline in the sense that it passes in parallel by Georgia’s gas pipeline (and Azerbaijan if possible) to reach an assembling point in Erzurum, Turkey. 2) Gas of the Eastern Mediterranean: Syria, Lebanon, and Israel.

Iran took a decision, the result of which was signing a number of agreements in July 2011, to transport gas through Iraq to Syria. These agreements make Syria the centre of assembly and production in conjunction with the reserves of Lebanon. This is a space of strategy and energy that geographically opens for the first time and extends from Iran to Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Though it was banned and was not allowed for many years, it now shows the degree of struggle over Syria and Lebanon at this phase, and shows the emerging role of France that considers the Eastern Mediterranean as a historical region of influence and everlasting interests. The French role now goes along with the French absence ever since the World War II. In other words, France wants to have a role in the world of (gas) from which it has gained (a health insurance) in Libya and wants to gain (a life insurance) in both Syria and Lebanon.

Now, Turkey feels it is going to be lost amid the struggle for gas as long as the Nabucco project is late. Since the Nord and South Streams exclude Turkey, Turkey knows quite well that the gas of the Eastern Mediterranean has become distant from the influence of Nabucco, and so has Turkey.

History of the Game

For the Nord and South Stream Projects, Moscow established the company of Gazprom in the early 1990s. Remarkably, Germany who wanted to escape, once and for all, the repercussions of the World War II, prepared itself to be a party to the project and a partner of it, whether in terms of establishment, a terminus of the north pipeline or the storage places of the south Stream in the Germanic roundabouts, especially Austria.

Gazprom

Gazprom was founded with the cooperation of Hans-Joachim Gornig, Moscow’s German friend, who was a former vice president of the German Oil and Gas Industrial Company and who supervised the construction of the pipeline network of GDR. The one who headed Gazprom until October 2011 was Vladimir Kotenev who was a former Russian ambassador to Germany.

Gazprom signed qualitative and easy transactions with German companies, on top of which comes the companies cooperating with the Nord Stream as the giant (E.ON) company for energy, and the giant (BASF) for chemicals where the (E.ON) gets preference to buy amounts of gas at the expense of Gazprom when gas prices go up. This is considered to be a kind of (political) support of the German energy companies.

Moscow benefited from the liberalization of the European gas markets monopoly to force those markets to disconnect the distribution networks from production facilities. These clashes between Russia and Berlin turn a page of historic hostility to start a new phase of cooperation on the basis of economy as well as repudiation of a heavy weight put on Germany’s shoulders; i.e., the heavy weight of the debt-overburdened Europe that is under the thumb of the U.S. Germany considers that the Germanic Group — Germany, Austria, Czech and Switzerland — has the priority in being the core of Europe, but it should not bear the consequences of the aging of a continent nor the fall of another giant.

Gazprom’s German ventures include its Wingas joint venture with Wintershall, a subsidiary of BASF which is Germany’s largest oil and gas producer and controls 18% of the gas market. Gazprom has given its top German partners unrivaled stakes in its Russian assets. BASF and E.ON each control almost one-quarter of the Yuzhno-Russkoye gas fields that will provide most of the supplies for Nord Stream at a time, which is not a mere coincidence or simulation, when the peer of Gazprom in Germany — called “The Germanic Gazprom” — expands to own 40% of the Austrian Centrex Co., which is specialized in gas storage. The latter has qualitative expansion into Cyprus, an expansion with which Turkey may not be content.

Turkey dearly misses assuming a tardy role in the Nabucco Gas Company whereby it is supposed to start storing, marketing, and transferring about 31 billion m³ of gas which can go up to 40 billion m³ — at a later stage — in a project that makes Ankara more and more subjugated to Washington and Nato decisions without having the right to insist on joining the European Union that has rejected it several times.

As a matter of fact, the strategic ties through gas become even more strategic in politics where Moscow lobbies effectively on the Social Democratic Party of Germany in North-Rhine Westphalia, the major industrial base that is home to the RWE (Neurath power plant) for electricity utilities and E.ON subsidiary.

Such an influence is recognized by the head of energy policies in the Green Party, Hans Joseph Fell, that four German companies related to Russia play a role in formulating the German Energy Policy through a very complicated network that lobbies ministers and manipulates the public opinion via the Eastern European Economic Relations Committee that represents German companies and has close business relations in Russia and countries of the Former Soviet Union Bloc.

Therefore, there is an indispensible silence on the part of Germany vis-à-vis the accelerating Russian influence. This silence is based on the necessity to improve the so-called “energy security” in Europe.

Remarkably, Germany now considers the policy of “easing and pacifying,” suggested by the European Union to cover the Euro crisis, will hinder the Russian-German investments for a long time. This reason, together with other reasons – e.g., German dawdling in saving the Euro laden with European debts. However, it should be taken into consideration that Germany and its Germanic bloc can bear those debts alone.

Every time Europeans oppose Germany and its policy regarding Russia, Berlin asserts that the Europe’s Utopian plans are unenforceable and may push Russia to sell its gas in Asia. This will, definitely, eighty-six energy security in Europe.

This Russian-German engagement was not simple when Putin could employ the legacy of the Cold War regarding the presence of three million Russian-speakers living in Germany who comprised the second largest group after the Turks. Putin was also adept at employing a network of Eastern German officials who had been recruited to look after the interests of the Russian companies in Germany, let alone recruiting a number of ex-Eastern German State Security Service agents (ex-Stasi agents). This includes Gazprom Germania’s director of personnel and its director of finance and director of finance of the Nord Stream Consortium, Matthias Warnig, who the Wall Street Journal reported as having helped Putin recruit spies in the eastern Germany City of Dresden when Putin was a young KGB operative.

To be fair, Russia’s employment of its former relations was not unripe; rather, it was for the benefit of Germany as a whole. That made the clash between the two countries not possible as long as interests were attained by both parties without having one dominating the other.

The Nord Stream Project, the major link between Russia and Germany, has been inaugurated recently with pipeline costing 4.7 billion euros. Although the Nord Stream Pipeline links Russia and Germany, Europeans’ recognition that such a project would be part of their Energy Security made France and Holland hasten to declare it a European project. In this regard, it is good to mention that Lindner of the Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations said without hesitation that it was a European not a German project and that they would not lock Germany into greater dependence on Russia. Such a declaration indicates the apprehension of the expanding Russian influence in Germany; however, the project of the Nord Stream, in structure, represents Moscow’s plan not the EU’s.

Russians can cripple energy distribution to Poland and other countries the way they like and will be able to sell gas to whoever pays more. However, the importance of Germany to Russia lies, practically, in the fact that it constitutes a platform from which to launch its strategy across the continent where Gazprom Germania has stakes in twenty-five joint projects in Britain, Italy, Turkey, Hungary, and other countries. This — actually — leads us to say that Gazprom will — after a while — become one of the largest companies of the world if not the largest.

Not only did Gazprom leaders build this project, they also tried to interfere in the Nabucco Project that will — as aforementioned — be delayed until 2017, taking into consideration that the latter constitutes a serious challenge. Therefore, Gazprom — which owns 30% of a project designed for building a second major huge pipeline that reaches Europe roughly along Nabucco’s route; a project even Gazprom supporters call “political” — began a political auctioneering to show its muscles by stopping Nabucco or crippling it.

Nevertheless, Moscow hastened to buy up gas in Central Asia and the Caspian in a bid to starve Nabucco at the same time it is ridiculing Washington politically, economically, and strategically.

Outlining Europe’s and – later – the world’s Map

Gazprom operates gas facilities in Austria; i.e., facilities in the strategic Germanic roundabouts. It also leases facilities in Britain and France. However, the growing number of storage facilities in Austria will be the basis for drawing the energy map of Europe since it is going to provide the Slovenian, Slovakian, Croatian, Hungarian, Italian, and somewhat German benefiting from a newly established repository called Katrina, which Gazprom builds in cooperation with Germany with the aim of exporting gas to the hubs of Western Europe.

Gazprom established a joint storage facility with Serbia to export gas to Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Serbia itself. Feasibility studies have been conducted on similar storage ventures in the Czech Republic, Romania, Belgium, Britain, Slovakia, Turkey, Greece, and even France. Such a venture, on the part of Gazprom, strengthens Moscow’s position as a provider of 41% of Europe’s needed supplies of gas. This, undoubtedly, means an substantial change in the relations between the East and the West in the short, mid, and long runs. It also indicates an ebb in the American influence or a collision being prepared, considering the missile shield to establish a new world order where gas is the most essential pillar of its formation. This is a clear indication of the heating struggle in the Middle East over the gas of the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

Nabucco in a tight spot

Nabucco was conceived to funnel gas 3,900 kilometers from Turkey to Austria and was designed to carry 31 bcm of natural gas annually from the Middle East and the Caspian region to markets in Europe. The Nato-American-French hastening towards decisively ending all matters in the Middle East, particularly in Syria and Lebanon, in a way that harmonizes with their interests, lies in the necessity to maintain calm situations supporting the investment and transportation of gas. Syria responded by signing a contract that aims at transferring gas from Iran to Syria passing by Iraq. As a matter of fact, it is the very Syrian and Lebanese gas that is the focal point of the struggle that aims at annexing it either to the Nabucco gas reserves or Gazprom, thus, the South Stream.

The consortium of Nabucco consists of the German energy companies REW, Austrian OML, Turkish Botas, Bulgarian Energy Holding Company, and Romanian Transgaz.

Five years ago, the initial costs of the rival project of Gazprom were estimated to be $ 11.2 billion and the project was expected to cost less than the Russian one. The costs, however, could reach $21.4 billion by 2017. This raises many questions about the viability of this economic project, in particular taking into consideration that Gazprom has enough deals in various regions — in an attempt to encompass Nabucco — that would feed on the surplus capacity of the gas of Turkmenistan, especially when we know that the ineffective pursuit of the Iranian gas precludes the possibility of achieving the Nabucco dream. This is, in fact, one of the unknown secrets of the struggle over Iran that has gone too far into defiance by choosing Iraq and Syria to be routes for its gas transport, or – at least – part of that route.

Thus, Nabucco’s best hope lies in gas supplies from Azerbaijan’s Shah Deniz 2 field which would almost be the only source of a project that seems to be stumbling from the very beginning. This manifests in the accelerating deals and in Moscow’s success in buying the sources of Nabucco, on the one hand, and the hardships encountered in achieving geopolitical changes in Iran and the Mediterranean (Syria and Lebanon), on the other hand. This comes at a time in which Turkey hastens to claim a share in the Nabucco Project either through signing a contract with Azerbaijan to buy 6 billion cubic metres (bcm) of gas in 2017 or trying to lay hands on Syria and Lebanon with the aim of hampering the transfer of Iranian oil or receiving a share of the Lebanese or Syrian gas affluence (or Syria and Lebanon altogether). The race towards occupying a position in the New World Order escalates through gas and other things ranging from small military services to the strategic domes of the missile shield.

Perhaps what poses a threat to Nabucco most is Russia’s attempt to ditch it through negotiating over more advantageous and competitive contracts of gas supplies in favor of Gazprom’s Nord and South Streams, hampering, thus, any effort to endow the United States and Europe with any kind of influence, political- and energy-wise, whether in Iran or the Mediterranean. Moreover, Gazprom could be one of the most important investors or operators of the new gas fields in Syria or Lebanon. The date of August 16, 2011 was not randomly chosen by the Syrian Ministry of Oil to announce the discovery of a gas well in the Area of Qarah in the Central Region of Syria near Homs. The well has the capacity of producing 400.000 cubic metres a day (146 million cubic metres a year). However, the Syrian Ministry of Oil did not breathe a syllable about the Mediterranean Gas.

The Nord and South Streams lessened the importance of the American policy that appeared to be lagging behind. The bad history between the states of Central Europe and Russia has ebbed, Poland is slowly coming round, and the US seem willing to reconsider since it announced in late October 2011 the shift in the energy policies after the discovery of coal mines in Europe which will lessen dependence on Russia … and the Middle East. This seems to be a far-reaching or long-term goal due to the fact that there is a number of procedures to be taken before starting commercial production of coal. This coal can be attained from unconventional sources in the rocks found at thousands of feet underground by using the techniques of rock fracturing and the hydraulic fracturing of high pressure water. Those techniques are used to pump liquids and sand into a well to release gas. This issue, however, is coated with environmental risks due to the impacts of the fracturing techniques on water reserves.

China’s Participation

Sino-Russian cooperation in the field of energy is the power orienting the Sino-Russian strategic partnership. This is, in fact, what experts point to as the “base” for the double veto in the UNSC that came in favour of Syria.

Cooperation in the energy field is what lubricates the acceleration of the partnership between the two giants. It is not only a matter of gas supplies with preferences to China but it is a process that urges China to participate in gas distribution through selling new assets and facilities, in addition to attempting to have joint control over the executive administrations of the gas distribution networks where Moscow currently shows resilience in prices of gas supplies provided that they are allowed to access the local Chinese markets because of the profits there. It was agreed that Russian and Chinese experts could work together in the following domains:

“coordinating energy strategies in Russia and china; predicting and outlining prospective scenarios; and developing market infrastructure, energy efficiency and sources of alternative energy.”

Despite cooperation in the field of energy, there are other strategic interests that represent in the mutual Chinese-Russian conception of the risks of the American so-called project “Missile Shield.” Not only has Washington involved Japan and South Korea in the Missile Shield, but it has also sent an invitation to India in early September 2011 to be a partner in the very project. Moscow’s concerns intersect with Beijing’s, regarding Washington’s moves to revive the Strategy of Central Asia: i.e., the Silk Road. This project is the same as that initiated by George Bush (Greater Central Asia Project) to roll back Russia and China’s influence in Central Asia in collaboration with Turkey to resolve the situation in Afghanistan by 2014 so as to arrange for the Nato influence there. There are increasing allusions from Uzbekistan to play host of Nato for such a project. Vladimir Putin estimates what can foil the Western invasion on Russia’s back scenes in Central Asia will be the expansion of the joint Russian-Kazakhstani-Belarusian economic space in cooperation with Beijing.

This image of the international struggle mechanisms allows access to see one side of the process of the New World Order Formation based on struggling for military influence and on holding the backbone of age; namely, energy, on top of which comes gas.

The Gas of Syria

As Israel started oil and gas extraction, it was clear that the basin of the Mediterranean had entered the game and that Syria was either to be attacked or that the whole region was going to enjoy peace since the twenty-first century was the century of clean energy.

What we know about this issue is that the Mediterranean basin is the wealthiest in gas and that Syria would be the wealthiest state, according to the Washington Institute which also speculates that struggle between Turkey and Cyprus would heat due to Ankara’s inability to bear its losses of the Nabucco gas despite the contract Moscow signed with Ankara on December 2011 to transport part of the South Stream gas via Turkey.

Embracing the secret of the Syrian gas will let all know how big the game over gas is. According to China, who controls Syria could control the Middle East, grip on the Gateway to Asia, possess the Key to Russia’ house (as Catherine the 2nd put it), and could set foot on the Silk Road. Most importantly, they who could penetrate Syria for gas have the ability to dominate the world, especially since the coming century will be the Century of Gas. With the contract Damascus signed to transport Iranian gas to the Mediterranean through Iraq, the geopolitical space would open and the gas space would close on the scene of Nabucco that used to be Europe and Turkey’s lifeline. Syria, undoubtedly, would be the key to the coming epoch.

China and Turkey are in discussions to build a new high-speed railway link across Turkey. If completed it would be the country’s largest railway project ever, even including the pre-World War I BerlinBaghdad Railway link. The project was perhaps the most important agenda item, far more so than Syria during talks in Beijing between Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Chinese leadership in early April. The proposed rail link would run from Kars on the easternmost border with Armenia, through the Turkish interior on to Istanbul where it would connect to the Marmaray rail tunnel now under construction that runs under the Bosphorus strait. Then it would continue to Edirne near the border to Greece and Bulgaria in the European Union. It will cost an estimated $35 billion. The realization of the Turkish link would complete a Chinese Trans-Eurasian Rail Bridge project that would bring freight from China to Spain and England.¹

The Kars-Edirne line would reduce travel time across Turkey by two-thirds from 36 hours down to 12. Under an agreement signed between China and Turkey in October 2010, China has agreed to extend loans of $30 billion for the planned rail network.¹

In addition a Baku-Tbilisi-Kars (BTK) railway connecting Azerbaijan’s capital of Baku to Kars is under construction, which greatly increases the strategic importance of the Edirne-Kars line. For China it would put a critical new link in its railway infrastructure across Eurasia to markets in Europe and beyond.

Map: Yunus Emre Hatunoğlu

Erdogan’s visit to Beijing was significant for other reasons. It was the first such high level trip of a Turkish Prime Minister to China since 1985. The fact that Erdogan was also granted a high-level meeting with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping, the man slated to be next Chinese President, and was granted an extraordinary visit to China’s oil-rich Xinjiang Province also shows the high priority China is placing on its relations with Turkey, a key emerging strategic force in the Middle East.

Xinjiang is a highly sensitive part of China as it hosts some 9 million ethnic Uyghurs who share a Turkic heritage with Turkey as well as nominal adherence to the Turkish Sunni branch of Islam. In July 2009 the US government, acting through the National Endowment for Democracy, the regime-change NGO it finances, backed a major Uyghur uprising in which many Han Chinese shop owners were killed or injured. Washington in turn blamed the riots on Beijing as part of a strategy of escalating pressure on China.²

During Uyghur riots in Xinjiang in 2009, Erdogan accused Beijing of “genocide” and attacked the Chinese on human rights, a dicey issue for Turkey given their Kurd ethnic problems. Clearly economic priorities from both sides have now changed the political calculus.

Building the world’s greatest market

Contrary to the dogma of Milton Friedman and his monetarist followers, markets are never “free.” They are always manmade. The essential element to building new markets is building infrastructure, and for the vast landmass of Eurasia railroad linkages, ideally high-speed rail links, are essential to those new markets and the fastest way to economic prosperity for all concerned. For the economically depressed countries of the European Union, joining in the infrastructure linkages with the growing economies of Eurasia offers a real way out of the present crisis.

With the end of the Cold War in 1990 the vast under-developed land space of Eurasia became open again. This space contains some forty percent of total land in the world, much of it prime unspoiled agriculture land; it contains three-fourth of the entire world population, an asset of incalculable worth. It consists of some eighty eight of the world’s countries and three-fourths of known world energy resources as well as every mineral known needed for industrialization. North America as an economic potential, rich as she is, pales by comparison.

The Turkish-China railway discussion is but one part of a vast Chinese strategy to weave a network of inland rail connections across the Eurasian Continent. The aim is to literally create the world’s greatest new economic space and in turn a huge new market for not just China but all Eurasian countries, the Middle East and Western Europe. Direct rail service is faster and cheaper than either ships or trucks, and much cheaper than airplanes. For manufactured Chinese or other Eurasian products the rail land bridge links are creating vast new economic trading activity all along the rail line.

Two factors have made this prospect realizable for the first time since the Second World War. First the collapse of the Soviet Union has opened up the land space of Eurasia in entirely new ways as has the opening of China to Russia and its Eurasian neighbors, overcoming decades of mistrust. This is being met by the eastward expansion of the European Union to the countries of the former Warsaw Pact.

The demand for faster rail transport over the vast Eurasian distances is clear. China’s container port activity and that of its European and North American destinations is reaching a saturation point as volumes of container traffic explode at double-digit rates. Singapore recently displaced Rotterdam as the world’s largest port in volume terms. The growth rate for container port throughput in China in 2006, before outbreak of the world financial crisis was some 25% annually. In 2007 Chinese ports accounted for some 28 per cent of world container port throughput.³ However there is another aspect to the Chinese and, to an extent, the Russian land bridge strategies. By moving trade flows over land, it is more secure in the face of escalating military tensions between the nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, especially China and Russia, and NATO. Sea transport must flow through highly vulnerable narrow passageways or chokepoints such as the Malaysian Straits of Malacca.

The Turkish Kars-Edirne railway would form an integral part of an entire web of Chinese-initiated rail corridors across the Eurasian landmass. Following the example of how rail infrastructure transformed the economic space of Europe and later of America during the late 19th Century, the Chinese government, which today stands as the world’s most efficient railroad constructor, has quietly been extending its rail links into Central Asia and beyond for several years. They have proceeded in segments, one reason the vast ambition of their grand rail infrastructure has drawn so little attention to date in the West outside the shipping industry.

China builds Second Eurasian Land Bridge

By 2011 China had completed a Second Eurasian Land Bridge running from China’s port of Lianyungang on the East China Sea through to Kazakhstan’s Druzhba and on to Central Asia, West Asia and Europe to various European destinations and finally to Rotterdam Port of Holland on the Atlantic coast.

The Second Eurasian Land Bridge is a new railway connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic that was completed by China to Druzhba in Kazakhstan. This newest Eurasia land bridge extends west in China through six provinces–Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Xinjiang autonomous region, which neighbors respectively with Shandong Province, Shanxi Province, Hubei Province, Sichuan Province, Qinghai Province, Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region and Inner Mongolia. That covers about 360,000 square kilometers, some 37% of the total land space of China. About 400 million people live in the areas, which accounts for 30% of the total population of the country. Outside of China, the land bridge covers over 40 countries and regions in both Asia and Europe, and is particularly important for the countries in Central and West Asia that don’t have sea outlets.

In 2011 China’s Vice Premier Wang Qishan announced plans to build a new high-speed railway link within Kazakhstan, linking the cities of Astana and Almaty, to be ready in 2015. The Astana-Almaty line, with a total length of 1050 kilometers, employing China’s advanced rail-building technology, will allow high-speed trains to run at a speed of 350 kilometers per hour.

