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.

“Everything that the American troops have done in Iraq–all the fighting and all the dying, the bleeding and the building, and the training and the partnering–all of it has led to this moment of success,” Obama said. “[W]e’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq, with a representative government that was elected by its people.”

Such claims are a lie. None of this rhetoric can disguise the terrible waste of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq–as many as 1 million Iraqis dead, millions more driven from their homes, along with 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed, 32,000 wounded and nearly $1 trillion gone.

Obama’s claims about America’s “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq are Orwellian. In reality, the U.S. war and occupation further wrecked an already devastated country, left it in a shambles rather than rebuild it and stoked sectarianism between Iraq’s three main groups–Kurds, Shia Muslims and Sunni Muslims.

The U.S. already precipitated one civil war between Sunnis and Shias in 2006. And now, sectarian conflicts are threatening to explode again.

Shortly after the U.S. withdrawal, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shia, attempted to arrest Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni. Hashimi fled to the Kurdish region for sanctuary. Sunni Salafists, who view Shias as infidels, have launched a wave of attacks that killed scores of Shia during their religious holiday of Arbaeen.

Post-occupation Iraq may be poised to descend into three-cornered warfare.

In the 1970s, Iraqis–though living under the brutal rule of Saddam Hussein’s regime–had achieved economic development and living standards on a par with Greece.

Over the last three decades, the U.S. has wrecked the country.

The U.S. launched the 1991 Gulf War to prevent Iraq from becoming a regional power that could threaten American control over the Middle East and its strategic oil reserves. The first Gulf War killed 300,000 Iraqis and destroyed the country’s infrastructure. Afterward, sanctions crippled Iraq’s economy, prevented reconstruction of the country, and led to the deaths of as many as 1.5 million more people.

In 2003, the Bush administration justified its invasion of the country with fabricated claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. In reality, Bush hoped the invasion would begin a series of regime changes in the region, including in Iran and Syria. With allied regimes in place in these countries, the U.S. would be able to dominate the region, control access to oil and thereby assert power over its international rivals, especially China.

The invasion quickly succeeded in toppling Saddam Hussein. But in short order, the Iraqi resistance to occupation destroyed Bush’s imperial fantasies.

Nevertheless, the U.S. occupation inflicted a terrible price on Iraqis. The Lancet medical journal estimated that between the invasion in March 2003 and June 2006, there were 650,000 civilian deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the war. Opinion Research Business, a British polling agency, used the Lancet‘s methodology to estimate over a million civilian deaths between March 2003 and August 2007.

Far from rebuilding Iraq as promised, Iraq remains in worse shape today, eight years after the invasion, than it was Saddam Hussein.

Outside of the Kurdish north, most Iraqis still go without regular electricity and don’t have reliable supplies of potable water. The Iraqi economy is in disastrous shape, with sky-high levels of unemployment and poverty. Journalist Juan Cole reports that the number of Iraqis living in slums jumped from 17 percent before the occupation to 50 percent today.

Instead of leaving behind a stable democracy responsive to its people, the U.S. established a corrupt state similar to that in Lebanon. Kurdish, Sunni and Shia ruling classes compete, via their political parties, in a three-way battle for the spoils of the national government. According to Transparency International, Iraq’s new government is the eighth-most corrupt in the world.

Perhaps the single-worst aspect of the entire legacy of occupation is the sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism that the U.S. consciously stoked and then used as the basis of the country’s new political system.

Iraq had a history of ethnic and religious oppression–though nominally secular, Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime was predominantly Sunni. It repressed Kurdish aspirations for self-determination, and crushed Kurdish and Shia uprisings at the end of the first Gulf War.

Iraq, however, did not have a history of mass sectarianism and ethnic cleansing. But the U.S. occupation magnified and militarized these divisions, eventually triggering a full-blown civil war between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad during 2006.

Iraq’s three major groups–Shia, Sunni and Kurds–reacted differently to the 2003 invasion.

The Sunni ruling class saw the U.S. war as an attack on its historic control over the country–confirmed by the occupation authorities’ “de-Baathification” program that hit Sunnis the hardest–and it went into resistance right away. The Kurdish ruling class, on the other hand, saw the invasion as a chance to consolidate its autonomous zone in the North, established after the first Gulf War.

The Shia ruling class and its religious parties Dawa and the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) tried to use the invasion to gain control of the new government. Since the Shia were a majority of Iraq’s population, Dawa and the ISCI pressed hard for elections to consolidate their dominance–which encouraged Sunnis to view them with hostility. Only the Shia nationalist Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army organized protests against the occupation.

When the U.S. targeted Sadr and his followers with repression, it raised the possibility of an Arab opposition uniting Sunnis and Shia against the occupation. In response, the U.S. turned to the oldest trick in the imperialist book–divide and conquer.

When the U.S. appointed up an Interim Governing Council, it used the Lebanese model, assigning each community representatives in proportion to their percentage of the population. But the pressure continued for elections. When they came, the U.S. had designed them in a fashion that cemented the religious and ethnic divisions in Iraqi society. As author Nir Rosen wrote:

Iraq’s election law itself seemed designed to promote civil war. Although the diverse country is divide into 18 province, it had only one electoral district…Ethnic and religious blocs preferred one district because they were nationally known, and they would be able to avoid challengers who had genuine grassroots local support.

Faced with impending defeat, the Sunni elite called for a boycott of the elections, which culminated in the victory for a succession of Shia-dominated governments. Sunni Salafist forces organized in various formations, including Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The Salafists staged a series of bombings and attacks on Shia civilians. Even the Sadrists turned against the Sunnis then.

A civil war between Shia and Sunni exploded in 2006, with Baghdad as the chief battleground.

Instead of using its occupation forces to stop the conflict, the U.S. fueled it. Washington’s Ambassador to Iraq, John Negroponte, had made his mark during the Reagan administration, backing death squads in Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua against left-wing movements and governments.

Negroponte implemented the so-called “Salvador Option” of backing Shia death squads against the Sunni resistance. He encouraged the Shia ISCI party to incorporate its militia, the Badr Brigades, into the Interior Ministry’s security forces. He then encouraged them to target not only the Salafists, but also the Sunni resistance itself.

The Shia-dominated Badr Bridgades and sections of Sadr’s Mahdi Army launched a massive counter-attack against Sunnis in Baghdad. Entire neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed.

In the end, according to the UN Refugee Agency, the fighting drove 4.7 million from their homes. Over 2 million mostly Sunnis fled the country, half of them to Syria, and another 2 million were internally displaced.

“There is no national identity any longer,” Ghassan al-Attiyah, an Iraqi political scientist and commentator, told journalist Patrick Cockburn. “Iraqis are either Sunni, Shia or Kurd.”

Negroponte and the U.S. had another twist in store. In 2007, the U.S. made overtures to sections of the Sunni elite–as part of the so-called “surge” of troops into Iraq–with the aim of exploiting divisions between the broader Sunni resistance and the Salafist groups. Over the protests of the Maliki government, the U.S. hired 100,000 Sunni resistance fighters and paid them $300 a month to form the Awakening Councils to fight a proxy war against the Salafists.

U.S. policies enflamed the sectarian conflict not only in Iraq, but across the Middle East.

The U.S. had planned to move on from Iraq to take down the Shia-dominated regime in Iran and Iran’s allies in power in Syria. But bogged down by the Iraqi resistance and the civil war, the U.S. hand in the Middle East was growing weaker. Iran gradually became as influential in Iraq as the U.S. itself.

The U.S. responded by raising the specter of a “Shia Crescent,” headquartered in Iran and extending through a Shia-dominated Iraq to Syria and the forces of Hezbollah in Lebanon. As Nir Rosen wrote, “The Bush administration contributed to regional sectarianism, seeking to bolster the so-called ‘moderate Sunni regimes’ (dictatorships like Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, viewed as moderate because they collaborated with Israel and the United States) against Iran or Hezbollah.”

U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia were only too happy to respond to the call for a network of Sunni states aligned with the U.S. against Iran and its influence in Iraq. The Saudis, along with the U.S. and Turkey, poured money into Iraqiya, an Iraqi party led by the secular Shia Ayad Allawi, but which had won 80 percent of the Sunni vote in recent elections. Iran, on the other hand, backed the Shia formations, from ISCI to Dawa and the Sadrists.

The battle over control of the Iraqi state came to a head in the 2010 parliamentary elections. Because of disagreements among them, the Shia parties didn’t put up candidates as part of a united slate, and Iraqiya was able to win the largest block of seats in parliament. Nevertheless, Maliki was able to unite the Shia parties to form a government.

The Sadrists agreed to participate–but on the condition that Maliki refuse to renegotiate the Status of Forces Agreement that the Bush administration had struck with the Iraqi government in 2008. Under the agreement, the U.S. was required to withdraw completely from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Despite pressure from the Obama administration to allow some number of U.S. military troops to remain in Iraq, with immunity from prosecution, Maliki refused to go along, and the U.S. was forced to pull its last soldiers out of Iraq in the middle of the night on December 18.

With the U.S. left with only a force of mercenaries in Iraq working for the State Department out of the giant Baghdad embassy, the situation in Iraq has reached a new stage–and the sectarian conflict threatens to explode once again into civil war.

Each of the sections of Iraqi ruling class is angling for full or partial control over the state, leadership of Iraq’s 900,000 military troops and police, and access to the country’s huge oil revenues.

The Kurdish ruling class, represented by Masoud Barzani of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, aims to consolidate its autonomous province and seize control of the contested city of Kirkuk, with its large oil reserves. Sunni politicians, represented in parliament by Allawi’s Irakiya party, want to establish a Sunni autonomous zone. Meanwhile, Shia leaders in Nuri al-Maliki’s coalition government aim to consolidate their rule over the country as a whole.

These schisms have detonated a political crisis.

Less than 24 hours after U.S. forces withdrew, Maliki, responding to an assassination attempt, ordered the arrest of Hashimi, the Sunni vice president of the coalition government, on terrorism charges mainly relating to the 2006-07 period. Hashimi fled to the autonomous Kurdish territory, where he remains. Maliki’s forces were able to arrest the vice president’s bodyguards, who were coerced into confessing to terrorist activities on national television.

Thousands of Sunnis have protested in various cities against the threatened arrest of Hashimi. The Iraqiya Party is now boycotting parliament and cabinet meetings to protest what it describes as Maliki’s attempt to consolidate dictatorial power, particularly over the security forces. Iraqiya is calling for Maliki to step down or face a no confidence vote.

At the same time, Sunni Salafist guerillas have launched a wave of attacks on Shia civilians and religious pilgrims. The Salafists have killed 145 Shias on a pilgrimage during the Arbaeen holidays. In one horrific attack on January 5, Salafists killed 78 pilgrims in Nasiriyah.

It is hard to predict whether the political crisis will descend into a full-blown civil war, but there are certainly dynamics driving in that direction.

For their part, the Salafists are intent on causing this. Leaders among the Sunni, Shia and Kurdish ruling classes also have an interest in playing the sectarian card to divert the anger of a desperate working class and urban poor onto other religious and ethnic groups.

The flashpoints are clear. Maliki’s attempt to consolidate a Shia state is a provocation to both Sunnis and Kurds. As Nir Rosen writes, “Government buildings are decorated with Shiite flags, banners and posters, and these can be seen even on Iraqi Army and Police vehicles and checkpoints. Not only is there no separation of church and state, there is no separation of state and sect.”

The Sunni elite’s demand for a Sunni autonomous zone could lead to another round of ethnic cleansing. Any such zone would contain a significant Shia minority who would be second-class citizens. No doubt the Salafists would take the opportunity to target the Shia, and this would provoke counter-attacks on Sunni minorities in predominantly Shia areas.

The Sunni Awakening Councils could also turn against the Shia government. The U.S., which had been bankrolling the Awakening Councils, has pressured Maliki into continue the payments and incorporating the councils into the Iraqi military. But Maliki has only hired one-sixth of these fighters. The well-armed Awakening Councils could be the basis of Sunni military attacks on Maliki’s ramshackle army.

Meanwhile, the long-simmering conflict between Arab and Kurdish rulers in Iraq could explode over control of the northern city of Kirkuk. Kirkuk sits on key oil reserves that would be a bonanza for whoever rules over it. A long-running, low-intensity conflict between Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and Arabs could reignite at any time.

On the other hand, there are interests and dynamics that could prevent the slide toward civil war.

The Shia, Sunni and Kurdish ruling classes have a stake in maintaining access to the national state and its oil profits. If the conflict goes too far, this would undermine their ability to continue to enrich themselves through state office. As journalist Patrick Cockburn wrote:

Disaster may come, but perhaps not yet. Iraqi politics can be misleading because, with the country so violent at the best of times, furious political confrontations do not necessarily lead to all-out conflict. Each side has a lot to lose from the final disintegration of the state.

Sunni rulers also recognize that they lost the last battle with Shia forces, and that they would likely lose any fight with either the Kurds, who have their own military forces in the Peshmerga, or the Shia, who control Iraqi military as well as a network of their own militias.

Among the Iraqi masses, there is also a deep weariness after three decades of war, sanctions, occupation and civil war. There is mass discontent with the entire government and distrust of national political parties that are widely perceived as corrupt, and only out to stuff their own pockets with government cash.

But no national political force has emerged to galvanize a united resistance among workers and urban poor against the government and the sectarian and chauvinist parties that dominate it. At various points, Iraqi oil workers seemed to point a way forward, but they have yet to create a national union movement nor a political party of their own that can break out of the stranglehold of communalist politics.

The U.S. and regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia will also be a factor in whether or not Iraq erupts in another civil war.

Each side in Iraq is weak in important ways, and so it looks to international sponsors for money and support. The Kurds look to the U.S. The Sunnis look to Saudi Arabia. And the Shia look to Iran and Syria. Thus, the growing schisms between the U.S. and the Sunni regimes it is allied with on the one hand, and Iran and its Shia allies on the other, will rebound into Iraq.

The U.S. remains the key player in all this. It has suffered a major defeat by having been forced to withdraw its military forces from Iraq. As a result, Iran has emerged as the principal victor of the Iraq war, with increased influence in the region. It now has a government dominated by Shia parties in control of Iraq to add to its historic relationship with the regime in Syria and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The U.S. also faces a threat from below in the form of the Arab Revolutions, which have toppled two U.S. allies in Tunisia and Egypt and shaken other regimes in Washington’s network of Sunni monarchies and dictatorships.

But the U.S. is determined to shore up its declining influence in the region. It wants to maintain its power in Iraq itself. It still retains a large military base in the country, otherwise known as the U.S. Embassy. This facility is the size of 80 football fields and employs 16,000 staff, 5,000 of whom are military contractors. The U.S. hopes to be the broker between the various forces inside Iraq, using its alliance with the Sunnis and Kurds to prevent the full consolidation of a Shia state aligned with Iran.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is escalating its conflict with Iran, using the cover of Iran supposedly developing–does this sound familiar?–nuclear weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s allies Israel and Saudi Arabia are also important actors in a conflict that revolves around the same imperial interests at stake in the invasion of Iraq–control of Middle East oil and geopolitical dominance.

Thus, the sectarian conflict that the U.S. stoked in Iraq is being reproduced on a regional level–with the U.S., Israel and a network of Sunni regimes confronting Iran’s Shia government and its allies. The catastrophe that took place with the civil war in Iraq–and that threatens to break out again–could play out regionally, with horrifying consequences.

The hope amid this horror is working class solidarity across the ethnic and religious divisions. This is not a fantasy, but has been demonstrated at the high points of the Arab revolutions, such as the efforts to unite Muslims in defense of the oppressed Christian Copt minority in Egypt.

In reality, only the ruling class benefits from such communalist divisions. Sectarianism cannot provide jobs, electricity, food nor housing for working people and the poor. The working class in Iraq and throughout the Middle East will have to combat sectarianism, religious oppression and national oppression on the road to uniting the Arab working class in a struggle for a new Middle East.

Only such a struggle can stop the horrors that imperialism has unleashed in the form of ethnic cleansing, civil war, and regional war.

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.

Speaking January 5 alongside his Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, the president announced a shift in strategy for the American military, one that emphasizes aerial campaigns and proxy wars as opposed to “long-term nation-building with large military footprints.” This, to some pundits and politicians, is considered a tectonic shift.

Indeed, the way some on the left tell it, the strategy marks a radical departure from the imperial status quo. “Obama just repudiated the past decade of forever war policy,” gushed Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings, calling the new strategy a “[s]lap in the face to the generals.”

Conservative hawks, meanwhile, predictably declared that the sky is falling. “This is a lead from behind strategy for a left-behind America,” cried hyperventilating California Republican Buck McKeon, chairman the House Armed Services Committee. “This strategy ensures American decline in exchange for more failed domestic programs.” In McKeon’s world, feeding the war machine is preferable to feeding poor people.

Unfortunately, though, rather than renouncing empire and endless war, Obama’s stated strategy for the military going forward just reaffirms the U.S. commitment to both. Rather than renouncing the last decade of war, it states that the bloody and disastrous occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan – gently termed “extended operations” – were pursued “to bring stability to those countries.”

And Leon Panetta assured the American public that even with the changes, the U.S. would still be able to fight two major wars at the same time—and win. And Obama assured America’s military contractors and coffin makers that their lifeline – U.S. taxpayers’ money – would still be funneled their way in obscene bucket loads.

“Over the next 10 years, the growth in the defense budget will slow,” the president told reporters, “but the fact of the matter is this: It will still grow.” In fact, he added with a touch of pride, it “will still be larger than it was toward the end of the Bush administration,” totaling more than $700 billion a year and accounting for about half of the average American’s income tax. So much for the Pentagon’s budget being slashed – like we were promised – the way lawmakers are trying to cut those “failed domestic programs.”

The U.S. could cut its military spending in half tomorrow and still spend more than three times as much as its next nearest rival, China. That’s because China, instead of waging wars of choice around the world, prefers projecting its might by investing in its own country. On the other hand, the U.S. under the leadership of Obama is beefing up its military presence in China’s backyard, more interested in projecting its dwindling power than rebuilding its economy.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once noted that every dollar going to the military is a dollar that can’t be used to provide food and shelter for those in need. Today’s obscene amount of military spending isn’t necessary if the administration wished to pursue the quaint goal of simply defending the country from invasion. Maintaining “the best-trained, best-equipped military in history,” as Obama says is his goal? That’s a different story – for a different purpose. Indeed, as Madeline Albright observed, possessing that kind of military might is no fun if you don’t get to use it, as Obama has with gusto in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and Uganda.

The truth is that the Obama administration’s “new” strategy is more of the same—a reaffirmation of the U.S. government’s commitment to militarism for the all the usual reasons: to promote American hegemony and, by extension, the interests of politically connected capital. And U.S. officials aren’t shy about that.