DB Schenker Rail Automotive is now transporting auto parts from Leipzig to Shenyang in northeastern China for BMW. Trains loaded with parts and components depart from DB Schenker’s Leipzig transshipment terminal in a three-week, 11,000 km journey to BMW’s Shenyang plant in the Liaoning province, where components are used in the assembly of BMW vehicles. Beginning in late November 2011, trains bound for Shenyang departed Leipzig once each day. “With a transit time of 23 days, the direct trains are twice as fast as maritime transport, followed by over-the-road transport to the Chinese hinterland,” says Dr. Karl-Friedrich Rausch, member of the management board for DB Mobility Logistics’ Transportation and Logistics division. The route reaches China via Poland, Belarus, and Russia. Containers have to be transferred by crane to different gauges twice—first to Russian broad gauge at the Poland-Belarus border, then back to standard gauge at the Russia-China border in Manzhouli.⁴

In May 2011 a daily direct rail freight service was launched between the Port of Antwerp, Europe’s second-largest port, and Chongqing, the industrial hub in China’s southwest. That greatly speeded rail freight transport across Eurasia to Europe. Compared to the 36 days for maritime transport from east China’s ports to west Europe, the Antwerp-Chongqing Rail Freight service now takes 20 to 25 days, and the aim is to cut that to 15 to 20 days. Westbound cargo includes automotive and technological goods, eastbound shipments are mostly chemicals. The project was a major priority for the Antwerp Port and the Belgian government in cooperation with China and other partners. The service is run by Swiss inter-modal logistics provider Hupac, their Russian partner Russkaya Troyka and Eurasia Good Transport over a distance of more than 10,000km, starting from Port of Antwerp through to Germany and Poland, and further to Ukraine, Russia and Mongolia before reaching Chongqing in China.⁵

The Second Eurasian Land Bridge runs 10,900 kilometers in length, with some 4100 kilometers of that in China. Within China the line runs parallel to one of the ancient routes of the Silk Road. The rail line continues across China into Druzhba where it links with the broader gauge rail lines of Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is the largest inland country in the world. As Chinese rail and highways have expanded west, trade between Kazakhstan and China has been booming. From January to October 2008, goods passing through the Khorgos port between the two nations reached 880,000 tons — over 250% growth compared with the same period a year before. Trade between China and Kazakhstan is expected to grow 3 to 5 fold by 2013. As of 2008, only about 1% of the goods shipped from Asia to Europe were delivered by overland routes, meaning the room for expansion is considerable.⁶

From Kazakhstan the lines go on via Russia and Belarus over Poland to the markets of the European Union.

Another line goes to Tashkent in Uzbekistan, Central Asia’s largest city of some two millions. Another line goes west to Turkmenistan’s capital Asgabat and to the border of Iran.⁷ With some additional investment, these links, now tied to the vast expanse and markets of China could open new economic possibilities in much-neglected regions of Central Asia. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) could provide a well-suited vehicle for coordination of a broad Eurasian rail infrastructure coordination to maximize these initial rail links. The members of the SCO, formed in 2001, include China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, Uzbekistan with Iran, India, Mongolia and Pakistan as Observer Status countries.

Russia’s Land Bridge

Russia is well positioned to benefit greatly from such an SCO strategy. The First Eurasian Land Bridge runs through Russia along the Trans-Siberian Railway, first completed in 1916 to unify the Russian Empire. The Trans-Siberian remains the longest single rail line in the world at 9,297 kilometers, a tribute to the vision of Russian Sergei Witte in the 1890s. The Trans-Siberian Railway, also called the Northern East-West Corridor, runs from the Russian Far East Port of Vladivostok and links in Europe to the Port of Rotterdam some 13,000 kilometers. At present it is the less attractive for Pacific-to-Atlantic freight because of maintenance problems and maximum speeds of 55 km.

There are attempts to better use the Trans-Siberian Land Bridge. In January 2008 a long distance Eurasian rail freight service, the “Beijing-Hamburg Container Express” was successfully tested by the German railway Deutsche Bahn. It completed the 10,000 km (6,200 miles) journey in 15 days to link the Chinese capital to the German port city, going through Mongolia, the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Poland. By ship to the same markets takes double the time or some 30 days. This route, which began commercial service in 2010 incorporates a section of the existing Trans-Siberian Railway, a rail link using a broader gauge than either Chinese or European trains, meaning two offloads and reloads onto other trains at the China-Mongolia border and again at the Belarus-Poland border.

Were the Trans-Siberian railway passage across Russian Eurasian space to be modernized and upgraded to accommodate high-speed freight traffic, it would add a significant new economic dimension to the economic development of Russia’s interior regions. The Trans-Siberian is doubletracked and electrified. The need is minimally to improve some segments to insure a better integration of all the elements to make it a more attractive option for Eurasian freight to the west.

There are strong indications the new Putin presidency will turn more of its attention to Eurasia. Modernization of the First Eurasian Land Bridge would be a logical way to accomplish much of that development by literally creating new markets and new economic activity. With the bond markets of the United States and Europe flooded with toxic waste and state bankruptcy fears, issuance of Russian state bonds for modernization or even a new parallel high-speed rail Land Bridge linking to the certainty of growing freight traffic across Eurasia would have little difficulty finding eager investors.

Russia is currently in discussion with China and Chinese rail constructors who are bidding on construction of a planned $20 billion of new high-speed Russian rail track to be completed before the 2018 Russian hosting of the Soccer World Cup. China’s experience in building some 12,000 km of high speed rail in record time is a major asset for China’s bid. Significantly, Russia plans to raise $10 billion of the cost by issuing new railroad bonds.⁸

A Third Eurasian Land Bridge?

In 2009 at the Fifth Pan-Pearl River Delta Regional (PPRD) Cooperation and Development Forum, a government-sponsored event, the Yunnan provincial government announced its intention to accelerate construction of needed infrastructure to build a third Eurasian continental land bridge that will link south China to Rotterdam via Turkey over land. This is part of what Erdogan and Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao discussed in Beijing this April. The network of inland roads for the land bridge within Yunnan province will be completed by 2015, said Yunnan governor Qin Guangrong. The project starts from coastal ports in Guangdong, with the Port of Shenzhen being the most important. It will ultimately go all the way through Kunming to Myanmar, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Iran, entering Europe from Turkey.⁹

The route would cut some 6,000-km from the sea journey between the Pearl River Delta and Rotterdam and allow production from China’s eastern manufacturing centers to reach Asia, Africa and Europe. The proposal is for completing a series of missing rail and modern highway links totaling some 1,000 Km, not that inconceivable. In neighboring Myanmar a mere 300 km of railways and highways are lacking in order to link the railways in Yunnan with the highway network of Myanmar and South Asia. It will help China pave the way for building a land channel to the Indian Ocean.

The third Eurasian Land Bridge will cross 20 countries in Asia and Europe and have a total length of about 15,000 kilometers, which is 3,000 to 6,000 kilometers shorter than the sea route entering at the Indian Ocean from the southeast coast via the Malacca Straits. The total annual trade volume of the regions the route passes through was nearly US$300 billion in 2009. Ultimately the plan is for a branch line that would also start in Turkey, cross Syria and Palestine, and end in Egypt, facilitating transportation from China to Africa. Clearly the Pentagon’s AFRICOM and the US-backed Arab Spring unrest directly impacts that extension, though for how long at this point is unclear.¹⁰

The geopolitical dimension

Not every major international player is pleased about the growing linkages binding the economies of Eurasia with western Europe and Africa. In his now famous 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives, former Presidential adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski noted,

In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geo-strategy involves the purposeful management of geostrategically dynamic states… To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geo-strategy are to prevent collusion and to maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.¹¹

The “barbarians” that Brzezinski refers to are China and Russia and all in between. The Brzezinski term “imperial geo-strategy” refers to US strategic foreign policy. The “vassals” he identifies in the book as countries like Germany, Japan, and other NATO “allies” of the US. That Brzezinski geopolitical notion remains US foreign policy today.¹²

The prospect of an unparalleled Eurasian economic boom lasting into the next Century and beyond is at hand. The first sinews of binding the vast economic space have been put in place or are being constructed with these rail links. It is becoming clear to more people in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Eurasia including China and Russia that their natural tendency to build these markets faces only one major obstacle: NATO and the US Pentagon’s Full Spectrum Dominance obsession. In the period prior to World War I it was the decision in Berlin to build a rail land link to and through the Turkish Ottoman Empire from Berlin to Baghdad that was the catalyst for British strategists to incite the events that plunged Europe into the most destructive war in history to that date. This time we have a chance to avoid a similar fate with the Eurasian development. More and more the economically stressed economies of the EU are beginning to look east and less to their west across the Atlantic for Europe’s economic future.

1. Today’s Zaman, Turkey, China mull $35 bln joint high-speed railway project, Istanbul, April 14, 2012.
2. F. William Engdahl, Washington is Playing a Deeper Game with China, Global Research, July 11, 2009.
3. UNCTAD, Port and multimodal transport developments,2008.
4. Joseph O’Reilly, BMW Rides Orient Express to China, Global Logistics, October 2011.
5. Aubrey Chang, Antwerp-Chongqing Direct Rail Freight Link Launched, May 12, 2011.
6. CNTV, Eurasian land bridge, March 12, 2011.
7. Shigeru Otsuka, Central Asia’s Rail Network and the Eurasian Land Bridge, Japan Railway & Transport Review, 28, September 2001, p. 42-49.
8. CNTV, Russian rail official: Chinese bidder competitive, November 21, 2011.
9. Xinhua, Yunnan accelerates construction of third Eurasia land bridge, 2009.
10. Li Yingqing and Guo Anfei, Third land link to Europe envisioned, China Daily, July 2, 2009.
11. Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 1997, Basic Books, p. 40. See F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, Wiesbaden, 2011, edition.engdahl, for details of the role of the German Baghdad rail link in World War I.
12. Zbigniew Brzezinski, op. cit., p. 40.

Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost 40% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world’s top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS? Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept. (It stands for the next 11 emerging economies.)

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Yale’s canny historian Paul Kennedy (of “imperial overstretch” fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a “historical watershed” taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of “the sole superpower.” There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for that: the slow erosion of the US dollar (formerly 85% of global reserves, now less than 60%), the “paralysis of the European project,” Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the decrepitude of the United Nations.

The Group of Eight (G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20, which includes the BRICS, might, however, prove to be the real thing. But there’s much to be done to cross that watershed rather than simply be swept over it willy-nilly: the reform of the UN Security Council, and above all, the reform of the Bretton Woods system, especially those two crucial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

On the other hand, willy-nilly may prove the way of the world. After all, as emerging superstars, the BRICS have a ton of problems. True, in only the last seven years Brazil has added 40 million people as middle-class consumers; by 2016, it will have invested another $900 billion – more than a third of its GDP — in energy and infrastructure; and it’s not as exposed as some BRICS members to the imponderables of world trade, since its exports are only 11% of GDP, even less than the US.

Still, the key problem remains the same: lack of good management, not to mention a swamp of corruption. Brazil’s brazen new monied class is turning out to be no less corrupt than the old, arrogant, comprador elites that used to run the country.

In India, the choice seems to be between manageable and unmanageable chaos. The corruption of the country’s political elite would make Shiva proud. Abuse of state power, nepotistic control of contracts related to infrastructure, the looting of mineral resources, real estate property scandals — they’ve got it all, even if India is not a Hindu Pakistan. Not yet anyway.

Since 1991, “reform” in India has meant only one thing: unbridled commerce and getting the state out of the economy. Not surprisingly then, nothing is being done to reform public institutions, which are a scandal in themselves. Efficient public administration? Don’t even think about it. In a nutshell, India is a chaotic economic dynamo and yet, in some sense, not even an emerging power, not to speak of a superpower.

Russia, too, is still trying to find the magic mix, including a competent state policy to exploit the country’s bounteous natural resources, extraordinary space, and impressive social talent. It must modernize fast as, apart from Moscow and St Petersburg, relative social backwardness prevails. Its leaders remain uneasy about neighboring China (aware that any Sino-Russian alliance would leave Russia as a distinctly junior partner). They are distrustful of Washington, anxious over the depopulation of their eastern territories, and worried about the cultural and religious alienation of their Muslim population.

Then again the Putinator is back as president with his magic formula for modernization: a strategic German-Russian partnership that will benefit the power elite/business oligarchy, but not necessarily the majority of Russians.

Dead in the Woods

The post-World War II Bretton Woods system is now officially dead, totally illegitimate, but what are the BRICS planning to do about it?

At their summit in New Delhi in late March, they pushed for the creation of a BRICS development bank that could invest in infrastructure and provide them with back-up credit for whatever financial crises lie down the road. The BRICS know perfectly well that Washington and the European Union (EU) will never relinquish control of the IMF and the World Bank. Nonetheless, trade among these countries will reach an impressive $500 billion by 2015, mostly in their own currencies.

However, BRICS cohesion, to the extent it exists, centers mostly around shared frustration with the Masters of the Universe-style financial speculation that nearly sent the global economy off a cliff in 2008. True, the BRICS crew also has a notable convergence of policy and opinion when it comes to embattled Iran, an Arab Sprung Middle East, and Northern Africa. Still, for the moment the key problem they face is this: they don’t have an ideological or institutional alternative to neo-liberalism and the lordship of global finance.

As Vijay Prashad has noted, the Global North has done everything to prevent any serious discussion of how to reform the global financial casino.¹ No wonder the head of the G-77 group of developing nations (now G-132, in fact), Thai ambassador Pisnau Chanvitan, has warned of “behavior that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neocolonialism.”

Meanwhile, things happen anyway, helter-skelter. China, for instance, continues to informally advance the yuan as a globalizing, if not global, currency. It’s already trading in yuan with Russia and Australia, not to mention across Latin America and in the Middle East. Increasingly, the BRICS are betting on the yuan as their monetary alternative to a devalued US dollar.

Japan is using both yen and yuan in its bilateral trade with its huge Asian neighbor. The fact is that there’s already an unacknowledged Asian free-trade zone in the making, with China, Japan, and South Korea on board.

What’s ahead, even if it includes a BRICS-bright future, will undoubtedly be very messy. Just about anything is possible (verging on likely), from another Great Recession in the US to European stagnation or even the collapse of the eurozone, to a BRICS-wide slowdown, a tempest in the currency markets, the collapse of financial institutions, and a global crash.

And talk about messy, who could forget what Dick Cheney said, while still Halliburton’s CEO, at the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999: “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” No wonder when, as vice president, he came to power in 2001, his first order of business was to “liberate” Iraq’s oil. Of course, who doesn’t remember how that ended?

Now (different administration but same line of work), it’s an oil-embargo-cum-economic-war on Iran. The leadership in Beijing sees Washington’s whole Iran psychodrama as a regime-change plot, pure and simple, having nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Then again, the winner so far in the Iran imbroglio is China. With Iran’s banking system in crisis, and the US embargo playing havoc with that country’s economy, Beijing can essentially dictate its terms for buying Iranian oil.

The Chinese are expanding Iran’s fleet of oil tankers, a deal worth more than US$1 billion, and that other BRICS giant, India, is now purchasing even more Iranian oil than China. Yet Washington won’t apply its sanctions to BRICS members because these days, economically speaking, the US needs them more than they need the US.

The world through Chinese eyes

Which brings us to the dragon in the room: China.

What’s the ultimate Chinese obsession? Stability, stability, stability.

The usual self-description of the system there as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is, of course, as mythical as a gorgon. In reality, think hardcore neo-liberalism with Chinese characteristics led by men who have every intention of saving global capitalism.

At the moment, China is smack in the middle of a tectonic, structural shift from an export/investment model to a services/consumer-led model. In terms of its explosive economic growth, the last decades have been almost unimaginable to most Chinese (and the rest of the world), but according to the Financial Times, they have also left the country’s richest 1% controlling 40%-60% of total household wealth. How to find a way to overcome such staggering collateral damage? How to make a system with tremendous inbuilt problems function for 1.3 billion people?

Enter “stability-mania.” Back in 2007, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was warning that the Chinese economy could become “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” These were the famous “Four Uns.”

Today, the collective leadership, including the next Prime Minister, Li Leqiang, has gone a nervous step further, purging “unstable” from the Party’s lexicon. For all practical purposes, the next phase in the country’s development is already upon us.

It will be quite something to watch in the years to come.

How will the nominally “communist” princelings — the sons and daughters of top revolutionary Party leaders, all immensely wealthy, thanks, in part, to their cozy arrangements with Western corporations, plus the bribes, the alliances with gangsters, all those “concessions” to the highest bidder, and the whole Western-linked crony-capitalist oligarchy – lead China beyond the “Four Modernizations”? Especially with all that fabulous wealth to loot.

The Obama administration, expressing its own anxiety, has responded to the clear emergence of China as a power to be reckoned with via a “strategic pivot” — from its disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to Asia. The Pentagon likes to call this “rebalancing” (though things are anything but rebalanced or over for the US in the Middle East).

Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been focused on China as its future global enemy number one. Then 9/11 redirected it to what the Pentagon called “the arc of instability,” the oil heartlands of the planet extending from the Middle East through Central Asia. Given Washington’s distraction, Beijing calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two decades in which the pressure would be largely off. In those years, it could focus on a breakneck version of internal development, while the US was squandering mountains of money on its nonsensical “Global War on Terror.”

Twelve years later, that window is being slammed shut as from India, Australia, and the Philippines to South Korea and Japan, the US declares itself back in the hegemony business in Asia. Doubts that this was the new American path were dispelled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, none too subtly labeled “America’s Pacific Century.” (And she was talking about this century, not the last one!)

The American mantra is always the same: “American security,” whose definition is: whatever happens on the planet. Whether in the oil-rich Persian Gulf where Washington “helps” allies Israel and Saudi Arabia because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered to a growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China, it’s always in the name of US security. In either case, in just about any case, that’s what trumps all else.

As a result, if there is a 33-year Wall of Mistrust between the US and Iran, there is a new, growing Great Wall of Mistrust between the US and China. Recently, Wang Jisi, Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and a top Chinese strategic analyst, offered the Beijing leadership’s perspective on that “Pacific Century” in an influential paper he coauthored.

China, he and his coauthor write, now expects to be treated as a first-class power. After all, it “successfully weathered … the 1997-98 global financial crisis,” caused, in Beijing’s eyes, by “deep deficiencies in the US economy and politics. China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy and seems to be the number two in world politics, as well … Chinese leaders do not credit these successes to the United States or to the US-led world order.”

The US, Wang adds, “is seen in China generally as a declining power over the long run … It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world … part of an emerging new structure.” (Think: BRICS.)

In sum, as Wang and his coauthor portray it, influential Chinese see their country’s development model providing “an alternative to Western democracy and experiences for other developing countries to learn from, while many developing countries that have introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos.”

Put it all in a nutshell and you have a Chinese vision of the world in which a fading US still yearns for global hegemony and remains powerful enough to block emerging powers — China and the other BRICS — from their twenty-first century destiny.

Dr Zbig’s Eurasian wet dream

Now, how does the US political elite see that same world? Virtually no one is better qualified to handle that subject than former national security adviser, BTC pipeline facilitator, and briefly Obama ghost adviser, Dr Zbigniew (“Zbig”) Brzezinski. And he doesn’t hesitate to do so in his latest book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.

If the Chinese have their strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured. He is now arguing that, for the US to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on an “expanded West.” That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially in energy terms), while embracing Turkey, which he imagines as a template for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia, politically and economically, in a “strategically sober and prudent fashion.”

Turkey, by the way, is no such template because, despite the Arab Spring, for the foreseeable future, there are no new Arab democracies. Still, Zbig believes that Turkey can help Europe, and so the US, in far more practical ways to solve certain global energy problems by facilitating its “unimpeded access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia’s oil and gas.”

Under the present circumstances, however, this, too, remains something of a fantasy. After all, Turkey can only become a key transit country in the great energy game on the Eurasian chessboard I’ve long labeled “Pipelineistan” if the Europeans get their act together. They would have to convince the energy-rich, autocratic “republic” of Turkmenistan to ignore its powerful Russian neighbor and sell them all the natural gas they need. And then there’s that other energy matter that looks unlikely at the moment: Washington and Brussels would have to ditch counterproductive sanctions and embargos against Iran (and the war games that go with them) and start doing serious business with that country.

Dr Zbig nonetheless proposes the notion of a two-speed Europe as the key to future American power on the planet. Think of it as an upbeat version of a scenario in which the present Eurozone semi-collapses. He would maintain the leading role of the inept bureaucratic fat cats in Brussels now running the EU, and support another “Europe” (mostly the southern “Club Med” countries) outside the euro, with nominally free movement of people and goods between the two. His bet – and in this he reflects a key strand of Washington thinking – is that a two-speed Europe, a Eurasian Big Mac, still joined at the hip to America, could be a globally critical player for the rest of the twenty-first century.

And then, of course, Dr Zbig displays all his Cold Warrior colors, extolling an American future “stability in the Far East” inspired by “the role Britain played in the nineteenth century as a stabilizer and balancer of Europe.” We’re talking, in other words, about this century’s number one gunboat diplomat. He graciously concedes that a “comprehensive American-Chinese global partnership” would still be possible, but only if Washington retains a significant geopolitical presence in what he still calls the “Far East” – “whether China approves or not.”

The answer will be “not.”

In a way, all of this is familiar stuff, as is much of actual Washington policy today. In his case, it’s really a remix of his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard in which, he once again certifies that “the huge Trans-Eurasian continent is the central arena of world affairs.” Only now reality has taught him that Eurasia can’t be conquered and America’s best shot is to try to bring Turkey and Russia into the fold.

Robocop rules

Yet Brzezinski looks positively benign when you compare his ideas to Hillary Clinton’s recent pronouncements, including her address to the tongue-twistingly named World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference. There, as the Obama administration regularly does, she highlighted “NATO’s enduring relationship with Afghanistan” and praised negotiations between the US and Kabul over “a long-term strategic partnership between our two nations.”

Translation; despite being outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency for years, neither the Pentagon nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing out of their holdings in the Greater Middle East. Already negotiating with President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul for staying rights through 2024, the US has every intention of holding onto three major strategic Afghan bases: Bagram, Shindand (near the Iranian border), and Kandahar (near the Pakistani border). Only the terminally na๏ve would believe the Pentagon capable of voluntarily abandoning such sterling outposts for the monitoring of Central Asia and strategic competitors Russia and China.

NATO, Clinton added ominously, will “expand its defense capabilities for the twenty-first century,” including the missile defense system the alliance approved at its last meeting in Lisbon in 2010.

It will be fascinating to see what the possible election of socialist Fran็ois Hollande as French president might mean. Interested in a deeper strategic partnership with the BRICS, he is committed to the end of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The question is: Would his victory throw a monkey wrench into NATO’s works, after these years under the Great Liberator of Libya, that neo-Napoleonic image-maker Nicolas Sarkozy (for whom France was just mustard in Washington’s steak tartar).

No matter what either Dr Zbig or Hillary might think, most European countries, fed up with their black-hole adventures in Afghanistan and Libya, and with the way NATO now serves US global interests, support Hollande on this. But it will still be an uphill battle. The destruction and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was the highpoint of the recent NATO agenda of regime change in MENA (the Middle East-Northern Africa). And NATO remains Washington’s plan B for the future, if the usual network of think tanks, endowments, funds, foundations, NGOs, and even the U.N. fail to provoke what could be described as YouTube regime change.

In a nutshell: after going to war on three continents (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya), turning the Mediterranean into a virtual NATO lake, and patrolling the Arabian Sea non-stop, NATO will be, according to Hillary, riding on “a bet on America’s leadership and strength, just as we did in the twentieth century, for this century and beyond.” So 21 years after the end of the Soviet Union — NATO’s original raison d’etre — this could be the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with NATO, in whimpering mode, still fulfilling the role of perpetual global Robocop.