Indeed, throughout the strategy document the ostensible purpose for having a military — to provide national security — repeatedly takes a backseat to promoting the economic interests of the U.S. elite that profits from empire. Repositioning U.S. forces “toward the Asia-Pacific region,” for instance – including the stationing of American soldiers in that hotbed of violent extremism, Australia – is cast not just as a means of ensuring peace and stability, but guaranteeing “the free flow of commerce.” Maintaining a global empire of bases from Europe to Okinawa isn’t necessary for self-defense, but according to Obama, ensuring – with guns – “the prosperity that flows from an open and free international economic system.”

Of course, that economic considerations shape U.S. foreign policy is nothing new. More than 25 years ago, President Jimmy Carter – that Jimmy Carter – declared in a State of the Union address that U.S. military force would be employed in the Persian Gulf, not for the cause of peace, freedom and apple pie, but to ensure “the free movement of Middle East oil.” And so it goes.

Far from affecting change, Obama is ensuring continuity. “U.S. policy will emphasize Gulf security,” states his new military strategy, in order to “prevent Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon capability and counter its destabilizing policies” — as if it’s Iran that has been destabilizing the region. And as Obama publicly proclaims his support for “political and economic reform” in the Middle East, just like every other U.S. president he not-so-privately backs their oppressors from Bahrain to Yemen and signs off on the biggest weapons deal in history to that bastion of democracy, Saudi Arabia.

Obama can talk all he wants about turning the page on a decade of war and occupation, but so long as he continues to fight wars and military occupy countries on the other side of the globe, talk is all it is. The facts, sadly, are this: since taking office Obama doubled the number of troops in Afghanistan; he fought to extend the U.S. occupation in Iraq – and partially succeeded; he dramatically expanded the use of killer drones from Pakistan to Somalia; and he requested military budgets that would make George W. Bush blush. If you want to see what his military strategy really is, forget what’s said at press conferences and in turgidly written Pentagon press releases. Just look at the record.

This essay analyzes the changing contemporary context of imperial domination, especially the demise of longstanding client regimes.  It then examines the previous significant ties between western imperial powers and Islamist movements and regimes and the basis of ‘historical collaboration’.

The third part of the paper will outline the political circumstances in which the imperial powers embrace “moderate” Islamists in government and utilize “armed fundamentalists” in opposition to secular regimes.  We will critically analyze how “moderate” Islam is defined by the Western imperialist powers.  Is this a tactical or strategic alliance?  What are the political “trade-offs”?  What do imperialism’s neo-liberal clients and their new ‘moderate’ Muslim allies have in common and how do they differ?

In conclusion, we will evaluate the viability of this alliance and its capacity to contain and deflect the popular democratic movements and repress the burgeoning class and national struggles, especially in regard to the ‘obstacles’ posed by the Israel-US-Zionist ties and the continued IMF policies which promise to worsen the crises in the Muslim countries.

The Transition from Neo-Liberal Client Rulers to Power-Sharing with Moderate Islamists

The key motivation in Washington’s and the European imperial troika’s (England, France and Germany) embrace of what their press and officialdom hail as “moderate” Islamist parties has been the collapse or weakening of their long-term client rulers.  Faced with the ouster of Mubarak, in Egypt, Ali in Tunisia and Saleh in Yemen, mass protests in Morocco and Algeria, the US-EU turned to conservative Muslim leaders who were willing to work within the existing state institutional framework (including the army and state police), uphold the capitalist order and align with the empire against anti-imperial movements and states.  In Egypt, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) (the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood), in Tunisia the Renaissance Party, in Morocco the Justice and Development Party have all indicated their willingness to serve as reliable partners in blocking the pro-democracy movements that challenge the socio-economic status quo and the long-standing military-imperial linkages.

The Islamist collaborators are called “moderate and respectable” because they agree to participate in elections within the boundaries of the established political and economic order; they have dropped any criticism of imperial and colonial treaties and trade agreements signed by the previous client regions – including ones which collaborate with Israel’s colonization of Palestine.

Equally important “moderate” means supporting imperial wars against nationalist and secular Arab republics, such as Syria and Libya, and isolating and/or repressing class based trade unions and secular-left parties.

“Moderate” Islamists have become the Empire’s ‘contraceptive of choice’ against any chance the massive Arab peoples’ revolt might give birth to substantive egalitarian social changes and bring those brutal pro-western officials, responsible for so many crimes against humanity, to justice.

The West and their client officials in the military and police have agreed to a kind of “power-sharing’ with the moderate/respectable (read ‘reactionary’) Islamist parties.  The Islamists would be responsible for imposing orthodox economic policies and re-establishing ‘order’ (i.e. bolstering the existing one) in partnership with pro-multinational bank economists and pro US-EU generals and security officials.  In exchange the Islamists could take certain ministries, appoint their members, finance electoral clientele among the poor and push their ‘moderate’ religious, social and cultural agenda.  Basically, the elected Islamists would replace the old corrupt dictatorial regimes in running the state and signing off on more free trade agreements with the EU.  Their role would keep the leftists, nationalists and populists out of power and from gaining mass support.  Their job would substitute spiritual solace and “inner worth” via Islam in place of redistributing land, income and power from the elite, including the foreign multi-nationals to the peasants, workers, unemployed and exploited low-paid employees.

Why the Empire Arms Fundamentalist Anti-Secular Muslims

While the US and EU have backed respectable “moderate Islam” in heading off a popular upheaval of the young and unemployed, in other contexts they have enlisted violent, fundamentalist Islamic terrorists to overthrow secular independent anti-imperialists regimes – like Libya, Syria — just as they had done earlier in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia.  The US, Qatar and the European troika financed and armed Libyan fundamentalist militias and then engaged in a murderous eight months air and sea assault to ensure their client’s ‘victory’ over the secular Gaddafi regime.  Fresh from NATO’s success, the US, the European ‘Troika’ and Turkey, with the backing of the League of Arab collaborator princes and emirs, have financed a violent Muslim Brotherhood insurrection in Syria, intent on destroying the nationalist economy and modern secular state.

The US and EU have openly unleashed their fundamentalists allies in order to destroy independent adversaries in the name of “democracy” and ‘humanitarian intervention’, a laughable claim in light of decade long colonial wars of occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan.  All target regimes have one crime in common:  Using their national resources to develop modern secular states – independent of imperial dictates.

NATO  implements its campaigns through conservative ‘moderate’ or armed fundamentalist Islamist movements depending on the specific needs, circumstances and range of options in any given target nation.  With the fall of  pro-Empire ‘secular dictatorships’ in Egypt and Tunisia, pliable conservative Islamist leaders are the fall back “lesser evil”.  When the opportunity to overthrow an independent secular or nationalist regime arises, armed and violent fundamentalist mercenaries become the political vehicle of choice.

As with European empires in the past, the modern Western imperial countries have relied on retrograde religious parties and leaders to collaborate and serve their economic and military interests and to provide mercenaries for imperial armies to savage any anti-imperialist social revolutionaries.  In that sense US and European rulers are neither ‘pro nor anti’ Islam, it all depends on their national and class position.  Islamists who collaborate with Empire are “moderate” allies and if they attack an anti-imperialist regime, they become ‘freedom fighters’.  On the other hand, they become “terrorists” or “fundamentalists” when they oppose imperial occupation, pillage or colonial settlements.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Collaboration

The historical record of western imperial expansion reveals many instances of collaboration and co-optation as well as conflict with Islamist regimes, movements and parties.  In the early 1960’s the CIA backed a brutal military coup against the secular Indonesian nationalist regime of Sukarno, and encouraged their puppet dictator General Suharto to unleash Muslim militia in a veritable “holy war” exterminating nearly one million leftist trade unionists, school teachers, students, farmers, communists or suspected sympathizers and their family members.  The horrific ‘Jakarta Option’ became a model for CIA operations elsewhere.  In Yugoslavia the US and Europe promoted and financed fundamentalists Muslims in Bosnia, importing mujahedeen who would later form part of Al Qaeda, and then backed the Kosovo Liberation Army, a known terrorist organization, in order to completely break-up and ethnically ‘cleanse’ a modern secular multi-national state – going so far as to have Americans and NATO bomb Belgrade for the first time since the Nazis in the Second World War.

During President Carter’s administration, the CIA joined with Saudi Arabia’s ruling royalty, providing billions of dollars in arms and military supplies to Afghan Muslim fundamentalists in their brutal but successful Jihad overthrowing a modern, secular nationalist regime backed by the USSR.  The murderous fate of school teachers and educated women in the aftermath was quickly covered up.

Needless to say, wherever US imperialism faces leftists or secular, modernizing anti-imperialist regimes, Washington turns to retrograde Islamic leaders willing and able to destroy the progressive regime in return for imperialist support.  Such coalitions are built mainly around fundamentalist and moderate Islamist opposition to secular, class-based politics allied with the Empire’s hostility to any anti-imperialist challenge to its domination.

The same ‘coalition’ of Islamists and the Empire has been glaringly obvious during the NATO assault on Libya and continues against Syria:  The Muslims provide the shock troops on the ground; NATO provides the aerial bombing, funds, arms, sanctions, embargoes and propaganda.

These Islamist-Imperialist coalitions are usually temporary, based on a common secular or nationalist enemy and not on any common strategic interest.  After the defeat of a secular anti-imperialist regime, militant Muslims may find themselves attacked by the colonial neo-liberal regime most favored by the imperial west.  This happened in Afghanistan and elsewhere after the overseas Islamist fighters (Afghan Arabs) returned to their own neo-colonized, collaborating home countries, like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt and elsewhere.