We’re back once again with Dr Zbig and the idea of America as the “promoter and guarantor of unity” in the West, and as “balance and conciliator” in the East (for which it needs bases from the Persian Gulf to Japan, including those Afghan ones). And don’t forget that the Pentagon has never given up the idea of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance.

For all that military strength, however, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is distinctly a New World (and not in North America either). Against the guns and the gunboats, the missiles and the drones, there is economic power. Currency wars are now raging. BRICS members China and Russia have cordilleras of cash. South America is uniting fast. The Putinator has offered South Korea an oil pipeline. Iran is planning to sell all its oil and gas in a basket of currencies, none dollars. China is paying to expand its blue-water Navy and its anti-ship missile weaponry. One day, Tokyo may finally realize that, as long as it is occupied by Wall Street and the Pentagon, it will live in eternal recession. Even Australia may eventually refuse to be forced into a counterproductive trade war with China.

So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the US/NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be able to shoot back.

1. See “The G-77 awakes,” Asia Times Online, April 17, 2012.

One of the more prevalent images in the current epoch is that of militarization. The armed forces now take part in Hollywood production (the recent film Act of Valor, for example), one of the top selling video game series, Call of Duty, promises the most authentic war experience, and the line between news and military action is blurred by the embedding of journalists in active units – a move that has the potential to disrupt objective reporting on the events that occur. Popular musicians appear in videos aimed at increasing the levels of military recruits, and the ever-changing military slogans enter common lexicon at a rapid pace. This conflation of military advertising is by no accident. Ever since the creation of so-called “military Keynesian”¹ during the Cold War, the armed forces industry has risen to be one of the key sectors of both the US and global economy. The financial aspects of the military, be it the armament, logistics, or marketing sectors, are indeed a business, and they have a product to sell – war.

The military image is conducted upon the utilization of symbols that are branded as the Other, the enemy that threatens the sanctity or livelihood of the nation’s population. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was the Other, portrayed in a manner that contrasted sharply with the domestic propaganda of the American Way of Life. The image of the USSR was used to sell to the American public unprecedented weapons build-up, violent interventions overseas, and the importance of US global supremacy. The largest post-Cold War conflict, the current War on Terror, saw Islamic fundamentalism – and centrally Osama Bin Laden – become the dominant symbol of evil, and it was used to justify expensive and needless wars, not to mention the rolling back of vital civil liberties on the home front.

Yet Bin Laden is now dead, and the wars rage on, unmoored from their symbolic context. Contrived justifications are wearing thin on a population growing wearing from the deaths, the costs, and the gruesome stories pouring forth from the television. With the branded image, war cannot exist, and without the war a dominant aspect of the economy is threatened to its very roots.

Enter Joseph Kony, a Ugandan warlord and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army – a roving band of guerrilla fighters that consists primarily of kidnapped children-turned soldiers. Fueled by a curious combination of nationalism, Christianity, and occultism, Kony’s crimes – which include the aforementioned kidnappings and militarization of the youth, child sex slavery, and the massacring of civilian populations – have led to his indictment for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC) and his placement on the US’s list of known terrorists in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. While the horrors Kony have visited upon Uganda have been some of the egregious human rights abuses in the modern era, his forces have subsequently thinned out and have left Uganda, becoming scattered across the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.²  Regardless, this pivotal fact has not fazed an effective international campaign calling for the US to intervene into Uganda to finally fulfill the ICC’s mandate.

Kony 2012

On March 5, 2012, a thirty minute video titled simply “Kony 2012” was released on the social media platform Vimeo, a higher quality alternative to Youtube. In the short half hour running time, the viewer is given a crash course in the developed world’s opposition to Kony, including action kits to buy, campaigns to conduct, and requests to make of government leaders. Set to the tune of pop music and dubstep, the film’s primary mechanism for informing the viewer of the situation in Africa is the director, Jason Russell, explaining to his five year old son that Kony “is a bad guy.”

The video went viral immediately, with over 16 million views by the close of March. The aim of the film – “to make Kony famous” – was accomplished with unprecedented success, catapulting the warlord’s name one truly heard around the world. It’s an exciting prospect – thanks to the internet, the global citizenry can partake in a legitimate dialogue over problems facing the world and not be obstructed by geographical boundaries or racial and gender differences. It’s the latest event in a long line of actions derived from the modern era’s new technological prowess, following closely on the heels of the Obama election campaign, the Arab Spring revolutions, and Occupy Wall Street. But while these instances veer from the top-down (Obama’s treatment of new media forms) to the bottom-up (Arab Spring and OWS’s decentralized ethos), the true position of Kony 2012 and the Stop Kony movement that it spearheads has yet to be truly seen. There is gradually emerging evidence, however, that the campaign to raise awareness about Kony, while playing an essential role for the emergent global society, may be more in line with top-down procedures connected directly to the military establishment.

Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, a program officer at Clark University’s Strassler Center” for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, has noted that the Kony 2012 film is conducted not as a thoughtful analysis; instead, she argues, it’s rooted in simplistic advertising-style systematics.³ Facts are cast aside for emotional appeals, and viewers are, in a way, talked down to as broad comparisons permeate social consciousness that equate Kony with Hitler and Osama Bin Laden. Such relations are inherently linked to a militarized mindset – while, yes, Kony, Hitler, and Bin Laden were and are violent figures, juxtaposing their images together simultaneously creates an aura of evil that, historically, has only been toppled by the utilization of military force. The enemy, keep in tune with wartime propaganda, is reconfigured in the national perception as the embodiment of evil, one that we, as a benevolent and enlightened populace, have a responsibility to unseat.

Such imagery-based maneuvering, especially the utilization of figures that have been the center of two of the US’s larger conflicts, could lead the Kony 2012 to be seen as an exercise in aspects of “pre-propaganda,” a little known yet effective procedure that helps condition a population into a certain mental framework. Jacque Ellul describe pre-propaganda’s function as helping to:

prepare man for a particular action, to make him sensitive to some influence, to get him into condition for the time when he will effectively, and without delay or hesitation, participate in an action. Seen from this angle, pre-propaganda does not have a precise ideological objective… It proceeds by psychological manipulations, by character modifications, by the creation of feelings or stereotypes useful when the time comes.⁴

The Stop Kony movement does carry with it a certain lack of concrete ideology. While the campaign does seek to raise awareness and to create a grassroots lobby to bringing Kony to justice before the close of 2012, the details are hidden behind vague terms such as “arrest,” and we are none the wiser as to what this truly details. Will it be, indeed, military intervention, or will it be some other action conducted in transnational comity? Perhaps the unwillingness to address such questions directly comes from the fact that much of the LRA consists of child soldiers and thus themselves the victims of human rights abuses. A conflict between well-trained Special Forces and children would certainly raise a few eyebrows.

It’s this very specter of international intervention that has caused some outcry against the film in Uganda – “Suggesting that the answer is more military action is just wrong,” says one blogger from the country.⁵  Other Ugandans have criticized the film’s presumptuous tone, noting that as time has gone on Kony’s forces have lost much of their might and have become scattered. A spokesman from the Uganda government went as far to state “It is totally misleading that the war is still in Uganda… I suspect that if that’s the impression that they are making, they are doing it only to garner increasing financial resources for their own agenda.” ⁶  Regardless, the anti-Kony movement is preparing to conduct a national “Cover the Night” campaign for late April, involving the plastering of high-visibility parts of US cities with awareness-raising posters.

So who are the organizations behind Kony 2012? As one would suspect, none of them are Ugandan institutions; instead, the coalition consists of powerful American bodies with deep pockets and political clout. Primarily, the organizations are Invisible Children, the Enough Project, and Resolve (Uganda).⁷  Invisible Children is the only one of the three which could be certifiably grassroots, being run by several young filmmakers who produced a 2006 documentary of the same name. However, Enough and Resolve “are closely related to one another and to the upper echelons of the US government’s foreign policy establishment.” ⁸

Michael Barker has observed the interrelated nature of the two organizations, writing in a piece for Swans Commentary that “the former acting executive director of Enough (Cory Smith) is the vice president of Resolve; while Peter Quaranto, one of the four individuals who founded Resolve with the aid of the Africa Faith and Justice Network, presently works in the office of the US State Department’s Special Envoy to Sudan.” Meanwhile, Resolve’s founding Executive Director Michael Poffenberger has worked at the USAID-funded Grassroots Reconciliation Group.

Enough, launched in 2007, is itself a joint project of two, well-entrenched political machines, the International Crisis Group (ICG) and the Center for American Progress (CAP),⁹ and is partnered with equally prolific international bodies such as Human Rights Watch, the Genocide Intervention Network, the aforementioned Grassroots Reconciliation Group, and the Save Darfur Coalition. Reflecting these partnerships, Enough’s governing body interlocks closely with quite a few of them – for example, the organization’s co-chair, John Prendegast, is an adviser to both the ICG and the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, a director for the Save Darfur Coalition, and an endorser of the Genocide Intervention Network. His co-chair, Gayle Smith, became a senior fellow at CAP after a time at USAID, the World Bank, and an advisory position at Save Darfur’s sister organization, Olympic Dreams for Darfur. These ties are certainly not indicative of sinister conspiracy; they do represent common interests in troubled reasons – yet one certainly has to ask what drives these interests. While a great deal of members surely are involved for altruistic reasons, a closer look at Enough’s parents, the ICG and CAP, reveal a connecting thread of militarized rhetoric and certainly deserve deeper scrutiny.

The origins of the ICG date back to the mid-1990s, when Mark Molloch Brown, a PR man turned World Bank vice president, was joined by Morton I. Abramowitz, a State Department official and board member of the International Rescue Committee to create a “conflict prevention” organization in (rather ironically) the build-up to the NATO airstrikes in Serbia. ¹⁰  The seed money was provided by the liberal billionaire philanthropist, who now has been a long-time fixture on the ICG’s executive committee. By the same token, his primary philanthropic vehicle, the transnational Open Society Institute (OSI) has been a longtime funder of the organization.

Sitting alongside Soros in the ICG’s administrative wings are a practical who’s who of the military and corporate establishments. Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish national security adviser to former President Jimmy Carter, former Boeing executive Thomas Pickering, NAFTA negotiator Carla Hills, former International Monetary Fund deputy director Stanley Fischer, and former NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark have all served the ICG in some capacity. Thus, it’s not surprising that by the organization’s own admission, the impetus behind their creation was to “persuade governments to do what it believes has to be done – if necessary by taking military measures.” ¹¹

The ICG goes to great lengths to cloak their militarized viewpoint in a liberal and humanitarian veneer, aligning itself with the Responsibility to Protect doctrine (R2P). Under R2P, a concept that has received the endorsement of Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, the World Federalists, and other transnational moderate bodies, [developed] nations have a responsibility to intervene in the affairs of [underdeveloped] countries or regions in order to ‘protect’ the population from human rights abuses – ignoring that frequently these very abuses stem from US military’s fist or from the imposition of Western economic models. The R2P doctrine was injected into transnational diplomacy following its drafting at the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, which was chaired by the Australian politician Gareth Evans. Incidentally, Gareth Evans went on to act as president of the ICG.¹²

Despite its recognition from the foreign policy elite, the doctrine has been met with criticism by those who see the potentials for conflict of interest in its implementation. Noam Chomsky, in a talk given at the UN General Assembly, attacked the tendency for R2P adherents to act rather selectively in their invocations of the doctrine:

The natural interpretation of the timing gains support from the selectivity of application of R2P. There was of course no thought of applying the principle to the Iraq sanctions administered by the Security Council, condemned as “genocidal” by the two directors of the oil-for-food program, Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, both of whom resigned in protest. Von Sponeck’s detailed study of the horrendous impact of the sanctions has been under a virtual ban in the US and UK, the primary agents of the programs. Similarly, there is no thought today of protection of the people of Gaza, also a UN responsibility, along with the rest of the “protected population” (under the Geneva Conventions), denied fundamental human rights.¹³

Chomsky goes on to point out that the R2P doctrine was never invoked during the crisis in East Timor, where Indonesian occupying forces (with US backing) were conducting ethnic cleansing against the region’s indigenous populations. Perhaps the silence was due to the fact that none other than Gareth Evans, at the time acting as Australia’s foreign minister, had signed lucrative contracts with the Indonesia government to drill in East Timor.¹⁴  Evans subsequently declared the Indonesian occupation as “irreversible” and flippantly commented that there were “zillions” of dollars to be made by the country’s joint oil programs.¹⁵

The Center for American Progress (CAP),¹⁶ on the other hand, is a relatively new US-based political advocacy organization, having been started in 2003 with financial backing from Hebert M. and Marion O. Sandler (the liberal philanthropists behind the investigative journalism non-profit, ProPublica). While Sandlers may have put up the money for CAP, it was John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff, who crafted the organization into a well-oiled political machine. Modeled on powerful right-wing institutions such as the Heritage Foundation, Podesta envisioned the CAP as a “think-tank on steroids”– its program follows closely with the consumer-propaganda mentality, hosting a “edgy website,” maintaining a daily-operating “war room” to crank out talking points, and the recruitment of “hundreds of fellows and scholars” to draw up policy recommendations.¹⁷

The CAP’s agenda is costly, yet the majority of its financial backers remain undisclosed by the organization. It is known, however, that they have received money from Wal-Mart,¹⁸ a corporation that been represented on Capital Hill by Podesta’s lobbying company, the Podesta Group.¹⁹  Major funding also comes, much like the ICG, from George Soros, with the OSI providing CAP with $30,000 in 2006 for “general support” and much more money ever since.²⁰ Thus it’s not surprising that the OSI maintains high profile ties with the CAP: Morton H. Halperin, the director of the U.S. Advocacy at the Institute is a senior fellow at CAP;²¹ his son, David Halperin, is the senior VP of CAP’s subsidiary organization, Campus Progress. Furthermore, CAP is also funded in part by the Democracy Alliance,²² a consortium of high-profile liberal philanthropists that includes Drummond Pike (founder of the Tides Foundation), Robert H. Dugger (chief economist for the American Bankers Association), Gara LaMarche (former vice president of U.S. Programs at the OSI), and Soros himself on its membership rosters.

The CAP worked with another Soros-funded venture in 2007, MoveOn, as part of the pro-Democrat Party coalition, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI). A faux-grassroots movement that was taking its marching orders from inside the Washington Beltway, the AAEI utilized the rage surrounding the American offensive in Iraq as a rhetorical talking point to channel activists into support for Democrat political candidates. As journalist Matt Taibbi observed:

[M]uch of the [AAEI’s] leadership hails from a consulting firm called Hildebrand Tewes Consulting — whose partners Steve Hildebrand and Paul Tewes served as staffers for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. … This is the kind of conflict of interest that would normally be an embarrassment in the activist community. … The really tragic thing about the Democratic surrender on Iraq is that it’s now all but guaranteed that the war will be off the table during the presidential campaign. Once again — it happened in 2002, 2004 and 2006 — the Democrats have essentially decided to rely on the voters to give them credit for being anti-war, despite the fact that, for all the noise they’ve made to the contrary, in the end they’ve done nothing but vote for war and cough up every dime they’ve been asked to give, every step of the way.²³

In an extension of its support for Democrat Party politics, the CAP, much like MoveOn, was a primary supporter of the Obama campaign, working with yet another OSI-supported outfit, Media Matters, to launch a PR organization simply titled “Progressive Media.”²⁴  Not surprisingly, veterans from the AAEI, Tom Matzzie and Tara McGuinness, were tapped to help run the operation. Subsequently CAP has operated quite closely with the administration, endorsing and campaigning for President Obama’s health care plan. Earlier, John Podesta himself had been selected to serve as co-chairman of the Obama-Biden Transition Project.²⁵

Just as Matt Taibbi predicted, the utilization of anti-war rhetoric served only to capture the activist voting bloc, while expedited troop de-escalation and withdrawal was never even near the table. In an about-face characteristic of the Democratic Party as a whole, the CAP went from opposing Republican-led maneuvers in the Middle East to arguing for an increase in military efforts under Obama. Their recommendations for a more hawkish approach to Middle East policy came in a report titled “Sustainable Security in Afghanistan,” and was the subject of a CAP-hosted forum called “A New Way Forward in Afghanistan.” ²⁶  In a complete evisceration of so-called progressive credentials, the report’s authors include Lawrence Korb, a director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former Vice President of Operations at the defense contractor Raytheon; and Frederick Kagan, a senior scholar at the right-wing American Enterprise Institute, and a former member of the notoriously militaristic Project for the New American Century.²⁷

Contrasting sharply with the ICG and CAP, Invisible Children lacks direct ties to the transnational military establishment; its realm is far more grounded in the grassroots activist spectrum (although their board of directors includes Dave Karlman, who has been attached to the International Rescue Committee). ²⁸  Acting in this grassroots space, Invisible Children – in contrast from the ICG and CAP – does not receive funding from the large liberal foundational complex. Instead, as a quick peruse through the organization’s financial statements (which, in a meaningful display of transparency, are posted for all to view on the Invisible Children’s website), the bulk of the funders are either individual donors, smaller businesses, schools, and religious organizations. With this funding, the Invisible Children organization has been able to conduct an impressive strategy that engages the population by hosting school events, protests, and arranging conservations with important policy-makers.

Aside from Dave Karlman, the overwhelming majority of Invisible Children staffers come from religious organizations or joined up following screenings of the film that launched the movement, Invisible Children. Religion plays an important role in the initial motivators behind Invisible Children’s Action; Jason Russell himself is an evangelical Christian and has acknowledged that his worldview is related to his charitable work.²⁹  Thus, because of this, it has not been uncommon to see Christian missionaries, such as Living Waters International, at work with Invisible Children in Uganda on some of their more functional community-based programs, such as the repairing or construction of infrastructure that had been damaged during the war.

As Michael Barker and others have pointed out, one of the organizations that has been subsidizing Invisible Children is ProVision, an extension of the religious, right-wing National Christian Foundation.³⁰  He notes that this combine has been a financial clearinghouse for a myriad of organizations that make up the tapestry of the evangelical community – including “The Family,” (also known as “The Fellowship”), a Washington D.C.-based religious organization that hosts the annual National Prayer Breakfast. Ironically, given the National Christian Foundation’s connection to Invisible Children, The Family itself has complicity in human rights abuses in Uganda: as reported by investigator Jeff Sharlet, a “core member” of the organization, the Uganda parliamentarian David Bahati, helped pushed forward the proposed “Anti-Homosexuality Bill.”³¹  This act, which is still being debated in the Ugandan parliament, would make homosexuality a capital offense and punishable by death.

Not all of National Christian Foundation’s funding recipients are religious-oriented, however. A large portion of their money is marked for free-market think-tanks that lobby for neoliberal economic reforms; these include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the Ludwig von Mises Institute.³²  While at first this may seem like a curious anomaly, the fact that a religious organization is supporting a certain economic platform is not a new phenomenon. The two have been essentially conjoined at the hip for much of modern American history – religious integration has been utilized as a perfect vehicle for economic imperialism and vice-versa.

One worthwhile study of this complex has been Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett’s Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil.³³ In their sprawling work, the two authors have tracked an extensive history showing the often-indirect (but undeniable collusion) between the religious right (mainly Christian missionaries), progressive politicians and figureheads (such as the Rockefeller family) and US foreign policy agencies in bringing that unruly hotbed of Leftist, Central and South America, in line with American geopolitical and economic imperatives. Earlier still, the Rockefellers had already noted that religious work operated rather harmoniously with market prerogatives. Frederick Taylor Gates, the family’s administrator of philanthropic funding, took careful note that “Missionary enterprise, viewed solely from a commercial standpoint, is immensely profitable. From the point of view of means of subsistence for Americans, our import trade, traceable mainly to channels of intercourse opened by missionaries, is enormous.”³⁴

One last important example of the relationship between religion and elite strategy is the case of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a secretive yet powerful consortium of right-wing politicians, businessmen, and evangelical leaders. In the early 1980s the CNP was joined by Colonel Oliver North, who saw in the organization a potential cash-cow for the Nicaraguan Contra rebels.³⁵ The move proved to be wildly successful, and the evangelical community became an informal extension of US foreign policy in the south by providing both money and media coverage to help unseat the left-wing Sandinista government. Perhaps importantly, the CNP and the National Christian Foundation were established a mere six months apart and maintained an interlocking relationship between their founders.³⁶ Furthermore, the Foundation maintained funding ties to Christian charities run by the sister of Nelson Bunker Hunt, one of the CNP’s original benefactors and one of North’s key Contra supporters.³⁷  To show just how closely aligned this world is, Hunt was also found to be one of the primary financiers of missionary work in South America, much to the benefit of the Rockefeller family and the US government.³⁸

Managing the Spectacle for Larger Ambitions

In bringing together the ICG, CAP, and Invisible Children together under a common rubric, a multi-tiered advocacy campaign is capable of being launched across normal class, ideological, and geographical divisions. At the top level, the ICG is capable of managing the flow of information coming from Uganda and can effectively craft policy recommendations on the actions that it sees fit. Likewise, CAP can work on the national level, and with its extensive relationship with the PR industry, drive a campaign while simultaneously conduct political lobbying. Invisible Children’s impact is primarily on a localized, community level, using clever campaigning to create a grassroots voice demanding action from the leaders in Washington. Working in tandem, a Spectacle is woven that promotes a singular mindset that, as discussed earlier, reflects the top-down pop consumer mentality of the society it was fomented in.

The Spectacle, in the hands of those who seek aggression, can be a powerful tool; it can overwhelm an opposition, as in the case of  the Iraq War, and one just has to turn on the television set to see the sabre-rattling being conducted towards Iran. Gerald Sussman, Professor of Urban Studies and Communications at Portland State University, has written that contrary to the ideas of many scholars, information – the cornerstone of the Spectacle³⁹ – does not, in the modern epoch, have a neutral character:

In the consumer economy, the prevailing uses of processed data are not simply informational in character or designed as a public good… Rather they are primarily promotional, which involves a control of language in ways that displaces the value of general wisdom and “common sense” that historically emerged in sites where public conversation, debate, and consensus on necessities and meanings took place (the public sphere). ⁴⁰

Kony 2012, by eschewing analysis and legitimate education in favor of easily digestible talking points and emotional appeals, creates a rather hollow framework that helps to undermine the complex conversations that must be had on the issue. The conditioning of society to consume hollow informational bits – a topic far beyond the scope of this article – allows a cohesive aura to be constructed, and the result in this case is the mass calls for what appears to indeed be an intervention in Uganda. A recent Reuters piece quotes John Campbell, an African specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, saying that the “campaign… definitively energizes the political level and that in turn energizes the diplomatic machine.”⁴¹  The article also quotes an official from the ICG, who notes that while the “campaign aims to harden the U.S.’s engagement in the fight against the LRA,” fears of the negative fallout from troop deaths could spell disaster for Obama in the upcoming electoral season.

The irony is that while the Kony awareness campaign is utilizing people power to pressure politicians into action, a great many players in the campaign are themselves members of the transnational foreign policy elite who operate outside of the White House. The ICG itself has already successfully utilized its standing in shaping President Obama’s policy towards Uganda; in 2010 it issued a report that recommended that the US government dispatch a team of specialists to help run an “intelligence platform” to centralize efforts between the country’s military and other regional armies. ⁴²  The Obama administration, in a very under-reported move, did just that – and the Kony 2012 video proceeded to cite this as an example of people power interacting with their government.

This rise of interventionist mindset towards Africa follows closely on the heels of NATO’s excursion into Libya, situated at the northern edge of the continent. The Libyan venture, explained away to the US population as support for the country’s rebels seeking to unseat the dictator Muammar Gaddafi, is a picture-perfect example of the R2P doctrine in action. Although, unlike the current Stop Kony campaign, it was not preceded by a seemingly politically engaged citizenry – it was a decision reached behind closed doors and far away from Congress. The primary catalyst for the excursion was one of Obama’s picks for his National Security Council, the self-proclaimed “humanitarian hawk” ⁴³  Samantha Power. ⁴⁴

Described by Human Rights Watch director Kenneth Roth as “[having] the president’s ear,” Power skyrocketed to prominence in 2003 after publishing A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, which argued that the US government is the solution to much of the world’s problems. In crafting this argument, however, she curiously sidesteps instances where the US has been the catalyst for human rights abuses or simply obfuscates the nation’s complicity. Critic Edward Herman has observed that one such instance is the earlier-discussed mass extermination in East Timor: Power’s treatment of the crisis is limited to noting that “when… the oil-producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the United States looked away” – ignoring that America “gave its approval, protected the aggression from any effective UN response… and greatly increased its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide.” ⁴⁵  Regardless, Power’s work was heavily endorsed by the foreign policy establishment and during the year of its publication, was awarded the Council on Foreign Relation’s Arthur Ross Book Award.

Power’s position in the Obama administration has been dominated by an elite-centric and rather technocratic state of mind connected directly to managing the flow of information and leveraging propaganda in favor of government action. Her husband and longtime Obama confidant, Cass Sunstein, was also tapped for a governmental position after the election as the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). OIRA is tasked with “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,”⁴⁶ something that may be unsettling when one takes into consideration their new director has argued in a college thesis that the government should “employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-’independent’ advocates to ‘cognitively infiltrate’ online groups and websites — as well as other activist groups — which advocate views that Sunstein deems ‘false conspiracy theories’ about the Government. ” The justification, he continues, is that actions deemed to be conspiratorial are good, as long as it serves the “greater good.” ⁴⁷

In a similar vein, Power stated in a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose that controlling information would be required in the era of Obama, particularly when it came to the hope that US forces would be leaving Iraq – “Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally.”⁴⁸  Following this statement, she proceeded to deny that the Obama presidency would be viewed as a wartime leadership – and in the process revealed her elite-centric view towards US supremacy:

Part of having a credible American leader again who is unimplicated with the war in Iraq who is very attractive to people around the world, is to somehow use that early wind at his back to try to extract commitments to patrol the commons, to actually deal with these broken people and broken places.

In other words, the presence of a commander-in-chief who is outside of what is normally perceived as the military establish will be more conductive to militarized behavior. She attaches this rhetoric to references to “broken people and broken places” – linking the military directly to humanitarian relief, while her belief in the necessity of “patrolling the commons” reveals a distinctive police mentality.

Power has deep ties to foreign policy complexes, including ones that are directly tied to the current “Stop Kony” campaign. In 1996 she was a policy analyst for the ICG, and she has been a director at the International Rescue Committee. She was the founding executive director of Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; the organization, which interlocks with the ICG through Morton Abramowitz, would go on to be involved in developing counter-insurgency doctrines during the War on Terror. ⁴⁹  She is linked to the Investors against Genocide group – much like the Enough Project’s John Prendergast. Furthermore, Resolve lists her as a “LRA Strategy Power Player,” the group of politicians involved in the movement to intervene in Uganda.⁵⁰

Samantha Power is certainly not the centerpiece of the humanitarian intervention complex – but she is indicative of the prevailing attitude that military force can be used for good. By repositioning it in a liberal context, it’s distanced from the neoconservative “Peace through Strength” diplomacy that the Left has so long castigated. Yet America (and the UN and NATO by extension) has, historically, been selective in its military offensives and interventions; where there are no economic gains to be had or geostrategic interests to be defended, the financial and physical costs of war have never been put to use. Thus, the flowery rhetoric about humanitarian intervention and “responsibility to protect” has to be taken lightly.

When one pulls back the cover behind the “Stop Kony” people power, the usual collusion of business and military can be found. The military advisers dispatched to Uganda on the ICG’s recommendations operate under the auspices of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), the umbrella group overseeing all of the US’s actions on the African continent.⁵¹  While the creation of AFRICOM, which occurred under the George W. Bush administration, was shrouded in humanitarian overtones, it came about following a lobbying campaign conducted by the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG). ⁵²  The AOPIG, in turn, is a consortium of representatives from the CIA, African oil companies, and other private interests. It is also linked to the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies – an Israeli-based think-tank that seeks to “shift America’s dependency on oil from the Gulf nations — hostile towards Israel — to other parts of the world.”⁵³ The AOPIG also has ties to the Free Africa Foundation, an African-oriented free-market advocacy group with its own connections to a network of US-based conservative foundations and think-tanks.⁵⁴

The existence of AFRICOM and its connections hint at a wider geopolitical agenda. While we now veer into the area of conjecture, it is certainly interesting to observe that many have linked AFRICOM to the presence of Chinese petroleum interests on the African continent: “Officials say that Chinese efforts to exert its military influence in Africa have drawn the interest of U.S. military planners,” Fox News reported,⁵⁵ while the BBC drew attention to the fact that “the US gets more than 10% of its oil from Africa and is worried about increased economic and diplomatic competition from China.” ⁵⁶ Extrapolating from that, the Libyan intervention can be viewed in a new light: Gaddafi’s government had entered into an oil partnership with the China, providing the country with 3% of its oil needs in 2010.⁵⁷ The Libyan rebels made a point to attack these Chinese oil installations, disrupting worker camps and breaking down the lines of communication. ⁵⁸  Chinese African oil interests are not only limited to Libya; the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation also signed exploratory deals with the government of Somalia⁵⁹ (another spot of interest for the US military), and has also been engaging in talks with Uganda’s up and coming oil industry.⁶⁰

Regardless of the ultimate reason for AFRICOM and the surge in US interest on the African continent, many Africans have worried that the American command umbrella will lead to a militarization of the continent’s culture. “Africa is going to look at all its development efforts through the lens of the Pentagon. That’s a truly dangerous dimension. We don’t need militarisation of Africa, we don’t need securitisation of aid and development in Africa,” the BBC quoted Kenyan columnist Salim Lone as saying.⁶¹  This militarized mindset, driven by AFRICOM, is indivisibly linked to the Stop Kony movement through both logistics (the presence of military advisers) and rhetoric (the innocuous calls for the warlord’s arrest). It has the potential to serve further goals, beyond just the possible short-term gains of geopolitical interest, but also sets a precedent for future propaganda about the role of the military in alleviating humanitarian crises.

The election of President Obama was fueled, in large part, by the population’s disgust in war. Organizations capitalized on this sentiment, funneling discontent into a powerful voting bloc, and now the same organizations are pushing for military action with a citizenry – legitimately concerned with the plight of the world’s oppressed and exploited – acting as the primary vanguard of the movement. This is no small part thanks to a well-orchestrated management of the flows of information, rooted in a mental framework that is all pervasive throughout modern society. This is a byproduct of informational breakdown, the obfuscation of motivation, and the possibility for the elite to derive action from conditioned emotional responses. It is through oversimplification and ‘digestible’ sound bites and images that important and worthwhile education of human abuses and global affairs – things that must be known and discussed – can be transmuted into a space where the adage “War is Peace” rings true.

1. “Military Keynesianism” refers to the methodology of utilizing military spending to inject money into the national economy, leading to a cozy relationship between the armed forces, the corporations that produce goods used by the armed forces, and the wings of the government that hold control over military activities. President Eisenhower immortalized the concept as the “military-industrial complex.”
2. Polly Curtis and Tom McCarthy, “Kony 2012: What’s the Real Story”, The Guardian, March 8, 2012
3. Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland, “Consumerism Trumps Education”, Huffington Post March 11, 2012
4. Jacque Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Vintage Books, 1965, pgs. 30-31
5. Mike Pflanza, “Joseph Kony 2012: growing outrage in Uganda over film”, The Telegraph, March 8, 2012
6. Ibid.
7. Michael Barker, “KONY 2012” Swans Commentary March 26, 2012
8. Ibid
9. “About” Enough Project
10. Tom Hazeldine, “The North Atlantic Counsel: Complicity of the International Crisis Group”,  New Left Review, May-June 2010
11. See Tom Hazeldine, “The North Atlantic Counsel: Complicity of the International Crisis Group“
12. Michael Barker, “Imperial Crusader for Global Governance”, Swans Commentary, April 20, 2009
13. Noam Chomsky,  “The Responsibility to Protect”,  Talk given at the UN General Assembly, New York City, July 23, 2009
14. Edward S. Herman, David Petersen,  “The Responsibility to Protect, the International Criminal Court, and Foreign Policy in Focus: Subverting the UN Charter in the Name of Human Rights”,  MRZine, August 24, 2009
15. Barker “Imperial Crusaders for Global Governance”
16. For more information the Center for American Progress, see my “Strange Contours: Resistance and the Manipulation of People Power” Dissident Voice December 21, 2012
17. Matt Bai,  “Notion Building”, The New York Times,  October 12, 2003
18. John McCormmack,  Corporatism and the Center for American Progress, The Weekly Standard, October 20, 2010
19. Justin Elliot, “Who’s Doing Mubarack’s Bidding in Washington?” Salon, January 28, 2011
20. Various Open Society Institute reports
21. Halperin is also on the steering committee of the Democracy Coalition Project, an initiative of the Open Society Institute that works closely with the UN Democracy Caucus.
22. Jim VandeHei, Chris Cillizza, “A New Alliance of Democrats Spreads Funding”, The Washington Post, July 17, 2006
23. Matt Taibbi, quoted in “Americans Against Escalation in Iraq”, Sourcewatch
24. John Strauber, “Progressive Media – A PR War Room for Obama”, March 28, 2009
25. Sam Stein, “Obama, McCain Transition Efforts are Worlds Apart”, Huffington Post, October 8, 2008
26. “A New Way Forward in Afghanistan”, Center for American Progress, April 3, 2009
27. The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, had been a coalition of neoconservatives that had come together during the Clinton administration to lobby for an increase in military action to maintain global American supremacy – an outgrowth of the “Peace Through Strength” mentality that had been the hallmark of Reagan-era foreign policy. Over twenty members of the PNAC went on to serve in the administration of George W. Bush, whose foreign policy followed their recommendations very closely.
28. Barker, “Kony 2012”
29. “Jason Russell and Alex Harris – Liberty University Convocation”
30. Michael Barker, “Kony 2012”
31. “The Secret Reach of ‘The Family’”, NPR interview between Terry Gross and Jeff Sharlet, November 24, 2009
32. M. Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”, Political Cortex, October 29, 2006
33. Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil, Harper Collins, 1995
34. E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America, University of California Press, 1979 pg. 123
35. This will be discussed in my forth-coming book on the history of American democracy promotion.
36. Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”
37. See Reynolds, “Inside the #1 Religious Right Money Machine”
38. See Colby and Dennett, Thy Will Be Done
39. The “Spectacle” referred to here is the superficiality of informational communication flows and mass media present in the age of advanced (or Late) capitalism. See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, Black & Red 2010 (reprint edition). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri summarize Debord’s notion of the Spectacle as “an integrated and diffuse apparatus of images and ideas that produces and regulates public discourse and opinion.” Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, Empire Harvard University Press, 2000, pg. 321
40. Gerald Sussman, Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Peter Lang, 2010, pg. 11
41. Peter Apps, “Seen by as seen by millions, will Uganda Kony video matter?” Reuters
42. “LRA: A regional strategy beyond Killing Kony”,  International Crisis Group,  April 28, 2010
43. Sholto Byrnes,  “Interview: Samantha Power“,  New Statesmen,  March 6, 2008
44. Sheryl Gay Strolberg,  “Still Crusading, but Now on the Inside“,  The New York Times,  March 29, 2011
45. Edward Herman,  “Response to Zinn on Samantha Power”,  ZNet,  August 27,  2007
46. “Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs”
47. Glenn Greenwald,  “Obama confidant’s spine-chilling proposal“, Salon,  January 15, 2010
48. Paul Street,  “‘Calibrating’ HOPE in the effort to “Patrol the Commons:” Samantha Power and the Hidden Imperial Reality of Barack Obama”,  ZNet,  February 25,  2008
49. Tom Hayden,  “Harvard’s Humanitarian Hawks”.  The Nation,  July 14, 2007
50. “Samantha Power”
51. Thomas P.M. Barnett,  “Africom to Work Lord’s Resistance Army Problem With Uganda”, Time,  October 17, 2011
52. “Ghana Oil – Seeking National or Some Personal Selfish Interests?” GhanaWeb,  February 1, 2010
53. Paul-Michael Wihbey,” Africa Energy Intelligence, November 5, 2002
54. One of the supporters of the Free Africa Foundation is Peter Ackerman, the managing director Rockport Capital Incorporated. Ackerman also holds deep ties to the US democracy promoting complex, acting as chairman of the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, which is funded in party by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Ackerman’s further credentials include acting as the former chairman of Freedom House, which also receives funding from the NED. Furthermore, Ackerman is a board member of the libertarian CATO Institute. In a similar vein, the Free Africa Foundation’s president, George Ayittey – who is also a member of the African Oil Policy Initiative Group – is a scholar at the CATO Institute, while another Free Africa Foundation board member, Theodore J. Forstmann, serves on the board of both CATO and Freedom House.
55. “Bush Approves New US Command in Africa”,  February 6, 2007
56. “US to get Africa command center”,  BBC News,  February 6, 2007
57. “Gaddafi’s fall threatens Chinese investments in Libya”,  Asia News,  August 24, 2011
58. Leslie Hook and Geoff Dyer,  “Chinese oil interests attacked in Libya”,  Financial Times,  February 24, 2011
59. Barney Jopson,  “Somalia Oil Deal for China”,  Financial Times,  July 13, 2007
60. “China’s State Oil Company in Talks for Uganda Refinery”,  Voice of America,  February 23, 2012
61. Daniel Gordon,  “The Controversy Over Africom”, October 3, 2007

Since partition in 1947, Pakistan and India have fought four armed conflicts, in 1947, 1965, 1971 (which led to the establishment of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan) and the 1999 Kargil clash.

With the exception of the 1971 conflict, which involved rising tensions in East Pakistan, the others have all involved issues arising from control of Kashmir.

But now a rising new element of discord threatens to precipitate a new armed clash between southern Asia’s two nuclear powers – water.

Lahore’s The Nation newspaper on Sunday published an editorial entitled, “War with India inevitable: Nizami,” the newspaper’s Editor-in-Chief and Nazaria-i-Pakistan Trust Chairman, Majid Nizami, asked his fellow citizens to prepare for a war with India over water issues. Nizami told those attending the “Pakistan-India relations: Our rulers-new wishes” session at Aiwan-e-Karkunan Tehrik-e-Pakistan, which he chaired, “Indian hostilities and conspiracies against the country will never end until she is taught a lesson.”

While The Nation is a conservative daily, part of the Nawa-i-Waqt publishing group, with a circulation of roughly 20,000, it has a website, and what’s more, close ties to Pakistan’s highest military circles, so Nizami’s comments should hardly be rejected out of hand.

Furthermore, Niazmi’s audience included some high ranking Pakistani officials, including Nazaria-i-Pakistan Vice Chairman Dr Rafique Ahmed; Pakistan Movement Workers-Trust Chairman, retired Colonel Jamshed Ahmed Tareen; former Foreign Secretary Shamshad Ahmed Khan; Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan Secretary General Qari Zawar Bahadur; retired Air Marshall Khurished Anwar Mirza; retired Brigadier Hamid Saeed Akhtar and Jamaat-e-Islami Lahore Chief Ameer-ul-Azeem, among others.

At issue are Pakistan’s concerns over India’s ongoing construction of two hydroelectric dams on the upper reaches of the Indus River. Islamabad is concerned that the 45 megawatt, 190-foot tall Nimoo-Bazgo concrete dam 44 megawatt Chutak hydroelectric power project will reduce the Indus River’s flow towards Pakistan, as they are capable of storing up to 4.23 billion cubic feet of water, violating the terms of the bilateral 1960 Indus Water Treaty. The Indus, which begins in Indian-controlled Kashmir, is crucial to both India and Pakistan, but is currently experiencing water flows down 30 percent from its normal levels. The Indus is Pakistan’s primary freshwater source, on which 90 percent of its agriculture depends. According to a number of Pakistani agriculture and water experts, the nation is heading towards a massive water shortage in the next couple of years due to insufficient water management practices and storage capacity, which will be exacerbated by the twin Indian hydroelectric projects, as they will further diminish the Indus’ flow.

So, if push comes to shove, who’s got Pakistan’s back?

China.

During the Boao Forum for Asia, on China’s southern Hainan island on 1 April, Pakistan and China agreed to support each other “in all circumstances” and vowed to uphold their sovereignty and territorial integrity at all costs. Pakistani Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani told Chinese Executive Vice Premier Li Keqiang, “China’s friend is our friend, and China’s enemy is ours,” adding Pakistan considers China’s security as its own security and supports China’s position on Taiwan, Tibet and Xinqiang. Li replied that China would support Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in every situation, telling Gilani, “No matter what changes take place at international level, we will uphold Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

It might be noted here that in October 1962, coinciding with the Cuban missile crisis, India and China fought a brief but bitter war along their disputed Himalayan border.

Fifty years later, China and India have yet to resolve their border issues over Kashmir and China continues to claim most of India’s Arunachal Pradesh to the base of the Himalayas in the absence of any definitive treaty delineating the border. Kashmir remains the site of the world’s largest and most militarized territorial dispute with portions under the de facto administration of China (Aksai Chin), India (Jammu and Kashmir), and Pakistan (Azad Kashmir and Northern Areas).

No guesses therefore as to whom Beijing might back should Pakistani-Indian tensions continue to rise.

Accordingly, to keep the peace, one might paraphrase Ronald Reagan in Berlin: “Prime Minister Singh, tear down those dams!”

But don’t bet on it.

These are some of the examples from the past decade of how the Holy Triumvirate recognizes no higher power and believes, literally, that they can do whatever they want in the world, to whomever they want, for as long as they want, and call it whatever they want, like “humanitarian intervention”. The 19th- and 20th-century colonialist-imperialist mentality is alive and well in the West.

Next on their agenda: the removal of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. As with Gaddafi, the ground is being laid with continual news reports — from CNN to al Jazeera — of Assad’s alleged barbarity, presented as both uncompromising and unprovoked. After months of this media onslaught who can doubt that what’s happening in Syria is yet another of those cherished Arab Spring “popular uprisings” against a “brutal dictator” who must be overthrown? And that the Assad government is overwhelmingly the cause of the violence.

Assad actually appears to have a large measure of popularity, not only in Syria, but elsewhere in the Middle East. This includes not just fellow Alawites, but Syria’s two million Christians and no small number of Sunnis. Gaddafi had at least as much support in Libya and elsewhere in Africa. The difference between the two cases, at least so far, is that the Holy Triumvirate bombed and machine-gunned Libya daily for seven months, unceasingly, crushing the pro-government forces, as well as Gaddafi himself, and effecting the Triumvirate’s treasured “regime change”. Now, rampant chaos, anarchy, looting and shooting, revenge murders, tribal war, militia war, religious war, civil war, the most awful racism against the black population, loss of their cherished welfare state, and possible dismemberment of the country into several mini-states are the new daily life for the Libyan people. The capital city of Tripoli is “wallowing in four months of uncollected garbage” because the landfill is controlled by a faction that doesn’t want the trash of another faction.¹ Just imagine what has happened to the country’s infrastructure. This may be what Syria has to look forward to if the Triumvirate gets its way, although the Masters of the Universe undoubtedly believe that the people of Libya should be grateful to them for their “liberation”.

As to the current violence in Syria, we must consider the numerous reports of forces providing military support to the Syrian rebels — the UK, France, the US, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, the Gulf states, and everyone’s favorite champion of freedom and democracy, Saudi Arabia; with Syria claiming to have captured some 14 French soldiers; plus individual jihadists and mercenaries from Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, et al, joining the anti-government forces, their number including al-Qaeda veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan who are likely behind the car bombs in an attempt to create chaos and destabilize the country. This may mark the third time the United States has been on the same side as al-Qaeda, adding to Afghanistan and Libya.

Stratfor, the private and conservative American intelligence firm with high-level connections, reported that “most of the opposition’s more serious claims have turned out to be grossly exaggerated or simply untrue.” Opposition groups including the Syrian National Council, the Free Syrian Army and the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights began disseminating “claims that regime forces besieged Homs and imposed a 72-hour deadline for Syrian defectors to surrender themselves and their weapons or face a potential massacre.” That news made international headlines. Stratfor’s investigation, however, found “no signs of a massacre,” and declared that “opposition forces have an interest in portraying an impending massacre, hoping to mimic the conditions that propelled a foreign military intervention in Libya.” Stratfor added that any suggestions of massacres are unlikely because the Syrian “regime has calibrated its crackdowns to avoid just such a scenario. Regime forces have been careful to avoid the high casualty numbers that could lead to an intervention based on humanitarian grounds.”²

Reva Bhalla, Stratfor’s Director of Analysis, reported in a December 2011 email on a meeting she attended at the Pentagon about Syria: “After a couple hours of talking, they said without saying that SOF [Special Operation Forces] teams (presumably from US, UK, France, Jordan, Turkey) are already on the ground focused on recce [reconnaissance] missions and training opposition forces.” We know of Bhalla’s comments thanks to the 5 million Stratfor emails obtained by the Internet hacker group Anonymous in December and passed on to Wikileaks.³

Human Rights Watch has reported that both Syrian government security forces and Syria’s armed rebels have committed serious human rights abuses, including kidnapings, torture, and executions. But only the Holy Triumvirate can get away with the sanctions they love to impose. Assad’s wife is now banned from traveling to EU countries and any assets she may have there are frozen. Same for Assad’s mother, sister and sister-in-law, as well as eight of his government ministers. Assad himself received the same treatment last May.⁴ Because the Triumvirate can.