Contemporary History of Islamist-Imperial Conflict

The relation between Islamist regimes and imperialism is complex, changing and  full of examples of bloody conflict.

The US backed the “modernizing” free market dictatorship of the Shah in Iran, overthrowing the nationalist Mosaddegh regime. They provided arms and intelligence for the Savak, the Shah’s monstrous secret police as it hunted down and murdered tens of thousands of nationalist-Islamists and leftist resistance fighters and critics in Iran and abroad.  The rise to power of the fundamentalist-anti-imperialist Khomeini regime fueled US armed attacks and provoked retaliatory moves:  Iran backed and financed anti-colonial Islamist groups in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Palestine (Hamas) and Iraq (the Shia parties).

Subsequent to 9/11 the US invaded and overthrew the Islamist Taliban regime, re-colonized the country, establishing a puppet regime under US-European auspices.  The Taliban and allied Islamist and nationalist resistance fighters organized and established a mass guerrilla army which has engaged in a decade long war with armed support from Pakistani Islamist forces responding to US military incursions.

In Palestine, Washington, under the overweening control of Israel’s Zionist fifth column, has armed and financed Israel’s war against the popularly elected Palestinian Islamist Hamas government in Gaza.  Washington’s total commitment to the Jewish state and its colonial expansion and usurpation of Palestinian (Muslim and Christian) lands and property in Jerusalem and elsewhere reflects the profound and pervasive influence of the Zionist power configuration throughout the US political system .They secure 90% votes in Congress, pledges of allegiance from the White House, and senior appointments in Treasury, State Department and the Pentagon.

What determines whether the US Empire will have a collaborative or conflict-ridden relation with Islam depends on the specific political context.  The US allies with Islamists when faced with nationalist, leftist and secular democratic regimes and movements, especially where their optimal choice, a military-neo-liberal alternative is relatively weak.  However, faced with a nationalist, anti-colonial Islamist regime (as is the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Washington will side with pro-western liberals, dissident Muslim clerics, pliable tribal chiefs, separatist ethnic minorities and pro-Western generals.

The key to US-Islamist relations from the White House perspective is based on the Islamists’ attitude toward empire, class politics, NATO and the “free market” (private foreign investment).

Today’s ‘moderate’ Islamist parties in Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Morocco (and elsewhere), which have offered their support to NATO and its wars against Libya and Syria, uphold ‘private property’ (i.e. foreign and imperialist client control of key industries) and repress independent working class and anti-imperialist parties.  They are the Empire’s “new partners” in the pillage of the resource-rich Middle East and North Africa.

The US-brokered counter-revolutionary alliance among moderate Islamists, the previous military rulers and Washington is fraught with tensions.  The military demands total impunity and a continuation of its economic privileges; this includes a veto on any legislation addressing the previous regime’s brutal crimes against its own people.  On the other hand, the Islamist parties uphold their electoral victories and demand majority rule.  Washington insists the alliance adhere to its policy toward Israel and abandon their support for the Palestinian national struggle.  As these tensions and conflicts deepen, the alliance could collapse ushering in a new phase of conflict and instability.

Emblematic of “moderate Islamist” collaboration with US-EU imperialism is the role of Qatar, home to the ‘respectable’ Arabic media giant, Al-Jazeera, and the demagogic Qatari “spiritual guide” Sheik Youssef  al-Qaradawi.  Sheik Youssef quotes the Koran and Islamic moral principles in defense of NATO’s 8-month aerial bombing of Libya, which killed over 50,000 pro-regime Libyans (themselves Muslims).  He calls for armed imperial intervention in Syria to overthrow the secular Assad regime, a position he shares comfortably with the state of Israel. He urges the “moderate Islamists” in Egypt and Tunisia to cease any criticism of the existing economic order, ( see “Spiritual guide steers Arabs to moderation”, Financial Times, December 9, 2011 – p5).  In a word, this respectable Muslim cleric is NATO’s perfect Koran-quoting “moderate Islamist” partner – a dream come true.

The Strategic Utility of “Moderate” Islamist Parties

Islamist parties are approached by the Empire’s policy elites only when they have a mass following and can therefore weaken any popular, nationalist insurgency.  Mass-based Islamist parties serve the empire by providing “legitimacy”, by winning elections and by giving a veneer of respectability to the pro-imperial military and police apparatus retained in place from the overthrown client state dictatorships.

The Islamist parties compete at the “grass roots” with the leftists.  They build up a clientele of supporters among the poor in the countryside and urban slums through organized charity and basic social services administered at the mosques and humanitarian religious foundations.  Because they reject class struggle and are intensely hostile to the left (with its secular, pro-feminist and working-class agenda), they have been ‘half-tolerated’ by the dictatorship, while the leftist activists are routinely murdered.  Subsequently, with the overthrow of the dictatorship, the Islamists emerge intact with the strongest national organizational network as the country’s ‘natural leaders’ from the religious-bazaar merchant political elite.  Their leaders offer to serve the empire and its traditional native military collaborators in exchange for a ‘slice of power’, especially over morality, culture, religion and households (women); in other words, the “micro-society”.

For their part, they offer to marginalize and undermine the left, anti-imperialist secular democrats in the streets.  In the face of mass popular rebellion calling into question the imperial order, a ‘moderate’ Islamist-imperial partnership is a ‘heavenly deal’ praised in Washington, Paris or London (as well as Riyadh and Tel Aviv).

Conclusion:  How Viable is the Imperial-Islamic Coalition?

Those who thought that the spontaneous pro-democracy movements spelled the end of the imperial order left out the role of organized “moderate” Islamist electoral parties as able collaborators of Empire.  The brutally repressed mass mobilization of unemployed youth was no match for the well-funded grass roots community organization of the moderate Islamists.  This is especially true when politics shifted from the street to the ballot box, a process that the Islamist parties facilitated.  In the absence of a mass revolutionary party seeking state power, the existing military-police state was able to work around the mass protesters and put together a power sharing agreement at least in the short-run.

In the November 2011 elections, the radical Egyptian Islamist party, Nour, gathered one-quarter of the vote in Cairo and Alexandria.  Their showing was even higher among the urban poor districts, which promises even greater support among poor rural constituencies in the coming elections. Essentially a Salafist Islamist party, Nour, unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, combined denunciations of class abuses and elite corruption with mass appeals to a return to a mythic harmonious life.  They used effective grass roots organizing around basic services in order to gain a greater proportion of the working class vote than all the leftist parties combined.  Nour’s message of “class retribution against the …abuses of Egypt’s elite fueled Nour’s new found popularity”, (Financial Times, December 10, 2011 p6).

Despite the successes of the Islamist-Imperial partnership, the world economic crises and especially the growing unemployment and misery in the Arab countries will make it difficult for the ‘respectable moderate’ Islamists to stabilize their societies. They are inextricably constrained by their alliances to function within the confines of the ‘orthodox neo-liberal framework’ imposed by the Empire.  For that reason, the “moderate” Islamists will try to co-opt some secular liberals, social democrats and even a few leftists as ‘minority partners’, so that they won’t be held solely responsible for dashing the expectations of the poor in their countries.

The fact of the matter is that the pro-imperial Islamist parties have absolutely no answer to the current crises:  Charities delivered from the mosque during the dictatorship won them mass support; now more austerity programs imposed from their ministerial posts will certainly alienate and infuriate their mass base.  What will follow depends on who is best organized:  Liberals are limited to media campaigns and tied to economic orthodoxy; the leftists have to advance from protest movements in the downtown squares to organized political units operating in popular neighborhoods, workplaces, markets, villages and slums.  Otherwise radical fundamentalist, like the Salafists, will exploit the people’s outrage with moderate Islamist betrayals and promote their own version of a closed clerical society, opposing the West while repressing the Left.

The US and EU may have ‘temporarily’ avoided revolution by accommodating electoral reforms and adapting to alliances with “moderate” Islamists, but their ongoing military interventions and their own growing economic crisis will  simply postpone a more decisive conflict in the near future.

US Secretary of State Hillary “we came, we saw, he died” Clinton set the scene on Indonesian TV a few weeks ago, when she prophesied there would be “a civil war” in Syria, with a well financed and “well-armed opposition” crammed with army deserters.

Now it’s up to NATOGCC to make it happen. NATOGCC is of course the now fully accomplished symbiosis between selected North Atlantic Treaty Organization members such as Britain and France and selected petromonarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council, aka the Gulf Counter-revolution Club, such as Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

So feel free to bask in the glow of yet another mercenary paradise.

The NATOGCC war

The Libyans formerly known as rebels, with explicit consent from Transitional National Council (TNC) chairman Mustafa Abdul NATO, aka Jalil, have already shipped to Syria — via Turkey — 600 highly motivated troops fresh from toppling the Gaddafi regime, to fight alongside the Free Syria Army (FSA). This followed a secret meeting in Istanbul between the TNC and the Syrian “rebels,” rebranded as Syrian National Council.

The trigger-happy Libyans have access to a wealth of weapons plundered from the Gaddafi’s regimes military depots or gently “donated” by NATO and Qatar. A delicious parallel may already be traced with the House of Saud in the 1980s — which gave the green light for hardcore Islamists to go fight in Afghanistan, instead of raising hell at home.