On March 25, the US and Turkish governments announced that they were discussing sending non-lethal aid to the Syrian opposition, implying quite clearly that until then they had not been engaged in such activity.⁵  But according to a US embassy cable, revealed by Wikileaks, since at least 2006 the United States has been funding political opposition groups in Syria as well as the London-based satellite TV channel, Barada TV, run by Syrian exiles, that beams anti-government programming into the country. The cable further stated that Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change.”

Regime change in Syria has been on the neo-conservative wish list since at least 2002 when John Bolton, Undersecretary of State under George W. Bush, came up with a project to simultaneously break up Libya and Syria. He called the two states along with Cuba “The Axis Of Evil”. On a FOX News appearance in 2011 Bolton said that the United States should have overthrown the Syrian government right after they overthrew Saddam Hussein. Amongst Syria’s crimes have been their close relations with Iran, Hezbollah (in Lebanon), the Palestinian resistance, and Russia, and their failure to conclude a peace treaty with Israel, unlike Jordan and Egypt; all this constituting evidence to the Holy Triumvirate of Syria, like Aristide, being “uppity”.

The clinical megalomania of the Holy Triumvirate can scarcely be exaggerated. And never prosecuted.

A closing word from Cui Tiankai, Chinese vice foreign minister for United States affairs:

The US has the strongest military in the world and spends more than any other country. But the US always feels unsafe or insecure about other countries. … I suggest the United States spend more time thinking about how to make other countries feel less worried about the United States.⁶

President Obama’s accomplishments

Last month, Alan S. Hoffman, an American professor from Washington University in St. Louis, was forbidden by the US Treasury Department to travel to Cuba to give classes in a course on biomaterials.⁷

At the same time, the State Department refused to grant two Cuban diplomats in Washington, DC permission to travel to New York City to speak at The Left Forum, the largest annual gathering of the left in the United States, which this year attracted over 5,000 people.⁸

The State Department has also been occupied recently with preventing Cuba from being invited to the Summit of the Americas in Colombia in April.⁹

And that’s just the past month.

I mention all this to keep in mind the next time President Obama or one of his supporters lists US relations with Cuba as one of his accomplishments.

And I still cannot go to Cuba legally.

Another claim the Obamabots are fond of making to defend their man is that he’s abolished torture. That sounds very nice, but there’s no good reason to accept it at face value. Shortly after Obama’s inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that “rendition” was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported: “Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.”¹⁰

The English translation of “cooperate” is “torture”. Rendition is equal to torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, to name some of the known torture centers frequented by the home of the brave. Kosovo and Diego Garcia — both of which house very large and secretive American military bases — if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business. The same for Guantánamo. Moreover, the executive order concerning torture, issued January 22, 2009 — “Executive Order 13491 — Ensuring Lawful Interrogations” — leaves loopholes, such as being applicable only “in any armed conflict”. Thus, torture by Americans outside environments of “armed conflict”, which is where much torture in the world happens anyway, is not prohibited. And what about torture in a “counter-terrorism” environment?

One of Mr. Obama’s orders required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and perhaps noise, and possibly stress positions and sensory overload.

After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had “left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of ‘rendition’ — picking terrorism suspects off the street and sending them to a third country. But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions “that violate our human values.”¹¹

Just as no one in the Bush and Obama administrations has been punished in any way for war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan and the other countries they waged illegal war against, no one has been punished for torture. And, it could be added, no American bankster has been punished for their indispensable role in the world-wide financial torture. What a marvelously forgiving land is America. This, however, does not apply to Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.

In the last days of the Bush White House, Michael Ratner, professor at Columbia Law School and former president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, pointed out:

The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.¹²

I’d like at this point to remind my dear readers of the words of the “Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment”, which was drafted by the United Nations in 1984, came into force in 1987, and ratified by the United States in 1994. Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back.

Joseph Biden

From a document found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan after his assassination last May: A call to kill President Obama because “Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make Biden take over the presidency. … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis.¹³

So … it would appear that the man America loved to hate and fear was no more knowledgeable of how United States foreign policy works than is the average American. What difference in the War on Terror — for better or for worse — against the likes of bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers could there have been over the past three years if Joe Biden had been the president? Biden was an outspoken supporter of the war against Iraq and is every bit the pro-Israel fanatic that Obama is. In his 35 years in the US Senate Biden avidly supported every American war of aggression including the attacks on Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989, Iraq in 1991, Yugoslavia in 1999 and Afghanistan in 2001. Whatever was Osama bin Laden thinking?

And whatever was Joe Biden thinking when he recently said the following after hosting China’s presumptive next leader Xi Jinping in a visit to the United States?

America holds at least one key economic advantage over China. Because China’s authoritarian government represses its own citizens, they don’t think freely or innovate. “Why have they not become [one of] the most innovative countries in the world? Why is there a need to steal our intellectual property? Why is there a need to have a business hand over its trade secrets to have access to a market of a billion, three hundred million people? Because they’re not innovating.” Noting that China and similar countries produce many engineers and scientists but few innovators, Biden said, “It’s impossible to think different in a country where you can’t speak freely. It’s impossible to think different when you have to worry what you put on the Internet will either be confiscated or you will be arrested. It’s impossible to think different where orthodoxy reigns. That’s why we remain the most innovative country in the world.”¹⁴

Holy Cold War, Batman! This is exactly the kind of stuff we were told about the Soviet Union. For years and years. For decades. Then came Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to be put into Earth’s orbit. It was launched into an Earth orbit by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957. The unanticipated announcement of Sputnik 1′s success precipitated the Sputnik crisis in the United States and ignited the Space Race. The USSR’s launch of Sputnik spurred the United States to create the Advanced Research Projects Agency to regain a technological lead. Not only did the launch of Sputnik spur America to action in the space race, it also led directly to the creation of NASA.¹⁵

1. Washington Post, April 1, 2012
2. Huffington Post, December 19, 2011
3. See the document on WikiLeaks
4. Washington Post, March 24, 2012
5. Ibid., March 26, 2012
6. Ibid., January 10, 2012
7. Prensa Latina (Cuba), March 18, 2012
8. See the video description on Cuba’s UN Ambassador at Left Forum ’12
9. BBC News, “Ecuador to boycott Americas summit over Cuba exclusion“, April 3, 2012
10. Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009
11. New York Times, February 6, 2009
12. Associated Press, November 17, 2008
13. Washington Post, March 16, 2012
14. Ibid., March 1, 2012
15. Wikipedia entry for Sputnik 1

Once the black sheep of high finance, government owned banks can reassure depositors about the safety of their savings and can help maintain a focus on productive investment in a world in which effective financial regulation remains more of an aspiration than a reality.

– Centre for Economic Policy Research, VoxEU.org (January 2010)

Public sector banking is a concept that is relatively unknown in the United States.  Only one state—North Dakota—owns its own bank.  North Dakota is also the only state to escape the credit crisis of 2008, sporting a budget surplus every year since; but skeptics write this off to coincidence or other factors.  The common perception is that government bureaucrats are bad businessmen.  To determine whether government-owned banks are assets or liabilities, then, we need to look farther afield.

When we remove our myopic U.S. blinders, it turns out that globally, not only are publicly-owned banks quite common but that countries with strong public banking sectors generally have strong, stable economies.  According to an Inter-American Development Bank paper presented in 2005, the percentage of state ownership in the banking industry globally by the mid-nineties was over 40 percent.[i]  The BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—contain nearly three billion of the world’s seven billion people, or 40% of the global population.  The BRICs all make heavy use of public sector banks, which compose about 75% of the banks in India, 69% or more in China, 45% in Brazil, and 60% in Russia.

The BRICs have been the main locus of world economic growth in the last decade.  China Daily reports, “Between 2000 and 2010, BRIC’s GDP grew by an incredible 92.7 percent, compared to a global GDP growth of just 32 percent, with industrialized economies having a very modest 15.5 percent.”

All the leading banks in the BRIC half of the globe are state-owned.  In fact, the largest banks globally are state-owned, including:

• The two largest banks by market capitalization (ICBC and China Construction Bank)
• The largest bank by deposits (Japan Post Bank)
• The largest bank by assets (Royal Bank of Scotland, now nationalized)
• The world’s largest development bank (BNDES in Brazil).

A May 2010 article in The Economist noted that the strong and stable publicly-owned banks of India, China and Brazil helped those countries weather the banking crisis afflicting most of the rest of the world in the last few years.  According to Professor Kurt von Mettenheim of the Sao Paulo Business School of Brazil:

Government banks provided counter cyclical credit and policy options to counter the effects of the recent financial crisis, while realizing competitive advantage over private and foreign banks.  Greater client confidence and official deposits reinforced liability base and lending capacity.  The credit policies of BRIC government banks help explain why these countries experienced shorter and milder economic downturns during 2007-2008.

Surprising Findings

In a 2010 research paper summarized on VoxEU.org, economists Svetlana Andrianova, et al., wrote that the post-2008 nationalization of a number of very large banks, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, “offers an opportune moment to reduce the political power of bankers and to carry out much needed financial reforms.”  But “there are concerns that governments may be unable to run nationalised banks efficiently.”

Not to worry, say the authors:

Follow-on research we have carried out (Andrianova et al, 2009) . . . shows that government ownership of banks has, if anything, been robustly associated with higher long run growth rates.

Using data from a large number of countries for 1995-2007, we find that, other things equal, countries with high degrees of government ownership of banking have grown faster than countries with little government ownership of banks. We show that this finding is robust to a battery of econometric tests.

Expanding on this theme in their research paper, the authors write:

While many countries in continental Europe, including Germany and France, have had a fair amount of experience with government-owned banks, the UK and the USA have found themselves in unfamiliar territory. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that there is deeply ingrained hostility in these countries towards the notion that governments can run banks effectively. . . . Hostility towards government-owned banks reflects the hypothesis . . . that these banks are established by politicians who use them to shore up their power by instructing them to lend to political supporters and government-owned enterprises. In return, politicians receive votes and other favours. This hypothesis also postulates that politically motivated banks make bad lending decisions, resulting in non-performing loans, financial fragility and slower growth.

But that is not what the data of these researchers showed:

[W]e have found that . . . countries with government-owned banks have, on average, grown faster than countries with no or little government ownership of banks. . . . This is, of course, a surprising result, especially in light of the widespread belief—typically supported by anecdotal evidence—that ‘… bureaucrats are generally bad bankers’ . . . .

What accounts for their surprising findings?  The authors provide a novel explanation:

We suggest that politicians may actually prefer banks not to be in the public sector. . . . Conditions of weak corporate governance in banks provide fertile ground for quick enrichment for both bankers and politicians – at the expense ultimately of the taxpayer. In such circumstances politicians can offer bankers a system of weak regulation in exchange for party political contributions, positions on the boards of banks or lucrative consultancies.  Activities that are more likely to provide both sides with quick returns are the more speculative ones, especially if they are sufficiently opaque as not to be well understood by the shareholders such as complex derivatives trading.

Government owned banks, on the other hand, have less freedom to engage in speculative strategies that result in quick enrichment for bank insiders and politicians. Moreover, politicians tend to be held accountable for wrongdoings or bad management in the public sector but are typically only indirectly blamed, if at all, for the misdemeanours of private banks. It is the shareholders who are expected to prevent these but lack of transparency and weak governance stops them from doing so in practice. On the other hand, when it comes to banks that are in the public sector, democratic accountability of politicians is more likely to discourage them from engaging in speculation. In such banks, top managers are more likely to be compelled to focus on the more mundane job of financing real businesses and economic growth.

The BRICs as a Global Power

Focusing on the financing of real businesses and economic growth seems to be the secret of the BRICs, which are leading the world in economic development today.  But the BRIC phenomenon is more than just a growth trend identified by an economist.  It is now an international organization, an alliance of countries representing the common interests and goals of its members.  The first BRIC meeting, held in 2008, was called a triumph for former Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy of promoting multilateral arrangements that would challenge the United States’ concept of a unipolar world.

The BRIC countries had their first official summit and became a formal organization in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009.  They met in Brazil in 2010 and in China in 2011, and they will meet in India in 2012.  In 2010, at China’s invitation, South Africa joined the group, making it “BRICS” and adding a strategic presence on the African continent.

The BRICS seek more voice in the United Nations, the IMF, and the World Bank.  They are even discussing their own multicultural bank to fund projects within their own nations, in direct competition with the IMF.  They oppose the dollar as global reserve currency.  After the Yekaterinburg summit, they called for a new global reserve currency, one that was diversified, stable and predictable; and they have the clout to get it.  According to Liam Halligan, writing in The U.K.Telegraph:

The BRICs account for . . . around three-quarters of total currency reserves. They have few serious fiscal issues and all are net external creditors.

Western financial interests have long fought to maintain the dollar as global reserve currency, but they are losing that battle, despite economic and military coercion.  Russia, China and India are now nuclear powers.  The BRICS will have to be negotiated with, and the first step to forming a working relationship is to understand how their economies work.  Rather than declaring war on their more successful practices, we may decide to assimilate some of them into our own.

China’s re-emergence as a world economic power raises important questions about what we can learn from its previous rise and fall and about the external and internal threats confronting this emerging economic superpower for the immediate future.

First we will outline the main contours of historical China’s rise to global economic superiority over West before the 19th century, following closely John Hobson’s account in The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization. Since the majority of western economic historians (liberal, conservative, and Marxist) have presented historical China as a stagnant, backward, parochial society, an “oriental despotism”, some detailed correctives will be necessary. It is especially important to emphasize how China, the world technological power between 1100 and 1800, made the West’s emergence possible. It was only by borrowing and assimilating Chinese innovations that the West was able to make the transition to modern capitalist and imperialist economies.

In part two we will analyze and discuss the factors and circumstances which led to China’s decline in the 19th century and its subsequent domination, exploitation and pillage by Western imperial countries, first England and then the rest of Europe, Japan and the United States.

In part three, we will briefly outline the factors leading to China’s emancipation from colonial and neo-colonial rule and analyze its recent rise to becoming the second largest global economic power.

Finally we will look at the past and present threats to China’s rise to global economic power, highlighting the similarities between British colonialism of the 18 and 19th centuries and the current US imperial strategies and focusing on the weaknesses and strengths of past and present Chinese responses.

China: The Rise and Consolidation of Global Power 1100-1800

In a systematic comparative format, John Hobson provides a wealth of empirical indicators demonstrating China’s global economic superiority over the West and in particular England. These are some striking facts:

As early as 1078, China was the world’s major producer of steel (125,000 tons); whereas Britain in 1788 produced 76,000 tons.

China was the world’s leader in technical innovations in textile manufacturing, seven centuries before Britain’s 18th century “textile revolution”.

China was the leading trading nation, with long distance trade reaching most of Southern Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

China’s “agricultural revolution” and productivity surpassed the West to the 18th century.

Its innovations in the production of paper, book printing, firearms, and tools led to a manufacturing superpower whose goods were transported throughout the world by the most advanced navigational system.

China possessed the world’s largest commercial ships. In 1588 the largest English ships displaced 400 tons, China’s displaced 3,000 tons. Even as late as the end of the 18th century China’s merchants employed 130,000 private transport ships, several times that of Britain. China retained this pre-eminent position in the world economy up until the early 19th century.

British and Europeans manufacturers followed China’s lead, assimilating and borrowing its more advanced technology and were eager to penetrate China’s advanced and lucrative market.

Banking, a stable paper money economy, manufacturing, and high yields in agriculture resulted in China’s per capita income matching that of Great Britain as late as 1750.

China’s dominant global position was challenged by the rise of British imperialism, which had adopted the advanced technological, navigational, and market innovations of China and other Asian countries in order to bypass earlier stages in becoming a world power.²

Western Imperialism and the Decline of China

The British and Western imperial conquest of the East, was based on the militaristic nature of the imperial state, its non-reciprocal economic relations with overseas trading countries and the Western imperial ideology which motivated and justified overseas conquest.

Unlike China, Britain’s industrial revolution and overseas expansion was driven by a military policy. According to Hobson, during the period from 1688-1815 Great Britain was engaged in wars 52% of the time.³ Whereas the Chinese relied on their open markets, their superior production, and sophisticated commercial and banking skills, the British relied on tariff protection, military conquest, the systematic destruction of competitive overseas enterprises as well as the appropriation and plunder of local resources. China’s global predominance was based on “reciprocal benefits” with its trading partners, while Britain relied on mercenary armies of occupation, savage repression and a “divide and conquer” policy to foment local rivalries. In the face of native resistance, the British (as well as other Western imperial powers) did not hesitate to exterminate entire communities.⁴

Unable to take over the Chinese market through greater economic competitiveness, Britain relied on brute military power. It mobilized, armed and led mercenaries, drawn from its colonies in India and elsewhere to force its exports on China and impose unequal treaties to lower tariffs. As a result China was flooded with British opium produced on its plantations in India — despite Chinese laws forbidding or regulating the importation and sale of the narcotic. China’s rulers, long accustomed to its trade and manufacturing superiority, were unprepared for the “new imperial rules” for global power. The West’s willingness to use military power to win colonies, pillage resources and recruit huge mercenary armies commanded by European officers spelt the end for China as a world power.

China had based its economic predominance on “non-interference in the internal affairs of its trading partners”. In contrast, British imperialists intervened violently in Asia, reorganizing local economies to suit the needs of the empire (eliminating economic competitors including more efficient Indian cotton manufacturers), and seized control of local political, economic, and administrative apparatus to establish the colonial state.

Britain’s empire was built with resources seized from the colonies and through the massive militarization of its economy.⁵ It was thus able to secure military supremacy over China. China’s foreign policy was hampered by its ruling elite’s excessive reliance on trade relations. Chinese officials and merchant elites sought to appease the British and convinced the emperor to grant devastating extra-territorial concessions opening markets to the detriment of Chinese manufacturers while surrendering local sovereignty. As always, the British precipitated internal rivalries and revolts further destabilizing the country.

Western and British penetration and colonization of China’s market created an entire new class: The wealthy Chinese “compradores” imported British goods and facilitated the takeover of local markets and resources. Imperialist pillage forced greater exploitation and taxation of the great mass of Chinese peasants and workers. China’s rulers were obliged to pay the war debts and finance trade deficits imposed by the Western imperial powers by squeezing its peasantry. This drove the peasants to starvation and revolt.

By the early 20th century (less than a century after the Opium Wars), China had descended from world economic power to a broken semi-colonial country with a huge destitute population. The principle ports were controlled by Western imperial officials and the countryside was subject to the rule by corrupt and brutal warlords. British opium enslaved millions.

British Academics: Eloquent Apologists for Imperial Conquest

The entire Western academic profession – first and foremost British imperialist historians – attributed British imperial dominance of Asia to English “technological superiority” and China’s misery and colonial status to “oriental backwardness”, omitting any mention of the millennium of Chinese commercial and technical progress and superiority up to the dawn of the 19th century. By the end of the 1920s, with the Japanese imperial invasion, China ceased to exist as a unified country. Under the aegis of imperialist rule, hundreds of millions of Chinese had starved or were dispossessed or slaughtered, as the Western powers and Japan plundered its economy. The entire Chinese “collaborator” comprador elitists were discredited before the Chinese people.

What did remain in the collective memory of the great mass of the Chinese people – and what was totally absent in the accounts of prestigious US and British academics – was the sense of China once having been a prosperous, dynamic and leading world power. Western commentators dismissed this collective memory of China’s ascendancy as the foolish pretensions of nostalgic lords and royalty – empty Han arrogance.

China Rises from the Ashes of Imperial Plunder and Humiliation: The Chinese Communist Revolution

The rise of modern China to become the second largest economy in the world was made possible only through the success of the Chinese communist revolution in the mid-20th century. The People’s Liberation “Red” Army defeated first the invading Japanese imperial army and later the US imperialist-backed comprador-led Kuomintang “Nationalist” army. This allowed the reunification of China as an independent sovereign state. The Communist government abolished the extra-territorial privileges of the Western imperialists, ended the territorial fiefdoms of the regional warlords and gangsters, and drove out the millionaire owners of brothels, the traffickers of women and drugs as well as the other “service providers” to the Euro-American Empire.

In every sense of the word, the Communist revolution forged the modern Chinese state. The new leaders then proceeded to reconstruct an economy ravaged by imperial wars and pillaged by Western and Japanese capitalists. After over 150 years of infamy and humiliation the Chinese people recovered their pride and national dignity. These socio-psychological elements were essential in motivating the Chinese to defend their country from the US attacks, sabotage, boycotts, and blockades mounted immediately after liberation.

Contrary to Western and neoliberal Chinese economists, China’s dynamic growth did not start in 1980. It began in 1950, when the agrarian reform provided land, infrastructure, credits and technical assistance to hundreds of millions of landless and destitute peasants and landless rural workers. Through what is now called “human capital” and gigantic social mobilization, the Communists built roads, airfields, bridges, canals and railroads as well as the basic industries, like coal, iron and steel, to form the backbone of the modern Chinese economy. Communist China’s vast free educational and health systems created a healthy, literate, and motivated work force. Its highly professional military prevented the US from extending its military empire throughout the Korean peninsula up to China’s territorial frontiers. Just as past Western scholars and propagandists fabricated a history of a “stagnant and decadent” empire to justify their destructive conquest, so too their modern counterparts have rewritten the first thirty years of Chinese Communist history, denying the role of the revolution in developing all the essential elements for a modern economy, state, and society. It is clear that China’s rapid economic growth was based on the development of its internal market, its rapidly growing cadre of scientists, skilled technicians, and workers and the social safety net which protected and promoted working class and peasant mobility were products of Communist planning and investments.

China’s rise to global power began in 1949 with the removal of the entire parasitic financial, comprador and speculative classes who had served as the intermediaries for European, Japanese and US imperialists draining China of its great wealth.

China’s Transition to Capitalism

Beginning in 1980 the Chinese government initiated a dramatic shift in its economic strategy: Over the next three decades, it opened the country to large-scale foreign investment; it privatized thousands of industries and it set in motion a process of income concentration based on a deliberate strategy of re-creating a dominant economic class of billionaires linked to overseas capitalists. China’s ruling political class embraced the idea of “borrowing” technical know-how and accessing overseas markets from foreign firms in exchange for providing cheap, plentiful labor at the lowest cost. The Chinese state re-directed massive public subsidies to promote high capitalist growth by dismantling its national system of free public education and health care. They ended subsidized public housing for hundreds of millions of peasants and urban factory workers and provided funds to real estate speculators for the construction of private luxury apartments and office skyscrapers. China’s new capitalist strategy as well as its double digit growth was based on the profound structural changes and massive public investments made possible by the previous communist government. China’s private sector “take off” was based on the huge public outlays made since 1949.

The triumphant new capitalist class and its Western collaborators claimed all the credit for this “economic miracle” as China rose to become the world’s second largest economy. This new Chinese elite have been less eager to announce China’s world-class status in terms of brutal class inequalities, rivaling only the US.