For the TNC, better keep those testosterone-heavy, unemployed warriors away in the Middle East rather than raising hell in Northern Africa. And for NATO member Turkey, in the absence of war (blame those pesky Russians and Chinese), the next best option is to rely on mercenaries to do the job.

The pressure is relentless. Diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times Online that NATOGCC operatives have set up a command center in Iskenderun, in Hatay province in Turkey. Crucial Aleppo, in northwest Syria, is very close to the Turkish-Syrian border. The cover story for this command center is to engineer “humanitarian corridors” to Syria.

Although these “humanitarians” come from NATO members US, Canada and France, and GCC members Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE, their cover is that they’re only innocent “monitors,” and not part of NATO. Needless to say these humanitarians consist of ground, naval, air force and engineering specialists. Their mission: infiltrate northern Syria, especially Idlib, Rastan, Homs but most of all the big prize, Aleppo, the largest city in Syria, with at least 2.5 million people, the majority of which are Sunni and Kurdish.

Even before this news from Brussels, the French satirical weekly Le Canard Enchaine, as well as the Turkish daily Milliyet, had already revealed that commandos from French intelligence and the British MI6 are training the FSA in urban guerrilla techniques, in Hatay in southern Turkey and in Tripoli, in northern Lebanon. Weapons — from shotguns to Israeli machine guns and RPGs — have been smuggled en masse.

It’s no secret in Syria that armed gangs — from Salafis to petty criminals — have been attacking regular soldiers, the police and even civilians since the early stages of the protest movement. Of roughly 3,500 people killed during the past seven months, a large number of civilians and more than 1,100 soldiers were killed by these gangs.

And then there are the deserters. So when the Assad regime insists the current Syrian tragedy is to a great extent incited by well-paid and well-armed elements — not to mention mercenaries — at the service of foreign powers, it is essentially correct.

In Homs, a local source tells Asia Times Online that as far as the FSA is concerned, “it’s clear that they are just a nice media cover for criminals. They had a video of themselves in Baba Amr in which they appeared like complete idiots (here it is, with captions conveniently!). But whoever these kids or guys are, they have lots of support amongst the Sunni population. Also, they are connected within the community, whether rich or poor. A Christian woman who teaches at a private school just outside Homs which has largely Sunni students had her car stopped and stolen by some gang. When she came to Homs she made some phone calls and her car was returned. So whoever stole her car outside city limits had connections to middle to high class people in the city and they were able to return the car. This tells me of the infiltration of the dogma of the revolution in Homs. The ‘concept’ of FSA is probably supported enough, and just the people of poor areas like Baba Amr, Bayada and Khalidiyya can self-sustain the FSA.”

Round up the usual votes

Just as in Libya, the Arab League also duly fulfilled its doormat function for NATOGCC, voting for harsh sanctions that include a freeze of Syrian government assets, no more trade deals with the central bank and no more Arab investment. In short: economic war. The Lebanese paper L’Orient Le Jour politely called it “a political euphemism.” Of the 22 League members, 19 voted — Syria was already suspended. Iraq — where the government is majority Shi’ite — and Lebanon — where Hezbollah is part of the government — were the only ones that “dissociated” themselves from the vote.

Meanwhile, the nasty opportunist game of musical chairs – the Syrian version – is also in effect. The Syrian National Council and its Islamist cohorts totally rejected any dialogue with the Bashar al-Assad regime. The secretary-general of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Riad Chakfi, pulled a “Libyan rebel” and implored the Turkish army to invade northern Syria and establish a buffer zone. Dodgy exiles such as former vice-president Abdelhalim Khaddam — exiled in Paris — and another vice-president, Rifaat al-Assad — exiled in Spain — are under the illusion that the Muslim Brotherhood (which will be the top power in a “new” Syria) would allow them to sit on the throne.

This is downright silly because the name of the game in a “new” Syria will be the House of Saud. The House of Saud is the crucial link between the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (which is getting closer and closer to taking power); the AKP party in Turkey (which is essentially a Muslim Brotherhood lite); and the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria. The Saudis are crucial investors in Turkey. They are positioning themselves as major investors in Egypt. And they’re dying to become a major investor in “new” Syria.

Then there’s the key question of Turkey’s game. In the Syrian dossier, Turkey is not a mediator anymore; it has become a brash advocate of regime change. Forget about the Tehran-Damascus-Ankara entente, which was a reality not along ago, in 2010. Forget about soft power and the much-advertised foreign policy of “zero problems with our neighbors,” coined by Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu.

Davutoglu himself announced Turkey’s own sanctions on Syria — a replay of the Arab League’s, with freezing of the government’s financial assets and no transactions with the central bank. Davutoglu insists a military buffer zone inside Syria, along the border with Turkey, is “not on the agenda” — but that’s exactly what those shady NATOGCC “humanitarian monitors” are up to. Since mid-November Turkish media has been ablaze detailing plans for a no-fly zone in northern Syria and the aforementioned buffer zone stretching as far as Aleppo.

The motive? Ask “prophet” Hillary Clinton: to foment civil war.

Showdown, Club Med style

In its mad rush to sell the Turkish political model to the majority-Sunni parts of the Arab world (yet the GCC is not buying), Turkey may be severely miscalculating its crucial relations with both Russia and Iran. Around 70% of Turkey’s energy is imported from Russia and Iran. Not to mention that both Russia and Iran are fuming with Turkey bowing to NATO pressure to host a radar station as part of missile defense.

Russia has very clear ideas about the Syrian scenario. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has been more than explicit for weeks now: “We absolutely do not accept a scenario of military intervention in Syria.”

Last week’s meeting of the deputy foreign ministers of the emergent BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), in Moscow, was unmistakable.

The BRICS essentially drew the red lines. No excuse whatsoever for a foreign intervention in Syria, as in “any external interference in Syria’s affairs, not in accordance with the UN Charter, should be excluded.” No “bomb bomb Iran”; instead, dialogue and negotiations. And no additional sanctions, deemed “counterproductive>” The BRICS clearly see how the Libya scenario is slowly morphing into the modified NATOGCC war.

To add extra sauce, the aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov — equipped with nuclear missiles — has already left Murmansk towards the Eastern Mediterranean, alongside the destroyer Admiral Chabanenko and the frigate Ladny. They will arrive at the Tartus naval base, in Syria, in mid-January, and will be met by other ships from the Russian fleet in the Black Sea.

Tartus, hosting around 600 military and technicians from the Russian Defense Ministry, is a center of maintenance and refueling for the Russian Black Sea fleet. It will be a thrill to watch whether the Russians will invite members of the George H W Bush Carrier Strike Group — now also in the Eastern Mediterranean — for a volleyball match.

It’s fair to argue that masses of Syrians want something other than the Assad regime — but certainly not some variant of humanitarian bombing, not to mention civil war. They saw NATO’s legacy in Libya — virtually the whole infrastructure of the country destroyed, cities bombed to dust, tens of thousands of dead and wounded, al-Qaeda-linked fanatics wielding power in Tripoli, widespread ethnic hatred. They don’t want a brand new massacre. But NATOGCC does.

According to official figures released by the Bahrain Center for Human Rights website, so far 44 Bahraini citizens were killed at the hands of the mercenaries of Al Khalifa regime. The Bahraini martyrs include the 6-year-old Mohammed Farhan, 14-year-old Ali Jawad Alshaikh and 15-year-old Sayed Ahmad Saeed Shams. The Bahraini organization has reported that many of these martyrs were killed while in custody. The Center has also published documents indicating that more than 1,500 Bahrainis, including about 100 women, were incarcerated since the eruption of turmoil in the Persian Gulf country on February 14, 2011 and that more that 90 journalists face life threat.

It’s also said that the Bahraini government has blocked the citizens’ access to more than 1000 opposition websites which are mainly used to organize and plan protests and mass demonstrations.

The Bahraini regime commits all of these aggressive and brutal actions with the direct involvement of Saudi Arabia and the implicit support and backing of NATO and the United States. The author of the Hidden Harmonies China blog in a March 14, 2011 post referred to the abuses of human rights in Bahrain with the flagrant, duplicitous support of the White House: “the Entry of Saudi security forces to crack down on the protesters with deadly force is a complication for U.S. policies, to say the least, since U.S. is reluctant to criticize its oil ally dictators in the region.”

He also called Bahrain the “Las Vegas” of the Middle East, host to the U.S. 5th Fleet and a haunt for the rich Saudis who are forbidden by Islamic laws at home from indulging in alcohol and other immoral enjoyments, “but who often vacation in Bahrain for these reasons.”

Bahraini citizens have uploaded several video files on the internet, showing the cruel and ruthless torturing and persecuting of the protesters by the Al Khalifa lackeys. These videos depict the Bahraini forces using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse protesters and killing many of them straight away. Some of these videos also show the Saudi and Bahraini cars nonchalantly running over Bahraini children and women, killing them at once.

The U.S.-Saudi project of crackdown on the Bahraini people was also empowered by many of the European cronies of Washington. In July 2011, Germany sold a set of 200 62-ton Leopard tanks to Saudi Arabia which sparked a huge controversy among the German parliamentarians and anti-war activists. According to the Daily Telegraph, Wolfgang Gerhardt, former leader of the Free Democrats, the junior collation member to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, said it was “unacceptable” the deal went through without the knowledge of his party’s MPs. However, the agreement which was worth around USD 1,252 million was concluded and the Saudi government dispatched many of these newly-bought tanks to Bahrain to accelerate and facilitate the bloody clampdown on the protesters.

The situation in Yemen, however, is far more deplorable and appalling. Allvoices.com has reported that as of September 25, 1,870 Yemenis were killed in the revolution and the majority of the martyrs were unarmed civilians taking part in anti-government demonstrations.

The Yemeni dictator who has remained defiant in the face of frequent calls by the tribal leaders, opposition groups and demonstrators to step down and give up power has turned his country into a bloodbath and made the Yemeni uprising the longest, most devastative revolution in the revolutionary wave of protests in the Middle East. The protests in Yemen started on February 3, 2011 and have continued so far. The only reaction of the international community to the brutality in Yemen was an indecisive and faltering resolution by the UNSC which called for “an end to violence” and asked President Ali Abdullah Saleh to accept a peace deal brokered by the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council. However, Abdullah Saleh, who is tacitly supported by the U.S., kept up with the brutalities and according to Yemen Times, 94 protesters were killed after the Security Council adopted the resolution 2014.

In a report published on Yemen Times on November 17, it was revealed that “ninety-four Yemenis were killed and over 800 injured since UN Resolution 2014 was issued on October 21.”

“Tentative reports show that over the last three weeks in Yemen, 124 homes, seven mosques, six public institutions including one hospital, two community wells, and 17 vehicles were effectively destroyed,” Yemen Times reported.

In the days leading to the detainment and death of Moammar Gaddafi, the Western mainstream media were only talking about the Libyan civil war, and the reason was clear: NATO had secured a UNSC resolution to enact a no-fly zone over Libya and it was in the interests of the U.S. and its European partners to give coverage to the tumultuous situation in the North African country. However, the reports and news regarding the carnage in Bahrain and Yemen were predominantly shunned and boycotted, simply because these two despotic regimes were close allies of the U.S. in the Middle East.

In a report published on Independent Australia, Zaid Jiani alluded to the violent crackdown on the protesters in Bahrain and Yemen and posed the question: “is the media downplaying these events because the two dictatorships are firm allies of the West?”

A Think Progress analysis of press coverage by the three major U.S. cable news networks – CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News – from March 14 to March 18 finds that Bahrain received only slightly more than ten percent as many mentions as Libya and that Yemen received only six percent as many mentions as Libya.

Now what concerns the independent thinkers, scholars, university professors, journalists and peace activists is that Syria has become the target of international pressure, simply because it has strong ties with Iran and resistant groups in Lebanon and Palestine, while the reactionary regimes of Bahrain and Yemen are getting away with the felonies which they commit by the virtue of their alliance with the United States.

The Arab League has vindictively suspended the participation of Syria while it has taken no practical step to normalize the situation in the turbulent and chaotic Yemen and Bahrain in which innocent people are being killed on a daily basis by their tyrannical rulers and their loyalists.

All that can be said is that the performance of the Arab League in neglecting the situation in Yemen and Bahrain and exaggerating the unrest in Syria, which is mainly caused by the foreign intervention and the West’s indifference toward the plight of the suppressed nations in Yemen and Bahrain, is an all-out hypocrisy and a clear, undeniable exercise of double standards. Who can really devise a clear-cut solution for this unsolvable dilemma?

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.

Yet key lateral moves by the West are already on. Diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times Online that the former Libyan “rebels” — now trying to come up with a credible government — have already given the go-ahead for NATO to build a sprawling military base in Cyrenaica.

NATO has no final say in such matters. This is decided by the boss — the Pentagon — interested in emboldening Africom in coordination with NATO. As many as 20,000 boots are expected to be deployed on the ground in Libya — at least 12,000 of them Europeans. They will be responsible for Libya’s “internal security”, but also be on alert for possible, further military campaigns targeted at — who else — Syria and Iran.

Bring those Shi’ites down

As much as the latest “coalition of the willing” — which by the way repeats the Libya model — is against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, it also represents a Christian/Sunni war against Shi’ites, be they the Alawite minority in Syria or the Shi’ite majorities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

This is part and parcel of the “strategic opportunity” identified by the powerful Israel lobby in Washington; if we strike against the Damascus-Tehran link, we deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That, ideologues believe, can now be sold to world public opinion under the cover of the former Arab Spring — now “Arab Winter” after a metamorphosis, before “Arab Summer”, into the Arab counter-revolution).

As Tehran sees it, what’s really going on regarding Syria is a “humanitarian” cover for a complex anti-Shi’ite and anti-Iran operation.

The road map is already clear. A fractious, unrepresentative Syrian National Council — Libya-style — is already in place. Same for a heavily armed Sunni “insurgency” crisscrossing the borders in Lebanon and Turkey. Sanctions are already essentially hurting the Syrian middle class. A relentless, international campaign of vilification of the Assad regime has been deployed. And psy ops abound, with the aim of seducing sections of the Syrian army to defect (it’s not working).

A report¹ by a Qatar-based researcher for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) even comes close to admitting that the self-described “Free Syria Army” is basically a bunch of hardcore Islamists, plus a few genuine army defectors, but mostly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood bought, paid for and weaponized by the US, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. There’s nothing “pro-democracy” about this lot – as incessantly sold by Western corporate and Saudi-owned media.

As for the National Council, based in Washington and London and sprinkled with the usual dodgy exiles, its program calls for governing Syria alongside the same military that has been — a la the Egyptian military junta — shooting civilian protesters. Makes one think that the only sensible solution would be for the people in Syria to topple the police state Assad regime, while being vehemently against the dodgy Syrian National Council.

This year’s model (dictator)

Then there’s the usually misguided and misinformed West, which believes that the Arab League, now no more than a puppet of US foreign policy, is siding with the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. Angry Arab blogger As’ad Abu Khalil is correct when he says that after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, “the League is now an extension of the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]“.

The GCC is in fact the Gulf Counter-revolution Club. Their favorite sport is to privilege “model” dictators — starting with themselves, but also including Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen and the little kings of Jordan and Morocco, who will be annexed to the GCC because they wish they were in the Persian Gulf (geography dictates they aren’t). On the other hand, the GCC abhors “bad” dictators — the snuffed-out Muammar Gaddafi and Assad, who not by accident are from secular republics.

The House of Saud, Jordan and rising Qatar are more than comfortable doing the US’s and Israel’s bidding. The House of Saud — the GCC’s top dog — invaded Bahrain with 1,500 troops to smash pro-democracy protests very much like the ones in Egypt and Syria. The House of Saud helped the ruling, Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in 70% Shi’ite Bahrain to conduct widespread torture; Bahrainis confirm that everyone tortured was forced to confess direct links with “evil” Tehran.

In Egypt, the House of Saud supported Mubarak even after he was deposed. Now it supports — with over US$4 billion so far — a military junta that basically wants to keep power, unchecked, over a “democratic” facade.

The House of Saud couldn’t possibly coexist with a successful, democratic Egypt. Anyone believing the House of Saud’s claim to defend human rights and democracy in the Middle East should check into an asylum.

The Arab League — also a House of Saud extension — gave a green card to NATO to bomb a member state. It suspended Syria on November 12 — as it had done with Libya on February 22 — because, unlike in Libya, US and European designs in the United Nations Security Council were duly vetoed by Russia and China.

Welcome to a “new” Arab League where if you don’t prostrate in front of the GCC altar, you’re condemned to regime change.

Worshipping the GCC can’t compare to worshipping the Pentagon and NATO. Jordan and Morocco are members of NATO’s Mediterranean dialogue, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are members of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. In addition, Jordan and the UAE are the only Arabic Troop Contributing Nations for NATO in Afghanistan.

Ivo Daalder, the Obama administration’s ambassador to NATO, has already ordered Libya to enter the Mediterranean Dialogue, alongside Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania and Israel. And early this month he told the Atlantic Council what’s needed for an attack on Syria; an “urgent necessity” (such as giving the impression Assad is going to raze Homs to the ground); “regional support” (that will come in a flash from the GCC/Arab League); and a UN mandate (it won’t happen, as Russia and China had made it clear).

So one may expect exactly that from the “coalition of the willing”; some black ops blamed on the Assad regime; immediate support from GCC/Arab League; and probably unilateral action, because via the UN is a no-no.

The Greater Middle East dream

No wonder some sound minds in Damascus, watching the tea leaves, decided to take some action. Damascus did send secret couriers to sound out Washington’s mood. The price to be left alone; to cut all ties with Tehran, for good. The Assad regime was left wondering what would they get in return.

The Alawites, roughly 12% of the population and members of the ruling elite, won’t desert the Assad regime. Christians and Druze expect only the worst from a possible, hardcore, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated new order. Same for a crucial neighbor, the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

Russia knows that if the current Libyan model is reproduced in Syria — and with Lebanon already under a de facto NATO blockade — the Mediterranean will indeed become that dream, a NATO lake, which is code for total US control.

Moscow also sees that in the US-conceived Greater Middle East — and talk about “great”, spanning from Mauritania to Kazakhstan — the only countries that are not linked with NATO through myriad “partnerships” are, apart from Syria: Lebanon, Eritrea, Sudan and Iran.

As for the Pentagon, the name of the game is “repositioning”. As in if you leave Iraq you go somewhere else in the “arc of instability”, preferably the Gulf. There are 40,000 US troops already in the Gulf — 23,000 of them in Kuwait. A secret army for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency is being trained by former Blackwater, “repositioned” as Xe, in the UAE. A NATO of the Gulf is being born. NATOGCC, anyone?

When the US neo-conservatives ruled the universe — that was only a few years ago — the motto was “Real men go to Tehran”. An update is in order. Call it “Real men go to Tehran via Damascus only if they have the balls to stare down Moscow”.