China: From Imperial Dependency to World Class Competitor

China’s sustained growth in its manufacturing sector was a result of highly concentrated public investments, high profits, technological innovations and a protected domestic market. While foreign capital profited, it was always within the framework of the Chinese state’s priorities and regulations. The regime’s dynamic “export strategy” led to huge trade surpluses, which eventually made China one of the world’s largest creditors especially for US debt. In order to maintain its dynamic industries, China has required huge influxes of raw materials, resulting in large-scale overseas investments and trade agreements with agro-mineral export countries in Africa and Latin America. By 2010 China displaced the US and Europe as the main trading partner in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Modern China’s rise to world economic power, like its predecessor between 1100-1800, is based on its gigantic productive capacity. Trade and investment was governed by a policy of strict non-interference in the internal relations of its trading partners. Unlike the US, China did not initiate brutal wars for oil; instead it signed lucrative contracts. And China does not fight wars in the interest of overseas Chinese, as the US has done in the Middle East for Israel.

The seeming imbalance between Chinese economic and military power is in stark contrast to the US where a bloated, parasitic military empire continues to erode its own global economic presence.

US military spending is twelve times that of China. Increasingly the US military plays the key role shaping policy in Washington as it seeks to undercut China’s rise to global power.

China’s Rise to World Power: Will History Repeat Itself?

China has been growing at about 9% per annum and its goods and services are rapidly rising in quality and value. In contrast, the US and Europe have wallowed around 0% growth from 2007-2012. China’s innovative techno-scientific establishment routinely assimilates the latest inventions from the West (and Japan) and improves them, thereby decreasing the cost of production. China has replaced the US and European controlled “international financial institutions” (the IMF, World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank) as the principle lender in Latin America. China continues to lead as the prime investor in African energy and mineral resources. China has replaced the US as the principle market for Saudi Arabian, Sudanese, and Iranian petroleum and it will soon replace the US as the principle market for Venezuela petroleum products. Today China is the world’s biggest manufacturer and exporter, dominating even the US market, while playing the role of financial life line as it holds over $1.3 trillion in US Treasury notes.

Under growing pressure from its workers, farmers and peasants, China’s rulers have been developing the domestic market by increasing wages and social spending to rebalance the economy and avoid the specter of social instability. In contrast, US wages, salaries and vital public services have sharply declined in absolute and relative terms.

Given the current historical trends it is clear that China will replace the US as the leading world economic power, over the next decade, if the US empire does not strike back and if China’s profound class inequalities do not lead to a major social upheaval.

Modern China’s rise to global power faces serious challenges. In contrast to China’s historical ascent on the world stage, modern Chinese global economic power is not accompanied by any imperialist undertakings. China has seriously lagged behind the US and Europe in aggressive war-making capacity. This may have allowed China to direct public resources to maximize economic growth, but it has left China vulnerable to US military superiority in terms of its massive arsenal, its string of forward bases, and strategic geo-military positions right off the Chinese coast and in adjoining territories.

In the nineteenth century British imperialism demolished China’s global position with its military superiority, seizing China’s ports – because of China’s reliance on “mercantile superiority”.

The conquest of India, Burma and most of Asia allowed Britain to establish colonial bases and recruit local mercenary armies. The British and its mercenary allies encircled and isolated China, setting the stage for the disruption of China’s markets and the imposition of the brutal terms of trade. The British Empire’s armed presence dictated what China imported (with opium accounting for over 50% of British exports in the 1850s) while undermining China’s competitive advantages via tariff policies.

Today the US is pursuing similar policies: US naval fleet patrols and controls China’s commercial shipping lanes and off-shore oil resources via its overseas bases. The Obama-Clinton White House is in the process of developing a rapid military response involving bases in Australia, Philippines, and elsewhere in Asia. The US is intensifying its efforts to undermine Chinese overseas access to strategic resources while backing “grass roots” separatists and “insurgents” in West China, Tibet, Sudan, Burma, Iran, Libya, Syria, and elsewhere. The US military agreements with India and the installation of a pliable puppet regime in Pakistan have advanced its strategy of isolating China. While China upholds its policy of “harmonious development” and “non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries”, it has stepped aside as US and European military imperialism have attacked a host of China’s trading partners to essentially reverse China’s peaceful commercial expansion.

China’s lack of a political and ideological strategy capable of protecting its overseas economic interests has been an invitation for the US and NATO to set-up regimes hostile to China. The most striking example is Libya where US and NATO intervened to overthrow an independent government led by President Gaddafi, with whom China had signed multi-billion dollar trade and investments agreements. The NATO bombardment of Libyan cities, ports and oil installation forced the Chinese to withdraw 35,000 Chinese oil engineers and construction workers in a matter of days. The same thing happened in Sudan where China had invested billions to develop its oil industry. The US, Israel, and Europe armed the South Sudanese rebels to disrupt the flow of oil and attack Chinese oil workers⁶ In both cases China passively allowed the US and European military imperialists to attack its trade partners and undermine its investments.

Under Mao Zedong, China had an active policy countering imperial aggression. It supported revolutionary movements and independent Third World governments. Today’s capitalist China does not have an active policy of supporting governments or movements capable of protecting China’s bilateral trade and investment agreements. China’s inability to confront the rising tide of US military aggression against its economic interests is due to deep structural problems. China’s foreign policy is shaped by big commercial, financial, and manufacturing interests who rely on their “economic competitive edge” to gain market shares and have no understanding of the military and security underpinnings of global economic power. China’s political class is deeply influenced by a new class of billionaires with strong ties to Western equity funds and who have uncritically absorbed Western cultural values. This is illustrated by their preference for sending their own children to elite universities in the US and Europe. They seek “accommodation with the West” at any price. This lack of any strategic understanding of military empire-building has led them to respond ineffectively and ad hoc to each imperialist action undermining their access to resources and markets. While China’s “business first” outlook may have worked when it was a minor player in the world economy and US empire builders saw the “capitalist opening” as a chance to easily takeover China’s public enterprises and pillage the economy. However, when China (in contrast to the former USSR) decided to retain capital controls and develop a carefully calibrated, state-directed “industrial policy” directing western capital and the transfer of technology to state enterprises, which effectively penetrated the US domestic and overseas markets, Washington began to complain and talked of retaliation. China’s huge trade surpluses with the US provoked a dual response in Washington. It sold massive quantities of US Treasury bonds to the Chinese and began to develop a global strategy to block China’s advance. Since the US lacked economic leverage to reverse its decline, it relied on its only “comparative advantage” – its military superiority based on a world wide system of attack bases, a network of overseas client regimes, military proxies, NGOers, intellectuals and armed mercenaries. Washington turned to its vast overt and clandestine security apparatus to undermine China’s trading partners. Washington depends on its long-standing ties with corrupt rulers, dissidents, journalists and media moguls to provide the powerful propaganda cover while advancing its military offensive against China’s overseas interests.

China has nothing to compare with the US overseas security apparatus because it practices a policy of non-interference. Given the advanced state of the Western imperial offensive, China has taken only a few diplomatic initiatives, such as financing English language media outlets to present its perspective, using its veto power on the UN Security Council to oppose US efforts to overthrow the independent Assad regime in Syria, and opposing the imposition of drastic sanctions against Iran. It sternly repudiated US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton’s vitriolic questioning of the “legitimacy” of the Chinese state when it voted against the US-UN resolution preparing an attack on Syria.⁷

Chinese military strategists are more aware and alarmed at the growing military threat to China. They have successfully demanded a 19% annual increase in military spending over the next five years (2011-2015).⁸ Even with this increase, China’s military expenditures will still be less than one-fifth of the US military budget and China has not one overseas military base in stark contrast to the over 750 US installations abroad. Overseas Chinese intelligence operations are minimal and ineffective. Its embassies are run by and for narrow commercial interests who utterly failed to understand NATO’s brutal policy of regime change in Libya and inform Beijing of its significance to the Chinese state.

There are two other structural weaknesses undermining China’s rise as a world power. This includes the highly ‘Westernized’ intelligentsia which has uncritically swallowed US economic doctrine about free markets while ignoring its militarized economy. These Chinese intellectuals parrot the US propaganda about the “democratic virtues” of billion-dollar Presidential campaigns, while supporting financial deregulation which would have led to a Wall Street takeover of Chinese banks and savings. Many Chinese business consultants and academics have been educated in the US and influenced by their ties to US academics and international financial institutions directly linked to Wall Street and the City of London. They have prospered as highly-paid consultants receiving prestigious positions in Chinese institutions. They identify the “liberalization of financial markets” with “advanced economies” capable of deepening ties to global markets instead of as a major source of the current global financial crisis. These “Westernized intellectuals” are like their 19th century comprador counterparts who underestimated and dismissed the long-term consequences of Western imperial penetration. They fail to understand how financial deregulation in the US precipitated the current crisis and how deregulation would lead to a Western takeover of China’s financial system – the consequences of which would reallocate China’s domestic savings to non-productive activities (real estate speculation), precipitate financial crisis and ultimately undermine China’s leading global position.

These Chinese yuppies imitate the worst of Western consumerist life styles and their political outlooks are driven by these life styles and Westernized identities which preclude any sense of solidarity with their own working class.

There is an economic basis for the pro-Western sentiments of China’s neo-compradors. They have transferred billions of dollars to foreign bank accounts, purchased luxury homes and apartments in London, Toronto, Los Angeles, Manhattan, Paris, Hong Kong, and Singapore. They have one foot in China (the source of their wealth) and the other in the West (where they consume and hide their wealth).

Westernized compradors are deeply embedded in China’s economic system having family ties with the political leadership in the party apparatus and the state. Their connections are weakest in the military and in the growing social movements, although some “dissident” students and academic activists in the “democracy movements” are backed by Western imperial NGO’s. To the extent that the compradors gain influence, they weaken the strong economic state institutions which have directed China’s ascent to global power, just as they did in the 19th century by acting as intermediaries for the British Empire. Proclaiming 19th Century “liberalism”, British opium addicted over 50 million Chinese in less than a decade. Proclaiming “democracy and human rights”, US gunboats now patrol off China’s coast. China’s elite-directed rise to global economic power has spawned monumental inequalities between the thousands of new billionaires and multi-millionaires at the top and hundreds of millions of impoverished workers, peasants and migrant workers at the bottom.

China’s rapid accumulation of wealth and capital was made possible through the intense exploitation of its workers who were stripped of their previous social safety net and regulated work conditions guaranteed under Communism. Millions of Chinese households are being dispossessed in order to promote real estate developer/speculators who then build high rise offices and the luxury apartments for the domestic and foreign elite. These brutal features of ascendant Chinese capitalism have created a fusion of workplace and living space mass struggle which is growing every year. The developer/speculators’ slogan “to get rich is wonderful” has lost its power to deceive the people. In 2011 there were over 200,000 popular encompassing urban coastal factories and rural villages. The next step, which is sure to come, will be the unification of these struggles into new national social movements with a class-based agenda demanding the restoration of health and educational services enjoyed under the Communists as well as a greater share of China’s wealth. Current demands for greater wages can turn to demands for greater work place democracy. To answer these popular demands China’s new comprador-Westernized liberals cannot point to their “model” in the US empire where American workers are in the process of being stripped of the very benefits Chinese workers are struggling to regain.

China, torn by deepening class and political conflict, cannot sustain its drive toward global economic leadership. China’s elite cannot confront the rising global imperial military threat from the US with its comprador allies among the internal liberal elite while the country is a deeply divided society with an increasingly hostile working class. The time of unbridled exploitation of China’s labor has to end in order to face the US military encirclement of China and economic disruption of its overseas markets. China possesses enormous resources. With over $1.5 trillion dollars in reserves China can finance a comprehensive national health and educational program throughout the country.

China can afford to pursue an intensive “public housing program” for the 250 million migrant workers currently living in urban squalor. China can impose a system of progressive income taxes on its new billionaires and millionaires and finance small family farmer co-operatives and rural industries to rebalance the economy. Their program of developing alternative energy sources, such as solar panels and wind farms – are a promising start to addressing their serious environmental pollution. Degradation of the environment and related health issues already engage the concern of tens of millions. Ultimately China’s best defense against imperial encroachments is a stable regime based on social justice for the hundreds of millions and a foreign policy of supporting overseas anti-imperialist movements and regimes – whose independence are in China’s vital interest. What is needed is a pro-active policy based on mutually beneficial joint ventures including military and diplomatic solidarity. Already a small, but influential, group of Chinese intellectuals have raised the issue of the growing US military threat and are “saying no to gunboat diplomacy”.⁹

Modern China has plenty of resources and opportunities, unavailable to China in the 19th century when it was subjugated by the British Empire. If the US continues to escalate its aggressive militaristic policy against China, Beijing can set off a serious fiscal crisis by dumping a few of its hundreds of billions of dollars in US Treasury notes. China, a nuclear power should reach out to its similarly armed and threatened neighbor, Russia, to confront and confound the bellicose rantings of US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton. Russian President-to-be Putin vows to increase military spending from 3% to 6% of the GDP over the next decade to counter Washington’s offensive missile bases on Russia’s borders and thwart Obama’s regime change programs against its allies, like Syria.¹⁰

China has powerful trading, financial and investment networks covering the globe as well as powerful economic partners. These links have become essential for the continued growth of many of countries throughout the developing world. In taking on China, the US will have to face the opposition of many powerful market-based elites throughout the world. Few countries or elites see any future in tying their fortunes to an economically unstable empire-based on militarism and destructive colonial occupations.

In other words, modern China, as a world power, is incomparably stronger than it was in early 18th century. The US does not have the colonial leverage that the ascendant British Empire possessed in the run-up to the Opium Wars. Moreover, many Chinese intellectuals and the vast majority of its citizens have no intention of letting its current “Westernized compradors” sell out the country. Nothing would accelerate political polarization in Chinese society and hasten the coming of a second Chinese social revolution more than a timid leadership submitting to a new era of Western imperial pillage.

1. John Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press 2004).
2. Ibid, Ch. 9: 190-218.
3. Ibid, Ch. 11: 244-248.
4. Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt (London: Verso 2011) for a detailed historical chronicle of the savagery accompanying Britain’s colonial empire.
5. Hobson: 253-256.
6. Katrina Manson, “South Sudan puts Beijing’s policies to the test”, Financial Times, 2/21/12, p. 5.
7. Interview of Clinton NPR, 2/26/12.
8. La Jornada, 2/15/12 (Mexico City).
9. China Daily, 2/20/2012.
10. Charles Clover, ‘Putin vows huge boost in defense spending’, Financial Times, 2/12/2012.

There is good reason to believe that this political movement will succeed where others failed, in large part because of the width and breadth of the participants, the growing co-operation and unity in common struggles for land reform, participatory democracy, and near universal opposition to US backed militarism and the neo-liberal free trade agreement.

International Perspectives: A Promising Context

Never has the international climate, especially in Latin America, been so favorable for the growth of Colombia’s popular democratic initiative and the eventual political success of this “movement of movements”.

Throughout most of South America and the Caribbean a favorable historic moment of regional autonomy has taken organizational form, backed by almost all the major countries in the region. ALBA (Bolivarian Alternative for Latin America) links a dozen Caribbean and Andean countries in a pact of regional integration led by the dynamic, democratic, anti-imperialist government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. UNASUR, (Union of South American Nations) MERCOSUR (Common Southern Market) and other regional organizations, are expressions of the growing political and economic independence of Latin America and a rejection of the US dominated OAS (Organization of American States). In practical terms, the growth of these independent regional organizations has meant a rejection of US-sponsored military intervention, as illustrated by their repudiation of the Washington-backed military coup in Honduras in 2009. Latin America’s opposition to Washington’s Free Trade of the America’s Agreement led to the growth of intra-regional trade and forced Washington to seek ‘bilateral’ free trade agreements’ with Chile, Colombia, Panama and Mexico.

The growth of autonomous regional integration provides two strategic advantages: it lessens economic dependence on the US and weakens Washington’s leverage in imposing economic sanctions against any nationalist, populist, or socialist government in the region. This is evident in Washington’s failure to secure any Latin American support for its blockade of Cuba or sanctions against Venezuela. The decline of US political influence and economic dominance opens a historic opportunity for a popular nationalist and democratic government in Colombia to realistically develop a new alternative development model centered on greater social equity.

The dynamic growth of Asian markets, especially China, provides Latin America with a historic opportunity to diversify its markets, increase trade and secure favorable prices for its exports. The advantage of Asian trade relations is that they are not encumbered by subversion by the CIA and the Pentagon – they are based on strictly mutually beneficial economic relations and non-intervention in the internal relations of each country. The diversification of trade is well advanced: China has replaced the US and the EU as the principle trading partner of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru and the list is growing as Asia rapidly expands at over 8% and the US-EU economies wallow in recession.

Latin America is no longer subject to the cyclical volatility of US-EU financial markets. During the financial crises of 2008-2010 of the US and Europe, Latin America was able to turn increasingly to China for financing: China’s lending to Latin America grew from $1 billion dollars in 2008, to $18 billion in 2009, to $36 billion in 2010. Moreover, countries like Argentina and Ecuador, which cannot access private capital markets in the US and EU because of debt defaults,can draw loans from Chinese state banks. Between 2005-2010, China lent Latin America $75 billion and by 2010 Chinese loans exceeded the combined loans of the IMF, World Bank and BID.

Moreover, Chinese state banks do not impose harsh political and economic “conditions” to their Latin borrowers as does the IMF. In other words, Latin Americans intent on external financing, can borrow from China to finance structural changes including agrarian reform and the nationalization of banks without fearing economic reprisals from overseas lenders.

ALBA provides an important ‘sub-regional grouping’ and a forum representing a forceful rejection of imperial wars, an opportunity for deeper Caribbean integration and a defense against imperial political and military intervention as well as favorable subsidies on petroleum imports. ALBA provides Colombia with an opportunity to deepen its strategic ties with Venezuela and Ecuador, as they share a common frontier, highly complementary economies and a common historical and cultural Bolivarian legacy.

In contrast to the period between the late 1970’s to 2000 when Washington dominated Latin America via client military and civilian regimes and the neoliberal dogma enshrined in the so called Washington Consensus of 1996, and limited the freedom of action of an independent popular government, today, a free and independent Colombia would have an immensely more favorable international, political and economic environment.

The Decline of US Global Power

US influence is declining on a world scale: China and India have displaced the US as the major trading partners in Asia, Latin America, Africa, and in major countries in the Middle East. Russia’s economy and military has recovered from the catastrophic pillage during the Yeltsin era and is pursuing an independent policy. This is evident in Russia’s military sales and petroleum agreements with Venezuela, its UN Security Council veto of the NATO-backed mercenary assault of Syria, and its closer ties with China.

Along with the emergence of a multi-polar world of Russia-China-Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa is in the midst of a series of anti-imperialist and popular democratic rebellions which threaten US client dictatorships.

Equally important, the US’s prolonged, costly, and losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been immensely unpopular internally, and along with the fiscal and trade deficits and financial crises, have undermined public support for new large scale ground wars.

In other words, the US is much less capable of sustaining a large scale military intervention against a major country like Colombia, if and when a new popular government is elected.

The Demise of the Neo-Liberal Capitalist Model

Today as never before in recent history, real existent “free-market capitalism” has, demonstrated on a world scale its failure to provide the essentials of the good life. In Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Italy youth unemployment hovers between 35% and 50%; and overall unemployment approaches or exceeds 20%. In the EU and the US, real unemployment and underemployment exceeds a quarter of the labor force.

Economic recession, financial crises and declining living and working conditions are the defining conditions of the US and Europe. In other words, the capitalist model in crises for five years offers no alternative for the great majority working in the “developed imperialist countries” or the so-called “developing countries”.

This presents a golden ideological opportunity to demonstrate that a socialist society based on democratic participation is a viable alternative to crises-ridden capitalism.

Class and National Struggles: The Emerging Reality

Throughout the world today, from Southern Europe to the Middle East, from Asia to North America, mass popular revolts, have taken prime of place. General strikes, mass demonstration and street fighting rage in the capitals of Greece, Portugal and Italy. Mass democratic movements confront dictators in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, and the Gulf States. ‘Occupy movements’ in the US and Spain spread to new countries, rejecting class-based “austerity”. In the face of the recovery of profits at the expense of massive cuts in wages, public services, pensions, health care, new middle class sectors join the struggle.

Even in the high growth Asian capitalist countries, like China, the working class rebels against the inequalities and exploitation: over 200,000 strikes and protests in 2011 recall the popular rebellions of the Cultural Revolution against hierarchy and abuse. In summary, the regional and world correlation of forces is very favorable to the emergence of a new dynamic unified political movement in Colombia. However, there are dangers and obstacles that need to be taken into account.

Obstacles and Challenges

The decline and decay of US power and influence does not lessen the dangers of direct Special Forces assassinations, indirect military intervention via local military proxies and economic destabilization.

Washington has developed a clandestine army of special forces, armed assassin operations, in 75 countries. The US retains 750 military bases around the world. As we saw in Honduras, the US still has leverage over the military and allies among the oligarchs to overthrow a progressive government. The US has a reserve army of local politicians and NGOs ready to replace established dictators when they are overthrown.

Washington and NATO Europe provided air and naval support and supplied arms to local mercenaries and fundamentalists to overthrow independent leaders like Mouammar Gaddafi in Libya. Today they provide arms to mercenaries to assault President Assad in Syria. The US and EU are building a military armada surrounding Iran and promoting economic sanctions to strangle its economy. More ominously, Washington is encircling China and Russia with military bases, missiles, and warships.

In other words, imperialism in economic decline still retains military options to deter the advance of a pluralist global political system. Imperial states do not surrender power unless they face unified regional alliances and, equally important, governments with united mass popular support.

The positive development of Latin American integration is a step toward greater independence but it has strategic weaknesses: namely internal class contradictions and conflicts over development models. Economic growth and diversification of markets has lessened US dominance but it has also strengthened the power and wealth of the domestic ruling classes and multi-national agro-mineral corporations.

Inequalities of wealth, income, and landownership flourish in Brazil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and elsewhere, even as some of these regimes claim to be “popular governments”. Moreover, the “anti-imperialism” of ALBA countries like Bolivia does not extend to the dozens of foreign owned mineral extracting and petroleum exploiting multi-nationals which dominate the country. Argentina may promote an independent foreign policy but over one-third of its countryside is owned by foreign capital.

In other words, while the growth of independent governments in Latin America contributes to limiting the domination of the US, Colombian movements must also recognize the limitations and class contradictions of the “progressive” countries in the region. Only Venezuela has pursued strong redistributive and nationalist policies.

The principle obstacles facing the new Colombian political movements are domestic: the entrenched oligarchy and its allies in the state, especially within the military and paramilitary forces. If the external environment is largely favorable, the internal political regime presents a formidable obstacle, especially the continued assassination of dozens of prominent trade union, peasant and human rights activists.