1. See “Revolutionary road: Among the Syrian opposition.”

Then he did something that is alien to United States corporate media culture. He behaved as an actual journalist and asked a tough, pertinent, no-holds-barred question. Here it is, as relayed by Husseini’s blog:

I want to know what legitimacy your regime has, sir. You come before us, representative of one of the most autocratic, misogynistic regimes on the face of the earth. Human Rights Watch and other reports of torture, detention of activists, you squelched the democratic uprising in Bahrain, you tried to overturn the democratic uprising in Egypt and indeed you continue to oppress your own people. What legitimacy does your regime have – other than billions of dollars and weapons?¹

Prince Turki, former Saudi intelligence supremo, former pal of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, former Saudi ambassador to the US, reacted by changing the subject.²

Were this to happen in the Middle East, Husseini would have been duly kidnapped by Saudi intel, tortured and snuffed out. Ask the remains of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. For much less — saying out loud in an Arab League meeting that King Abdullah was a traitor because he was encouraging the George W Bush administration to invade Iraq — the House of Saud did everything in its power, for years, to make sure Gaddafi was taken out.

Turki exhibits all the trademark democratic credentials of the House of Saud. He refers to the push for democracy in the Arab world as “Arab Troubles”.

After the Turki shoot

According to Husseini, on the same day of the news conference he received “a letter informing me that I was suspended from the National Press Club ‘due to your conduct at a news conference’. The letter, signed by the executive director of the club, William McCarren, accused me of violating rules prohibiting ‘boisterous and unseemly conduct or language’.”

Husseini, communications director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, which showcases critical journalism from all over the world, is a calm, thoughtful man with impeccable credentials. The accusation is not only bogus — it is downright pathetic.

Was this a one-off? Obviously not. Flashback to January 2009, at the same National Press Club, during a news conference by then-Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni. When Livni was asked a tough question — once again by Husseini — the mike was cut, and the conference abruptly terminated. My cameraman, Sebastian Pituscan, was there with me.³

So this is how the much-lauded “freedom of the press” myth in the US actually works. If you perform the job of an actual journalist, telling truth to power, forget about attending press conferences at the White House, Pentagon or State Department. You won’t even be admitted in the building.

If you are an official from a “valuable ally” — such as the House of Saud or the regime in Israeli — you are assured a tough question-free pulpit anywhere you choose, especially if you’re fluent in English.

But if you are an official from a “rogue” regime, the maximum you can aspire is to be humiliated in public, as it happened to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad at Columbia University in New York. Especially if you don’t speak English, and most of what you say is lost in translation.

On the other hand, if you are a travelling US corporate media hack, you can get away with murder.

Example. During the Asian financial crisis, in 1997 and 1998, I went to countless press conferences where parachuted US hacks intimidated Asian leaders as if they were a bunch of hooligans (the hacks, not the leaders). Perky chicks emerging from some two-bit journalism school in the flyover states treated then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad as if he was a child rapist, because he had established capital controls.

Mahathir turned out to be right — as Malaysia overcame the crisis much earlier than those, such as Indonesia, Thailand and South Korea, that surrendered to the International Monetary Fund’s dreadful “adjustments”.

In 1989, Chinese students protesting in Tiananmen Square were hailed by US media as heroes standing up to tyranny. In 2011, American students protesting all across the country against financial tyranny are “lazy”, “bastards”, both, or downright criminalized.

United States corporate media could not possibly admit that repression in Tahrir Square by Egyptian riot police is exactly the same as repression in New York, Oakland, Portland or Boston by American riot police.

Still there’s no word from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization about setting up a “humanitarian” no-fly zone over selected Occupy sites in US cities. They are still consulting with the House of Saud.

1. See the blog.
2. Video of the exchange.
3. The exchange is here.

The US tale of the Iranian plot was greeted with unusual skepticism on the part of Iran specialists and independent policy analysts, and even elements of the mainstream media. The critics observed that the alleged assassination scheme was not in Iran’s interest, and that it bore scant resemblance to past operations attributed to the foreign special operations branch of Iranian intelligence. The Qods Force, it was widely believed, would not send a person like Iranian-American used car dealer Manssor Arbabsiar, known to friends in Corpus Christi, Texas as forgetful and disorganized, to hire the hit squad for such a sensitive covert action.

But administration officials claimed they had hard evidence to back up the charge. They cited a 21-page deposition by a supervising FBI agent in the “amended criminal complaint” filed against Arbabsiar and an accomplice who remains at large, Gholam Shakuri.¹  It was all there, the officials insisted: several meetings between Arbabsiar and a man he thought was a member of a leading Mexican drug cartel, Los Zetas, with a reputation for cold-blooded killing; incriminating statements, all secretly recorded, by Arbabsiar and Shakuri, his alleged handler in Tehran; and finally, Arbabsiar’s confession after his arrest, which clearly implicates Qods Force agents in a plan to murder a foreign diplomat on US soil.

A close analysis of the FBI deposition reveals, however, that independent evidence for the charge that Arbabsiar was sent by the Qods Force on a mission to arrange for the assassination of Jubeir is lacking. The FBI account is full of holes and contradictions, moreover. The document gives good reason to doubt that Arbabsiar and his confederates in Iran had the intention of assassinating Jubeir, and to believe instead that the FBI hatched the plot as part of a sting operation.

The Case of the Missing Quotes

he FBI account suggests that, from the inaugural meetings between Arbabsiar and his supposed Los Zetas contact, a Drug Enforcement Agency informant, Arbabsiar, was advocating a terrorist strike against the Saudi embassy. The government narrative states that, in the very first meeting on May 24, Arbabsiar asked the informant about his “knowledge, if any, with respect to explosives” and said he was interested in “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia.” It also notes that in the meetings prior to July 14, the DEA informant “had reported that he and Arbabsiar had discussed the possibility of attacks on a number of other targets,” including “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country,” located “within and outside the United States.”

But the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to “attack” the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped “in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,” according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.

The most suspicious aspect of the administration’s case, in fact, is the complete absence of any direct quote from Arbabsiar suggesting interest in, much less advocacy of, assassinating the Saudi ambassador or carrying out other attacks in a series of meetings with the DEA informant between June 23 and July 14. The deposition does not even indicate how many times the two actually met during those three weeks, suggesting that the number was substantial, and that the lack of primary evidence from those meetings is a sensitive issue. And although the FBI account specifies that the July 14 and 17 meetings were recorded “at the direction of law enforcement agents,” it is carefully ambiguous about whether or not the earlier meetings were recorded.

The lack of quotations is a crucial problem for the official case for a simple reason: If Arbabsiar had said anything even hinting in the May 24 meeting or in a subsequent meeting at the desire to mount a terrorist attack, it would have triggered the immediate involvement of the FBI’s National Security Branch and its counter-terrorism division. The FBI would then have instructed the DEA informant to record all of the meetings with Arbabsiar, as is standard practice in such cases, according to a former FBI official interviewed for this article. And that would mean that those meetings were indeed recorded.

The fact that the FBI account does not include a single quotation from Arbabsiar in the June 23-July 14 meetings means either that Arbabsiar did not say anything that raised such alarms at the FBI or that he was saying something sufficiently different from what is now claimed that the administration chooses not to quote from it. In either case, the lack of such quotes further suggests that it was not Arbabsiar, but the DEA informant, acting as part of an FBI sting operation, who pushed the idea of assassinating Jubeir. The most likely explanation is that Arbabsiar was suggesting surveillance of targets that could be hit if Iran were to be attacked by Israel with Saudi connivance.

“The Saudi Arabia” and the $100,000

The July 14 meeting between Arbabsiar and the DEA informant is the first from which the criminal complaint offers actual quotations from the secretly recorded conversation. The FBI’s retelling supplies selected bits of conversation — mostly from the informant — aimed at portraying the meeting as revolving around the assassination plot. But when carefully studied, the account reveals a different story.

The quotations attributed to the DEA informant suggest that he was under orders to get a response from Arbabsiar that could be interpreted as assent to an assassination plot. For example, the informant tells Arbabsiar, “You just want the, the main guy.” There is no quoted response from the car dealer. Instead, the FBI narrative simply asserts that Arbabsiar “confirmed that he just wanted the ‘ambassador.’” At the end of the meeting, the informant declares, “We’re gonna start doing the guy.” But again, no response from Arbabsiar is quoted.

Two statements by the informant appear on their face to relate to a broader set of Saudi targets than Adel al-Jubeir. The informant tells Arbabsiar that he would need “at least four guys” and would “take the one point five for the Saudi Arabia.” The FBI agent who signed the deposition explains, “I understand this to mean that he would need to use four men to assassinate the Ambassador and that the cost to Arbabsiar of the assassination would be $1.5 million.” But, apart from the agent’s surmise, there is no hint that either cited phrase referred to a proposal to assassinate the ambassador. Given that there had already been discussion of multiple Saudi targets, as well as those of an unnamed third country (probably Israel), it seems more reasonable to interpret the words “the Saudi Arabia” to refer to a set of missions relating to Saudi Arabia in order to distinguish them from the other target list.

Then the informant repeats the same wording, telling Arbabsiar he would “go ahead and work on the Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can.” This language does not show that Arbabsiar proposed the killing of Jubeir, much less approved it. And the FBI narrative states that the Iranian-American “agreed that the assassination of the Ambassador should be handled first.”  Again, that curious wording does not assert that Arbabsiar said an assassination should be carried out first, but suggests he was agreeing that the subject should be discussed first.