The de-militarization of civil society beginning with the dismantling of the US military bases, the discontinuation of Plan Colombia and the demobilization of the armed forces (over 300,000 plus private paramilitary gangs) are major steps toward opening political space for the excrcise of democratic rights. The democratization of elections requires the termination of the state penetration and coercion of civil society.

The democratization of Colombia requires the growth of powerful independent social movements representing all popular sectors of Colombian society; judicial investigation and prosecution of ex-narco-President Álvaro Uribe and his closest collaborators, for political homicides, needs to extend to the present Santos regime. The recent “free trade agreement” between Obama and Santos must be repudiated as it is an obstacle to domestic development and deepening more promising economic relations with Venezuela and the rest of Latin America and Asia.

Above all over 4 million displaced Colombians, forcibly dispossessed by the Uribe regime, must be mobilized to repossess their lands and provided with credit, loans and an opportunity to escape their current misery and squalor.

Colombia’s current rulers cannot point to a single example of a successful neo-liberal model in Europe, Latin America, or the United States. Neo-liberal Mexico and Central America are over-run by drug cartels, with 80,000 plus homicides over the past 5 years and the lowest growth rates in the region. The US economy stagnates with over 20% un- and underemployed. The European Union is on the verge of disintegration. Clearly Marx’s critique of growing capitalist immiseration is being confirmed. It is time for the new political movements to consider a “Colombian road to socialism” built on public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy, agrarian reform, sustainable agriculture,and environmental protection under democratic control.

It is in this spirit of optimism and critical analysis that I send my solidarity and unconditional support to the organizers, activists, and militant participants attending this historic gathering. I am confident sooner rather then later they will lead Colombia to its “second and final independence”.

On February 4, Western politicians and journalists responded with outrage to the Russian and Chinese vetoing of a UN security council resolution calling for Syrian president Bashar Assad to step down as part of a ‘political transition’. UK foreign secretary, William Hague, said:

More than 2,000 people have died since Russia and China vetoed the last draft resolution in October 2011. How many more need to die before Russia and China allow the UN security council to act?

‘Those opposing UN security council action will have to account to the Syrian people for their actions, which do nothing to help bring an end to the violence that is ravaging the country. The United Kingdom will continue to support the people of Syria and the Arab League to find an end to the violence and allow a Syrian-led political transition.

The corporate media took the same view. A leading article in the Independent commented:

Hillary Clinton described the vetoing of the UN resolution as a “travesty”. She is right. But this cannot be the international community’s last word.

Curiously, while Hague talked of the West’s determination ‘to find an end to the violence’, and the media railed against the Russians and Chinese for failing to seek the same, almost no-one noticed that the resolution had itself subordinated the possibility of a ceasefire to the demand for regime change.

The draft resolution did call ‘for an immediate end to all violence’. But it specifically demanded ‘that the Syrian government… withdraw all Syrian military and armed forces from cities and towns, and return them to their original home barracks’.

This one-sided demand that only Syrian government forces should withdraw from the streets closely resembled the Machiavellian device built into UN Resolution 1973 on Libya, passed on March 17, 2011.

This also called for “the immediate establishment of a cease-fire” supported by “a ban on all flights” in Libyan air space. But crucially, the determination was added “to take all necessary measures… to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, including Benghazi…”

This clearly had nothing to do with the mere banning of flights. Indeed, the authorisation to protect civilians by “all necessary means” transformed Nato planes from neutral monitors of Libyan air space into a ground-attack air force for “rebel” fighters.

Far from bringing an end to the violence, UN Resolution 1973 unleashed overwhelming Western force in pursuit of regime change, in a war that was fought to the bitter end. To ensure the right outcome, Western and other powers supplied special forces and weapons, simply ignoring the resolution’s call for “strict implementation of the arms embargo” and “excluding a foreign occupation force of any form on any part of Libyan territory”. In short, the resolution resulted in a massive escalation in violence. Seumas Milne noted in the Guardian last week:

When it began, the death toll was 1,000 to 2,000. By the time Muammar Gaddafi was captured and lynched seven months later, it was estimated at more than 10 times that figure. The legacy of foreign intervention in Libya has also been mass ethnic cleansing, torture and detention without trial, continuing armed conflict, and a western-orchestrated administration so unaccountable it resisted revealing its members’ names.

The New York Times also reported last week:

The country that witnessed the Arab world’s most sweeping revolution [sic] is foundering’ with a government ‘whose authority extends no further than its offices’ and where ‘militias are proving to be the scourge of the revolution’s aftermath’.

Militia violence is rife – Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates 250 separate militias in the city of Misrata alone. Peter Bouckaert, the emergencies director at HRW, said:

‘People are turning up dead in detention at an alarming rate. If this was happening under any Arab dictatorship, there would be an outcry.’

On January 26, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) announced its decision ‘to suspend its operations in detention centers in Misrata’. Detainees ‘are being tortured and denied urgent medical care’:

MSF doctors had been increasingly confronted with patients who suffered injuries caused by torture during interrogation sessions… In total, MSF treated 115 people who had torture-related wounds…. Since January, several of the patients returned to interrogation centers were again tortured.

MSF general director Christopher Stokes commented:

Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions.

As ever, violence for which the West shares responsibility has been met with indifference and quickly forgotten. According to the media database Lexis-Nexis, Stokes’ comments were mentioned once in half a dozen newspapers on January 27, with no follow up. Ironically, Bouckaert’s comments on the absent “outcry” have themselves been ignored.

As a result, the post-war disaster in Libya has given journalists little pause for thought on the merits of the West’s latest “humanitarian intervention” in Syria. Facts have to be recognised as real and important to have an impact.

“Further Measures”

Returning to the vetoed UN resolution, the one-sided demand that Syrian government forces withdraw, but not anti-government fighters, was combined with the demand that the Syrian government “facilitate a Syrian-led political transition to a democratic, plural political system” – regime change by any other name – “in an environment free from violence, fear, intimidation and extremism”. The draft text promised “to review implementation of this resolution within 21 days and, in the event of non-compliance, to consider further measures”.

The trap was clear enough – Syrian forces would have been ordered back to barracks. If the fighters had continued fighting and government forces had responded, this would have constituted “non-compliance”, opening the way for “further measures”, including foreign intervention leading to regime change. This would have given Syrian fighters every motivation to continue the violence in hopes of triggering the kind of Western intervention that destroyed Gaddafi and that they have been openly seeking.

None of this should come as a surprise. For the West, a peaceful solution in Libya (as in Iraq) was perceived as an obstacle to the actual goal, regime change. Milne observed last August:

If stopping the killing had been the real aim, Nato states would have backed a ceasefire and a negotiated settlement, rather than repeatedly vetoing both. Instead, UN Resolution 1973 ‘has since been used as Nato’s fig leaf to justify the onslaught against Gaddafi and deliver regime change from the air.

Consider, then, that we have strong evidence that the vetoed resolution on Syria would have escalated violence in pursuit of regime change (an illegal aspiration under international law). We have the clear example of Libya, from just last year, of very similar machinations producing regime change, a ten times increase in violence, and massive post-war chaos and violence.

If this isn’t enough to question the “black and white” portrayal of the Russian and Chinese veto as a “travesty”, we can consider the filmed testimony of former Nato chief, General Wesley Clark, when he recalled a conversation with a Pentagon general in 2001, a few weeks after the September 11 attacks:

He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.’

Clark added:

They wanted us to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.

He recounted a conversation he had had in 1991 with Paul Wolfowitz, then US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, who told Clark: ‘we’ve got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet regimes – Syria, Iran, Iraq – before the next great superpower comes on to challenge us’.

In response, Clark said he asked himself: ‘the purpose of the military is to start wars and change governments? It’s not to deter conflicts?’

Clark’s conclusion will be blindingly obvious to future historians, if not to contemporary journalists:

[T]here are always interests. The truth about the Middle East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody is threatening to intervene in Africa. The problem is the opposite. We keep asking for people to intervene and stop [violence]. There’s no question that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great power involvement.

It is hard to imagine Clark being dismissed as a crazed conspiracy theorist lacking “insider” knowledge – he was Nato chief, after all. But his account has been ignored – talk of a hidden agenda of realpolitik challenges the Manichean view of the world that makes “humanitarian intervention” possible. We can find only one mention of Clark’s comments in all UK national newspapers – by Clark himself in an article for The Times in 2003.²

In light of the above facts and arguments, it is interesting to consider the comments of UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, who condemned the Russian and Chinese veto as “disastrous for the Syrian people”. The failure to agree on collective action, he said, had “encouraged the Syrian government to step up its war on its own people”.

But honest analysis suggests serious room for doubt – the vetoed resolution might itself have been disastrous for the Syrian people. With these words, the UN secretary-general told us much about his own position. Indeed, the near-unanimity in outrage that has characterised so much commentary, despite obvious holes in the reasoning, is symptomatic of a widespread conformity that defers to “pragmatic” considerations rather than to common sense.

It is interesting, also, to consider in more detail the response of the corporate press.

1. Aryasura, The Marvelous Companion, Dharma Publishing, 1983, p.305
2. Clark, “Iraq: Why it was the wrong war on the wrong enemy for the wrong reasons,” The Times, October 23, 2003

United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the double veto a “travesty”. Then Clinton duly incited “friends of democratic Syria” to keep working for regime change, which was the object of the resolution. The copyright for this idea is held by the liberator of Libya, neo-Napoleonic French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said Paris was already working to create a NATOGCC “Friends of the Syrian People Group” in charge of implementing the Arab League’s regime change plan.

Right on cue, Paris puppet Burhan Ghalyun, the head of the Syrian National Council (SNC) – the opposition umbrella group – also summoned these countries “friendly to the Syrian people”. Everybody knows who they are; the US, Britain, France, Israel and GCC members Qatar and Saudi Arabia. With “friends” like these, the “Syrian people” certainly don’t need enemies.

Those ‘disgusting’ BRICS

United States ambassador to the UN Susan Rice – a top cheerleader of R2P, also known as humanitarian bombing – called the double veto “disgusting”.

Even the venerable stones of the Umayyad mosque in Damascus know that only Washington has the right to wield veto power at the UN – overwhelmingly to protect the state of Israel’s right to kill Palestinian men, women and children with tanks and shelling without bothering about pesky UN resolutions.¹

Russia, vocally – and China, silently – had been adamant for weeks; forget about a UN resolution for regime change in Syria, or worse yet, opening the doors for a Libya-style NATO humanitarian bombing.

Russia has its own geopolitical reasons to consider Syria a red line; Syria hosts Russia’s only naval base in the Mediterranean, in the port of Tartus; and Syria buys Russian weapons. But, in fact, all the five BRICS – plus the overwhelmingly majority of the developing world – are in synch; forget about regime change-enabling UN resolutions, promoted by the usual suspect Western trio US-Britain-France and – the summit of hypocrisy – devised by the “democratic” House of Saud and Qatar.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will be in Damascus this Tuesday to meet with President Bashar al-Assad and discuss a serious plan to try to end the bloodshed. Lavrov has calmly explained the reasons for the Russian veto.

He had sent Russian amendments to the draft resolution directly to Clinton; “The rationality and objectivity of these amendments should not cause anyone’s doubt.” But to no avail; the resolution remained “unilateral” – demanding nothing from Syrian anti-government armed groups. Lavrov stressed, “No president with self-respect, no matter how treated, will agree to surrender inhabited localities to armed extremists without resistance.” Imagine if Homs was in Texas.

Still, the SNC now holds Moscow and Beijing “responsible for the escalating acts of killing and genocide”, and facilitators of a “license to kill”. Lavrov is imperturbable; “We have repeatedly said that we are not protecting Assad but international law. The prerogative of the UN Security Council does not envision interference in internal processes.”

Homs: Who’s killing whom?

Syria’s UN ambassador Bashar Ja’afari strongly denied the opposition’s accusation of regime forces bombing the Khadiliya neighborhood in Homs with tanks and artillery and killing over 200 people – arguing that “no sensible person” would launch such an attack the night before the UN Security Council was discussing a resolution. Without any preliminary investigation, France called it a “massacre” and a “crime against humanity”. Like France’s performance during the Algerian war?

To understand what’s at stake, it’s crucial to keep in mind who’s defecting from the Syrian army. Syria’s top military – also members of the Ba’ath Party – are almost all Alawis, the folk Shi’ite sect (10% of the overall population). They are not defecting.

The defectors are overwhelmingly Sunni troops (70% of the overall population); they are forming militias, Libya-style, heavily infiltrated by mercenaries weaponized by the GCC, and fighting government troops. The government’s response has been to target the neighborhoods where the families of these defectors live. The center of Homs nowadays is controlled by the rebels.

So what’s really happening on the ground in Homs? Here are sections from a crucial e-mail sent by a trusted Syrian Christian source:

Many Syrians are ecstatic about the double veto but Homs is very worrying. The opposition spread news about a massacre just before the vote and they quoted numbers in the hundreds … unbelievably quoted by all news channels (all based on “activists”) without any verification, only to bring the number down to something like 33 later. They never showed any bombing or taking people under rubble or any injured people … just clean-bodied men with their hands and feet tied up and shot mostly once and only in their underwear. Whatever the Syrian government has in its arsenal it seems there are very intelligent bombs that can strip and tie up people then shoot them in the head!!

The thing that we know fully well is that there are no army presence in Homs. My parents left the city then came back Saturday morning on the day of the alleged massacre and there was nothing. They usually call a hotline (115) and ask if the roads are safe and security operator will tell you to come to Homs or not. This time they told them to come and indeed there was nothing to be seen or heard. This of course doesn’t mean that most of the city and particularly the old city is under the control of the gunmen. Our old neighborhood where I grew up (the Christian Bustan al-Diwan) was completely taken over by the gunmen. YouTube videos show how the FSA cleared the army roadblock in the previous neighborhood (Bab al-Dreib) and then proceeded to destroy the one guarding our neighborhood.

People in my neighborhood did not complain of any major harassment or problem, however the “revolutionaries” did indeed break into a couple of homes that their people left either days earlier or at the time, also into a school, Homs Newspaper (operated by the Orthodox church for more than 100 years) and a few other restaurants but no other complaints. I mean, considering what these FSA do to Alawites, then the Christians are really getting very fair treatment so far.

What many believe now is that the bodies shown tied up and shot in Khalidiya and which are alleged to be “men, women and children” killed by a bombardment of the Syrian army were nothing but kidnapped Syrian soldiers. Add to them kidnapped Alawites who were not liberated (or actually exchanged). When the FSA kidnap some people, Alawites started to kidnap in return to exchange the prisoners. This doesn’t always work and some people who weren’t “exchanged for” turned up dead in Khalidiya.

All in all up to this point there really isn’t any offensive by the Syrian army on the city. The rebels continue to attack other checkpoints. People are completely in the dark as to what the government is thinking regarding Homs. It’s devastating for me to see my neighborhood become another battleground and many of my friends leaving.

All this dovetails with an explanation by fine journalist Nir Rosen, author of the indispensable Aftermath: Following the Bloodshed of America’s Wars in the Muslim World; Homs is essentially a question of rebels seizing government checkpoints – and government forces shelling a few neighborhoods with mortars. According to Rosen:

There was no fighting in Homs, just shelling from these safe locations (from the point of view of the regime), suggesting they are unable to actually attack Khalidiya with regime fighters … No opposition fighters were killed in the attack. And up to 130 people in Khaldiyeh were killed and 800 wounded (like I said not fighters). Now that’s a lot of people but if you were watching the news … you would think that Homs was destroyed while in fact this attack can also be seen as a sign of the regime’s weakness in the city.

Compare this with my Syrian source worried that “people are completely in the dark as to what the government is thinking regarding Homs”.

Imagine an armed insurrection in a mid-sized city in the US; the whole world saw how peaceful Occupy Wall Street was dealt with by billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. The “disgusting” BRICS have made it clear; there will be no NATOGCC humanitarian bombing of Syria. But NATOGCC may be succeeding in its plan B: to plunge Syria into civil war.

• First published at Asia Times.

1. Here’s a partial summary of US vetoes at the UN

Essentially, the GCC created an Arab League group to monitor what’s going on in Syria. The Syrian National Council – based in North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member countries Turkey and France – enthusiastically supported it. It’s telling that Syria’s neighbor Lebanon did not.

When the over 160 monitors, after one month of enquiries, issued their report … surprise! The report did not follow the official GCC line – which is that the “evil” Bashar al-Assad government is indiscriminately, and unilaterally, killing its own people, and so regime change is in order.

The Arab League’s Ministerial Committee had approved the report, with four votes in favor (Algeria, Egypt, Sudan and GCC member Oman) and only one against; guess who, Qatar – which is now presiding the Arab League because the emirate bought their (rotating) turn from the Palestinian Authority.

So the report was either ignored (by Western corporate media) or mercilessly destroyed – by Arab media, virtually all of it financed by either the House of Saud or Qatar. It was not even discussed – because it was prevented by the GCC from being translated from Arabic into English and published in the Arab League’s website.

Until it was leaked. Here it is, in full.

The report is adamant. There was no organized, lethal repression by the Syrian government against peaceful protesters. Instead, the report points to shady armed gangs as responsible for hundreds of deaths among Syrian civilians, and over one thousand among the Syrian army, using lethal tactics such as bombing of civilian buses, bombing of trains carrying diesel oil, bombing of police buses and bombing of bridges and pipelines.

Once again, the official NATOGCC version of Syria is of a popular uprising smashed by bullets and tanks. Instead, BRICS members Russia and China, and large swathes of the developing world see it as the Syrian government fighting heavily armed foreign mercenaries. The report largely confirms these suspicions.

The Syrian National Council is essentially a Muslim Brotherhood outfit affiliated with both the House of Saud and Qatar – with an uneasy Israel quietly supporting it in the background. Legitimacy is not exactly its cup of green tea. As for the Free Syrian Army, it does have its defectors, and well-meaning opponents of the Assad regime, but most of all is infested with these foreign mercenaries weaponized by the GCC, especially Salafist gangs.

Still NATOGCC, blocked from applying in Syria its one-size-fits-all model of promoting “democracy” by bombing a country and getting rid of the proverbial evil dictator, won’t be deterred. GCC leaders House of Saud and Qatar bluntly dismissed their own report and went straight to the meat of the matter; impose a NATOGCC regime change via the UN Security Council.

So the current “Arab-led drive to secure a peaceful end to the 10-month crackdown” in Syria at the UN is no less than a crude regime change drive. Usual suspects Washington, London and Paris have been forced to fall over themselves to assure the real international community this is not another mandate for NATO bombing – a la Libya. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described it as “a path for a political transition that would preserve Syria’s unity and institutions”.

But BRICS members Russia and China see it for what it is. Another BRICS member – India – alongside Pakistan and South Africa, have all raised serious objections to the NATOGCC-peddled draft UN resolution.

There won’t be another Libya-style no fly zone; after all the Assad regime is not exactly deploying Migs against civilians. A UN regime change resolution will be blocked – again – by Russia and China. Even NATOGCC is in disarray, as each block of players – Washington, Ankara, and the House of Saud-Doha duo – has a different long-term geopolitical agenda. Not to mention crucial Syrian neighbor and trading partner Iraq; Baghdad is on the record against any regime change scheme.

So here’s a suggestion to the House of Saud and Qatar; since you’re so seduced by the prospect of “democracy” in Syria, why don’t you use all your American weaponry and invade in the dead of night – like you did to Bahrain – and execute regime change by yourselves?

•  First published at Asia Times.

Speaking Sunday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Russian and Chinese veto a “travesty,” while labeling the Security Council “neutered.”  American Ambassador Susan Rice, meanwhile, stated that she was “disgusted” by the veto.

On NBC Nightly News (2/4/12), Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell called the Security Council vote “just a terrible day for the United Nations and diplomacy.”  (“Diplomacy” in Washington speak, we see, entails strictly toeing the U.S. line.)

Not content with merely condemning the Security Council, the U.S. also began to plot an alternative means for intervention.

Secretary of State Clinton reassured that the U.S. would work with the Arab League to continue applying “immense pressure” on Syria, while adding pointblank that, “Assad must go.”  President Obama added much the same on Saturday, arguing that Mr. Assad had “lost all legitimacy to rule.”  (Apparently, the revealed targeting of funeral mourners in the C.I.A.’s drone campaign does not constitute the grounds on which one loses legitimacy.)

Such rhetoric, one will recall, mirrors that which presaged the NATO orchestrated demise of Gaddafi.  Of little surprise, then, that the Mossad connected Debkafile reported over the weekend that in the face of growing Russian resistance to foreign intervention, “The United States, the Europeans and the Gulf Arabs are likely to redouble their efforts to unseat Bashar Assad.”  And as if summoned on cue, the proverbial hawk Joseph Lieberman emerged on Sunday to float the idea of providing direct military support to the Free Syrian Army.

But as their plans to turn Syria into Libya 2.0 were initially impeded over the weekend, the pouting Washington elite quickly pivoted, directing their bitter ire towards a long favorite foe: Russia.

In the immediate wake of the Security Council vote, Ambassador Rise preceded to openly berate Russia on the Council floor for continuing to supply arms to the Syria government.  As she later told CNN, Russia and China “will have any future blood spilt on their hands.”  (Ms. Rice has no qualms with the blood spilt in U.S. client states like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and so on.  Nor, needless to say, does the U.S. have any reservations about Israeli apartheid.)

Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, on the other hand, argued on Monday, ahead of his Tuesday visit to Damascus, that such outbursts sounded “indecent and perhaps on the verge of hysterical.”  So much for that U.S.-Russia “reset.”

Of course, always eager to parrot the official U.S. line, the American media also quickly cast its scorn toward Russia.

As New York Times imperial messenger Thomas Friedman wrote (2/4/12), “The more Putin throws his support behind the murderous dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the more he looks like a person buying a round-trip ticket on the Titanic — after it has already hit the iceberg.”  (Friedman is the same man who, as President Bush searched into Putin’s very soul, encouraged his readers to “keep routin’ for Putin.”)

Yet amidst all this public sulking at its U.N. rebuff, the U.S. was ultimately able to extract a measure of revenge for Russia’s diplomatic intransigence.  For as massive protests broke out onto the streets in Russia on Saturday, the U.S. press pounced.

As NBC Nightly News (2/4/12) eagerly reported, a hundred thousand hit the streets of Moscow on Saturday calling for the “end of Putin’s rule.”

While on CBS Evening News (2/4/12), Elizabeth Palmer reported from Russia on the “tens of thousands protesting against Putin and a legacy of corruption.”

And as the Washington Post adoringly wrote on the protests (2/4/12): “The temperature was below zero, which only made the crowd more joyful as well as forceful, as if mere weather could prevent them from showing their disdain for Putin.”

Completely omitted from the network news broadcasts (in addition to many stalwart liberal sources, such as Democracy Now!), was the fact that tens of thousands also turned out in support of Putin.  For as the Los Angeles Times (2/4/12) critically noted, Putin continues to enjoy more than 50 percent support within the country, “especially among the working class outside Moscow.”

Yet unwilling to acknowledge (or perhaps unable to comprehend) that people would actually be willing to hit the streets on their own volition to support Putin, the American press posited ulterior motives.

Typical of the discrediting of the pro-Putin protesters, the Washington Post wrote:

The post office brought in busloads of its workers for the counter-rally, and teachers were recruited from points nearby.

One who chose not to show up was Yulia Konstantinova, a math teacher who turned down a request from her principal and joined the anti-Putin Bolotnaya march instead. “We’re sick and tired of pretending everything is fine,” she said. “It’s not true.”

Predictably enough, as the American press dutifully reported on the political division in Russia, and swooned over those voicing their dissent with Putin, it employed a universal blackout of coordinated protests in dozens of U.S. cities called in opposition to American policy towards Iran.  A bit hard to furnish war, I suppose, if one reveals any degree of popular discord.

But with the U.S. now openly lusting not only for Damascus, but Tehran as well, one ought to expect the blackout of internal U.S. dissent to continue.  Moreover, the swift and coordinated discrediting campaign levied against Russia for bucking Washington assures that the U.S. power elite remains firmly fixated on its anticipated imperial spoils.  Any and all obstacles will simply not be tolerated.  American imperial ambitions do not die easily.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

— George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair, 1903-1950)

For anyone in two minds about what is really going on in Syria, and whether President Assad, hailed a decade ago as “A Modern Day Attaturk”, has become the latest megalomaniacal despot to whose people a US-led posse of nations must deliver “freedom” with weapons of mass, home, people, nation and livelihood destruction, here is a salutary tale from modern history.

Have the more recent saber-rattlings against Syria* been based on US-UK government papers only discovered in 2003, and since air-brushed (or erroneously omitted) from even BBC timelines on that country?

In late 2003, the year of the Iraq invasion, Matthew Jones, a Reader in International History at London’s Royal Holloway College, discovered “frighteningly frank” documents — 1957 plans between then UK Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and then President Dwight Eisenhower endorsing: “a CIA-MI6 plan to stage fake border incidents as an excuse for an invasion (of Syria) by Syria’s pro-western neighbours.”

At the heart of the plan was the assassination of the perceived power behind then President Shukri al-Quwatli. Those targeted were Abd al-Hamid Sarraj, Head of Military Intelligence; Afif al-Bizri, Chief of Syrian General Staff: and Khalid Bakdash, who headed the Syrian Communist Party.

The document was drawn up in Washington in September of 1957:

In order to facilitate the action of liberative (sic) forces, reduce the capabilities of the regime to organize and direct its military actions … to bring about the desired results in the shortest possible time, a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals.

Their removal should be accomplished early in the course of the uprising and intervention, and in the light of circumstances existing at the time.

In light of President Assad’s current allegations of foreign forces, interventions and cross-border incursions, this document contains some fascinating, salutary phrases:

Once a political decision has been reached to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria, CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main (sic) incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals.

Incidents should not be concentrated in Damascus … care should be taken to avoid causing key leaders of the Syrian regime to take additional personal protection measures.

Further, a “necessary degree of fear … frontier incidents and (staged) border clashes”, would “provide a pretext for intervention” by Iraq and Jordan – then still under British mandate.

Syria was to be “made to appear as sponsor of plots, sabotage and violence directed against neighbouring governments … the CIA and SIS should use … capabilitites in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

Incursions into Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon would involve “sabotage, national conspiracies, and various strong arms activities”, were, advised the document, to be blamed on Damascus.

In late December 2011 an opposition “Syria National Council” was announced, to “liberate the country”.  Representatives met with Hilary Clinton. There now seems to be a US – endorsed “Syrian Revolutionary Council.”

The Eisenhower-Macmillan plan was for funding of the “Free Syria Committee” and “arming of political factions with paramilitary or other actionist capabilities”, within Syria.

CIA-MI6 planned fomenting internal uprisings and replacing the Ba’ath Communist-leaning government with a Western, user-friendly one. Expecting this to be met by public hostility, they planned to “probably need to rely first on repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power.”

The document was signed off in both London and Washington. It was, wrote Macmillan in his diary, “a most formidable report” — a report which was “withheld even from British Chiefs of Staff …”

Washington and Whitehall had become concerned at Syria’s increasingly pro-Soviet, rather than pro-Western sympathies, and the Ba’ath (Pan Arab) and Communist party alliance, also largely allied within the Syrian army.

However, even political concerns were trumped by Syria then controlling a main pipeline from the Western bonanza of Iraq’s oil fields in those pre-Saddam Hussein days.

Briefly put, in 1957 Syria allied with Moscow (which included an agreement for military and economic aid) also recognized China – and then as now, the then Soviet Union warned the West against intervening in Syria.

Syria is unchanged as an independent minded country, and the loyalties remain. It broadly continues to be the cradle of the Pan Arab ideal of Ba’athism, standing alone since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In 1957, this independent mindedness caused Loy Henderson, a Senior State Department official, to say that “the present regime in Syria had to go …”

Ultimately, the plan was not used since British mandate or not, neighbouring countries refused to play. However, the project overtly bears striking similarity to the reality of events over the last decade in Syria – and the region.

In a near 1957 re-run, Britain’s Foreign Minister, William Hague has said President Assad “will feel emboldened” by the UN Russia-China vote in Syria’s favour.

Hilary (“We came, we saw, he died”) Clinton, has called for “friends of a democratic Syria”, to unite and rally against the Assad government:

“We need to work together to send them a clear message: you cannot hold back the future at the point of a gun”, said the woman filmed purportedly watching the extrajudicial, illegal assassination of who may be, or may be not, Osma Bin Laden and others –but certainly people were murdered by US illegal invaders at the point of lots of guns.

Supremely ironically, she was speaking in Munich (5 February) historically “the birth place of the Nazi party.”

The Russia-China veto at the UN on actions against Syria has been condemned by the US, varyingly as “disgusting”, ‘shameful”, “deplorable”, “a travesty.”

Eye opening is the list of US vetoes to be found here. Jaw dropping double standards can only be wondered at (again.).

Perhaps the bottom line is that in 1957, Iraq’s oil was at the top of the agenda, of which Syria held an important key. Today, it is Iran’s, and as Michel Chossudovsky notes so succinctly: “The road to Tehran is through Damascus.”

*  2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2008, 2011, 2012.

Such an award could be called the Lebon Prize (reversing Nobel).

If there was such an award, the statements of European and American leaders in the immediate aftermath of Russia and China’s veto of the Security Council resolution to end the killing in Syria suggest two most obvious nominees for it.

One is William Hague, Britain’s Foreign Secretary.

In the House of Commons he pronounced Bashar al-Assad’s regime to be “doomed” because there is “no way it can recover its credibility.” That may very well be the case in the long term, but in my view that Hague statement was somewhat naive at the time he made it. For its short to mid-term survival at the time of writing, and unless visiting Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is seeking to engineer Bashar al-Assad’s departure from office in a face-saving way that will protect Russia’s interests, the Syrian regime doesn’t need credibility in the outside world. It needs only enough weapons and the will to go on killing its own people. (That said there can be no doubt that Bashar al-Assad and/or his Alawite generals took the Russian and Chinese vetoes as a green light to escalate the killing. Also to be noted is that Bashar al-Assad was not the only Arab leader to draw a particular conclusion from Mubarak’s downfall. “If our people take to the streets demanding regime change, shoot them!”)

But the particular Hague statement that prompts my suggestion that he be nominated for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy was this one. By exercising their veto “Russia and China have placed themselves on the wrong side of Arab and international opinion.”

The obvious implication is that it’s not good politics and policy to be on the wrong side of that opinion. Really? Then how do we explain the fact that all the governments of the Western world, led by America, are on the wrong side of it because of their support for the Zionist state of Israel right or wrong – unending occupation, on-going ethnic cleansing and all? There is a one-word answer. Hypocrisy.

The second most obvious nominee for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy is Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the UN. In condemning the Russian and Chinese vetoes, she said, “For months this Council has been held hostage by a couple of members.”

Given that for the Security Council has been held hostage for decades by American vetoes to protect Israel from being called to account for its crimes, that Rice statement is – what I can say without resorting to use of the “F” word? – hypocrisy most naked and taken to its highest level

No doubt readers will have other suggestions, probably many, for nominations for a Lebon Prize for hypocrisy.

Hague also condemned China and Russia for “betraying the Syrian people”. It apparently doesn’t matter that the British and all other Western governments have been betraying the Palestinians for decades. There really is no end and no limit to the hypocrisy.

1. The Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway, while the other prizes are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. Baruch Aba Shalev, author of a book on the Nobel Prize, has said “the Nobel Prize has come to be regarded as the best-known and most prestigious award available

In recent years, particularly since the onset of the Great Recession, it has become clear to many Americans that their country is composed of two different societies with clashing interests — a very small minority in possession of great wealth and power, and everyone else, with some getting by and many falling by the wayside.

As a consequence, large numbers of people now perceive to one degree or another that big money not only manipulates most elections but influences a great many of the politicians and bureaucrats who craft legislation and execute the policies of the U.S. government. Awareness is spreading that crony capitalism —the corporations, banks and Wall Street — controls the economic system which shapes the political system where decisions are made.

But the beat goes on, of course, until mass consciousness transforms into mass action.

In domestic politics, 2012 opened with the Republican Party’s three-ring circus in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, the initial contests  to select a presidential nominee. On display is the most bizarre collection of clowns in recent political history. At this stage the battle is between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney, who is still favored for now. The struggle within the GOP between ultra right and ultra right “lite” will be determined soon, signaling the start of the best election money can buy.

Which ever party wins in November — and we think President Barack Obama will be reelected — the contest is not between right and left but between right/far right and center right. No matter what the result, progressive change will not be the product. The best outcome might simply be keeping the crazies at bay.

In international affairs, the year opened with U.S. cannon shots aimed just above the heads of America’s multifarious enemies, identified as being mainly in Asia and the Middle East, warning them not to mess with Uncle Sam, as though they were about to.

As the shots reverberated, the American people were told:

Good morning, everybody. The United States of America is the greatest force for freedom and security that the world has ever known. And in no small measure, that’s because we’ve built the best-trained, best-led, best-equipped military in history — and as Commander-in-Chief, I’m going to keep it that way….

These “reassuring” hyper-nationalist words from the Commander-In-Chief were expressed January 5 during a visit to the Pentagon to explain Washington’s dangerous new war policy. A secondary purpose of the plan is to facilitate Pentagon spending cuts in the next decade, but future allocations will not drop one penny below George W. Bush’s bloated war budgets.

Abruptly, the U.S. is supposed to be confronted with a “threat” from China, necessitating that the Pentagon surround that country with even more of its far superior  weaponry, more troops, battle fleets heading in closer proximity, surveillance aircraft, space weapons and long range nuclear missiles.

All this is part of Obama’s recent “pivot” to Asia, as though we ever left, the main goal being to weaken China within its own natural sphere of interest in order to secure Washington’s need to remain global top dog. China is no military threat to the U.S. today or in the future, given the Pentagon’s two-decade head start in all the technologies of conflict, and the fact that America’s war budget is, and will remain, many times that of China.

In addition, there seems to be an imminent “threat” to our way of life from Iran, as well as the continuing “threat” to U.S. democracy from some poor tribes in Afghanistan.

Actually, according to “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense,” the document explaining the new war plan, the U.S. faces additional “threats” throughout the world, specifically including (aside from those mentioned): Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and  “elsewhere” (our guess is Africa, where Obama’s already inserting troops). Primary regions to worry about, says the Pentagon plan, are South Asia, Middle East, Asia-Pacific, Northeast Asia, Eurasia, Southeast and East Asia, plus future, unforeseen demands.

Despite all these “threats,” which are largely invented to justify war spending and keep the American people supportive of the militarism that now pervades our society, Obama twice mentioned in his speech the “tide of war” is receding. But if that is true, why station 40,000 troops in countries around Iraq after withdrawal? Why deploy attack-ready bombers and Navy aircraft carriers near Iran? Why keep nearly 100,000 troops in Afghanistan and make demands on Kabul to allow thousands more to remain indefinitely after the planned “withdrawal” in 2014?

The U.S.-Israeli crusade against Iran may result in an attack this year. The New York Times reported January 12 on an “accelerating covert campaign against Iran consisting of assassinations and bombings. The campaign, which experts believe is being carried out mainly by Israel, apparently claimed its latest victim January 11 when a bomb killed a 32-year-old nuclear scientist in Tehran’s morning rush hour.”

On January 14, Iran charged the U.S. and Israel were behind the scientist’s murder. That same day the Wall Street Journal reported that the White House was worried that Israel will attack Iran before the U.S. gives a go-ahead. But four days later the Times reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak declared “any decision on a possible pre-emptive military strike on Iranian targets was ‘very far off.’” Stay tuned, the year’s just started.

The American people are supposed to be safer this new year because President Obama just signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act allocating $662 billion in military spending in 2012 (plus an equal amount for other “national security” purposes in other budgets).

Civil liberties groups criticize the Pentagon bill because it also authorizes an “indefinite detention” clause that is one more step toward a police state. Obama’s civil liberties record is worse than that of his predecessor because he retained Bush’s excesses and added his own.

A few days after Obama’s bragging about the “best-trained” military, the Pentagon and the secretaries of defense and state were forced to publicly apologize in the wake of an international uproar over circulation of a video showing four U.S. Marines jovially urinating on the corpses of Taliban suspects. A couple of days later a U.S. military legal officer recommended that PFC Bradley Manning face a court martial for transferring documents including evidence of U.S. war crimes to the whistle blowing website WikiLeaks. And so it goes, day by day into 2012.

Washington maintains that the Great Recession ended in June 2009 and the economy is on the mend. Stock prices are up, corporate profits are zooming, and the wealthy are exhausting the nation’s supply of money bags.

The corporations, banks and Wall St. have been abundantly helped through the tough times by the Obama Administration, but little help has trickled down to average working families. Recession conditions will continue in 2012 for much of the “bottom” 80% of the U.S. population, including high unemployment, more foreclosures, and stagnant wages. Half the families in our Land of Opportunity are low income or poor.

Early in January, the new Pew Research Center survey of 2,048 adults contained a most unusual result. It found that 66% of the people in our “classless society” believe there are “very strong or strong conflicts between the rich and the poor” in the U.S. This is big news, evidently based on growing comprehension of what are, in fact, class differences.

The top 1% now possess more than 50% of all privately held assets in the U.S. (Assets are everything you own including cash, car and house minus debts.) The top 20% possess 85% of all assets. This means the bottom 80% of the people have accumulated only 15% of the assets (including the bottom 40%, who have no assets at all because they owe more than they own).

However, there is one aspect of our system that is said to prove beyond doubt that all Americans — rich and poor alike — are actually equal in our society where it really counts. We speak of each citizen’s right to vote in the quadrennial selection of a Commander-in-Chief, known popularly as the presidential election.

President Obama has transformed his rhetoric into that of liberal populism for the duration of the campaign. He now talks about having government intervene to help reduce inequality and help build a more “equitable” society, not that it’s going to happen. He now even tut-tuts about crony capitalism.

Obama sure sounds even more progressive than when he was a “change-we-can-believe-in” candidate in 2008. This was before governing as a center-right patron of the ruling establishment for the last three years, ignoring poor, low income and minority Americans as though they didn’t exist, initiating a completely failed program for the millions who have been foreclosed, and changing little to nothing, even in his first two years when the Democrats controlled the House as well as the Senate.

Probable opponent Romney has undergone a similar opportunist transformation in the opposite direction in order to obtain the GOP nomination. He’s now campaigning as a right/far right populist this year after governing Massachusetts as a health care moderate conservative and who earlier supported abortion, and gun control, among many flip-flops. Gingrich has always been an ultra-reactionary hypocrite going back to the early 1990s in the House, and hasn’t seen the need to adopt a new persona for 2012.

The main reason we believe Obama will be reelected has nothing to do with his record as president. It is that the Republicans have gone so far to the political right, and have acted like such obstructionist buffoons in Congress, that the crucial independent vote will lean toward the center-right. The Democratic leadership hopes Gingrich becomes the candidate because he’ll campaign as a far rightist while they fear Romney may moderate some of his rhetoric. But even so, Obama’s nearly $1 billion war chest should finish him off.

Assuming Obama does return to power, we know now, as in the 2008 campaign, that a “liberal” will not be occupying the Oval Office for the next four years. The pro-99% rhetoric will stop at the second term White House door.

American politics is quite different today than when the Democratic Party adopted a center left configuration for a few years in the 1930s and 1960s. However, in terms of the gradations of political “evil,” the center right is a “lesser evil” to the right/far right, given the two conservative options for electing a president offered the American people by those who run the show, though it’s a dismal commentary on democracy.

In the present era it is certainly legitimate to worry about the direction American politics is heading domestically, coupled with a probable global future of more wars, more poverty and environmental disaster. We worry deeply about the problems that will confront our, and all, today’s children and grandchildren.

However, we retain unshakable confidence in what the masses of people can accomplish under difficult conditions when they become united, organized, disciplined and committed to the struggle for a better, equal and cooperative society, and a peaceful, environmentally sustainable world.

This option for substantive transformation beckons. It is the objective requirement of our times if we are to avoid a catastrophe down the road. A decisive turn to the left is essential and possible. It could revolutionize society and change the world to benefit all the people.

What we are told is what Panetta-Petraeus, and the weapons manufacturers instruct the media to say:

– U.S. combat forces are surging in the Middle East. Earlier this week the “American carrier Carl Vinson joined the carrier Stennis in the Arabian Sea, giving commanders major naval and air assets in case Iran carries out its recent threats to close the Strait of Hormuz.”

– Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis (chief of U.S. Central Command) warned that he needed additional forces to deal with Iran and other potential threats.

– 15,000 troops are stationed in Kuwait joining the others that are there. This includes two new units — Army infantry brigades and a helicopter unit. General Mattis said that we should not take this as a build-up to war.

With the recent news of another assassination of an Iranian nuclear scientist, carried out by Israeli forces (a.k.a. U.S. special forces), we are told that Israel is “pushing” the U.S. toward war. To lend credence to this, pundits last week on CNN stated that in terms of war-making, that Israel could not act alone — that it, in fact, needs the U.S. Air Force to carry out a war and attack on Iran. It is very clear to most Americans that Israel cannot carry out a war by itself — that the U.S. is involved in every decision that affects Israeli actions against Iran, and that the Pentagon began planning and training for it years ago.

The attacks on Iran and Syria are imminent even though Russia is asking the U.S. and Iran to abandon the militant rhetoric. China, upon Geitner’s recent request during his visit there this last week, has not “significantly” reduced its Iranian oil imports. Turkey has also requested the U.S. resume diplomatic efforts.¹ The U.S.’s commitment to destabilize every Muslim country in the Middle East is almost complete. Iran and Syria are among the last remnants of independent nation-states in that area of the world, with lackeys such as Saudi Arabia, and a handful of other client states prepared to do whatever the U.S. demands. It will be decades before any Muslim country will have the economic and military independence it would take to prevent the U.S. from intervening when and where it chooses.

What the U.S. media doesn’t discuss is why we seek to destabilize the entire Arab world. The reason is obvious: by destroying the infrastructure of countries that have valuable natural resources, the U.S. and Europe ensure the stability and price-fixing capacities of U.S. and European oil interests as well as artificial control over other natural resources worldwide. It is not necessary for us to steal Iraq’s or Iran’s oil. By destroying their ability to compete on the world market, our oil companies are free to set whatever prices they want, and can insist on a regulation-free environment within which to maneuver.

By manufacturing a non-existent threat, and engaging in another unwarranted, one-sided war, Obama can once again bow down to corporate America, pretend to be concerned for the welfare of the American people, and do nothing to control the war mongers.

The American people are so marginalized and disenfranchised that there is simply nothing that can be done to stop this madness. Just as we sat by and watched the destruction of Libya, the bailout of Wall Street, the theft of jobs, money and houses from right under our noses, the latest imperial assault is a done deal.

This will be a vicious war with the U.S. utilizing its “tactical” nuclear weapons (light weight nuclear devices and also drones) to destroy the Iranian nuclear plants underground.²

This represents yet another escalation of weaponry, just as did Mustard Gas in WWI; as bombing, conflagration and destruction of entire cities during WWII, culminating in nuclear war; as Agent Orange did in the American War against Vietnam; and torture and drones have in these wars in the Middle East.

We have become apt at war; we excel at it. If only we could be as apt at peace.

1. “US military operation against Iran would be a grave mistake,” RT, 1-14-12
2. Global Security describes “tactical” weapons:

   “The B61-11 can penetrate and detonate below the earth’s surface, creating a massive shock wave capable of destroying underground targets. In tests the bomb penetrates only 20 feet into dry earth, even when dropped from altitudes above 40,000 feet. But even this shallow penetration before detonation allows a much higher proportion of the explosion to be transferred into ground shock relative to a surface burst. It is not able to counter targets deeply buried under granite rock. Moreover, it has a high yield, in the hundreds of kilotons. If used in North Korea, the radioactive fallout could drift over nearby countries such as Japan.” (“Info for the B61-11 Earth Penetrating Weapons”:

   http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/systems/b61-11.htm)

   Chossudovsky, Michel, ” ‘Tactical Nuclear Weapons’ against Afghanistan?,” Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG), globalresearch.ca,  12-5-11

   EXCERPT:
   The US Air Force is using GBU-28 “bunker buster bombs” capable of creating large scale underground explosions.  The official story is that these bombs are intended to target “cave and tunnel complexes” in mountainous areas in southern Afghanistan, used as a hideaway by Osama.

   Dubbed by the Pentagon as “the Big Ones”, the GBUs (“guided bomb unit”) are 5000lb laser guided bombs with improved BLU-113 warheads, capable of penetrating  several meters of reinforced concrete. The BLU-113 is the most powerful conventional “earth penetrating warhead.”

   While the Pentagon’s “Big Ones” are classified as “conventional weapons”, the official statements fail to mention that the same “bunker buster bombs” launched from a B-52, a B-2 stealth bomber or an F-16 aircraft can also be equipped with a nuclear device. The B61-11 is the ” nuclear version” of its  ”conventional” BLU-113 counterpart. The B61-11 was developed from the old “conventional” B61-7 “gravity bomb.”

   While in the case of these “bunker buster bombs”, the distinction between “nuclear” and ”conventional” warheads is not always brought out in official statements, the impacts of the ”nuclear version” on civilians are far more devastating, in view of the toxic radioactive fallout over a large area.