The absence of any quote from Arbabsiar about an assassination plot, combined with the multiple ambiguities surrounding the statements attributed to the DEA informant, suggest that the main subject of the July 14 meeting was something broader than an assassination plot, and that it was the government’s own agent who had brought up the subject of assassinating the ambassador in the meeting, rather than Arbabsiar.

The government reconstruction of the July 14 meeting also introduces the keystone of the Obama administration’s public case: $100,000 that was to be transferred to a bank account that the DEA informant said he would make known to Arbabsiar. The FBI deposition asserts repeatedly that whenever Arbabsiar or the DEA informant mention the $100,000, they are talking about a “down payment” on the assassination. But the document contains no statement from either of them linking that $100,000 to any assassination plan. In fact, it provides details suggesting that the $100,000 could not have been linked to such a plan.

The FBI deposition states that the informant and Arbabsiar “discussed how Arbabsiar would pay [the informant],” but offers no statement from either individual even mentioning a “payment,” or any reason for transferring the money to a bank account. Furthermore, it does not actually claim that Arbabsiar made any commitment to any action against Jubeir at either the July 14 or 17 meetings. And when the informant is quoted in the July 17 meeting as saying, “I don’t know exactly what your cousin wants me to do,” it appears to be an acknowledgement that he had gotten no indication prior to July 17 that Arbabsiar’s Tehran interlocutors wanted the Saudi ambassador dead. The deposition does not even claim that Arbabsiar’s supposed handlers had approved a plan to kill Jubeir until after the Iranian-American returned to his native country on July 20.

Nevertheless, Arbabsiar is quoted telling the informant on July 14 that the full $100,000 had already been collected in cash at the home of “a certain individual.” Preparations for the transfer of the $100,000 had thus commenced well before the assassination plot allegedly got the green light.

The amount of $100,000 does not even appear credible as a “down payment” on a job that the FBI account says was to have cost a total of $1.5 million. It would represent a mere 6 percent of the full price. Bearing in mind that the DEA informant was supposed to be representing the demand of a ruthlessly profit-motivated Los Zetas drug cartel for a high-stakes political assassination well outside its purview, 6 percent of the total would represent far too little for a “down payment.”

The $100,000 wire transfer must have been related to an understanding that had been reached on something other than the assassination plan. Yet it has been cited by the administration and reported by news media as proof of the plot — and key evidence of Iran’s complicity therein.²

The Qods Force Connection

The FBI account of the July 17 meeting shows the DEA informant leading Arbabsiar into a statement of support for an assassination. The informant, obviously following an FBI script, says, “I don’t know what exactly your cousin wants me to do.” But the deposition notes “further conversation” following that invitation for a clear position on a proposal coming from the informant, indicating that what Arbabsiar was saying did not support the administration’s allegation that the assassination plot was coming from Tehran.

After the FBI evidently sought again to get the straight forward answer it was seeking, however, Arbabsiar is quoted as saying: “He wants you to kill this guy.” The informant then presents a fanciful plan to bomb an imaginary restaurant in Washington where Arbabsiar was told the Saudi ambassador liked to dine twice a week and where many “like, American people” would be present. “You want me to do it outside or in the restaurant?” asks the informant, to which question the Iranian-American replies, “Doesn’t matter how you do it.” At another point in the conversation, Arbabsiar goes further, saying, “They want that guy done. If the hundred go with him, fuck ‘em.”

These statements appear at first blush to be conclusive evidence that Arbabsiar and his Iranian overseers were contracting for the assassination of Jubeir, regardless of lives lost. But there are two crucial questions that the FBI account leaves unanswered: Was Arbabsiar speaking on behalf of the Qods Force or some element of it? And if he was, was he talking about a plan that was to go into effect as soon as possible or was it understood that they were talking about a contingency plan that would only be carried out under specific circumstances?

The deposition includes several instances of Arbabsiar’s bragging about a cousin who is a general, out of uniform and involved in covert external operations, including in Iraq — clearly implying that he belongs to the Qods Force. Arbabsiar is said to have claimed that the cousin and another Iranian official gave him funds for his contacts with the drug cartel. “I got the money coming,” he says. Subsequently, in one of the most extensive quotations from the recorded conversations, Arbabsiar says, “This is politics, so these people they pay this government…he’s got the, got the government behind him…he’s not paying from his pocket.” The FBI narrative identifies the person referred to here as Arbabsiar’s cousin, a Qods Force officer later named as Abdul Reza Shahlai, but again, there is not a single direct quotation backing the claim. And the reference to “these people” who “pay this government” suggests that “he” is connected to a group with illicit financial ties to government officials.

This excerpt could be particularly significant in light of press reports quoting a US law enforcement official saying that Arbabsiar had offered “tons of opium” to the drug cartel and that he and the informant had discussed what the New York Times called a “side deal” on the Iranian-held narcotics.³ If these reports are accurate, it seems possible that Arbabsiar approached Los Zetas on behalf of Iranians who control a portion of the opium being smuggled through Iran from Afghanistan, while seeking to impress the drug cartel operative with his claim to have close ties to the Qods Force through Shahlai. But if the DEA informant then pressed him to authenticate his Qods Force connection, he may have begun discussing covert operations against Iran’s enemies in North America.

The only alleged evidence that Arbabsiar was speaking for Shahlai and the Qods Force is Arbabsiar’s own confession, summarized in the criminal complaint. But, at minimum, that testimony was provided after he had been arrested and had a strong interest in telling the FBI what it wanted to hear.

The deposition makes much of a series of three phone conversations on October 4, 5 and 7 between Arbabsiar and someone who Arbabsiar tells his FBI handlers is Gholam Shakuri, presenting them as confirmation of the involvement of Qods Force officers in the assassination scheme. But the FBI apparently had no way of ascertaining whether the person to whom Arababsiar was talking was actually Shakuri. After the October 4 call, for example, the FBI account merely records that Arbabsiar “indicated that the person he was speaking with was Shakuri.”

On their face, moreover, these conversations prove nothing. In the first of the three calls, the person at the other end of the line, whom Arbabsiar identifies to his FBI contact as Shakuri but whose identity is not otherwise established, asks, “What news…what did you do about the building?” The FBI agent again suggests, “based on my training, experience and participation in this investigation,” that these queries were a “reference to the plot to murder the Ambassador and a question about its status.”

But Arbabsiar is said to have claimed in his confession that he was instructed by Shakuri to use the code word “Chevrolet” to refer to the plot to kill the ambassador. In a second recorded conversation, Arbabsiar immediately says, “I wanted to tell you the Chevrolet is ready, it’s ready, uh, to be done. I should continue, right?” After further exchange, the man purported to be “Shakuri” says, “So buy it, buy it.” Despite the obvious invocation of a code word, it remains unclear what Arbabsiar was to “buy.” “Chevrolet” could actually have been a reference to either a drug-related deal or a generic plan having to do with Saudi and other targets.

In a third recorded conversation on October 7, both Arbabsiar and “Shakuri” refer to a demand by a purported cartel figure for another $50,000 on top of the original $100,000 transferred by wire earlier. But there is no other evidence of such a demand. It appears to be a mere device of the FBI to get “Shakuri” on record as talking about the $100,000. And here it should be recalled that the account in the deposition shows that the transfer of the $100,000 had been agreed on before any indication of agreement on a plan to kill the ambassador.

The invocation of a fictional demand for $50,000, along with the dramatic difference between the first conversation and the second and third conversations, suggests yet another possibility: The second and third conversations were set up in advance by Arbabsiar to provide a transcript to bolster the administration’s case.

Terrorist Plot or Deterrence Strategy?

Even if Qods Forces officials indeed directed Arbabsiar to contact the Los Zetas cartel, it cannot be assumed that they intended to carry out one or more terrorist attacks in the United States. The killing of a foreign ambassador in Washington (not to speak of additional attacks on Saudi and Israeli buildings), if linked to Iran, would invite swift and massive US military retaliation. If, on the other hand, the Qods Force men instructed Arbabsiar to conduct surveillance of those targets and prepare contingency plans for hitting them if Iran were attacked, the whole story begins to make more sense.

Iran lacks the conventional means to deter attack by a powerful adversary. In its decades-long standoffs with the United States and Israel, amidst recurrent talk of “preemptive” strikes by those powers, Iran has relied on threats of proxy retaliation against US and allied state targets in the Middle East.⁴ The Iranian military support for Lebanon’s Hizballah, in particular, is widely recognized as prompted primarily by Iran’s need to deter US and Israeli attack.⁵

In one case in 1994-1995, Saudi Arabian Shi‘i militants carried out surveillance of potential US military and diplomatic targets in Saudi Arabia, in a way that was quickly noticed by US and Saudi intelligence.⁶ Although the consensus among US intelligence analysts was that Iran was preparing for a terrorist attack, Ronald Neumann, then the State Department’s intelligence officer for Iran and Iraq, noted that Iran had done the same thing whenever US-Iranian tensions had risen. He suggested that Iran could be using the surveillance for deterrence, to let Washington know that its interests in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere would be in danger if Iran were attacked.⁷

Unfortunately for Iran’s deterrent strategy, however, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was also carrying out surveillance of US bases in Saudi Arabia, and in November 1995 and again in June 1996, that group bombed two facilities housing US servicemen. The bombing of Khobar Towers in June 1996, which killed 19 US soldiers and one Saudi Arabian, was blamed by the Clinton administration’s FBI and CIA leadership on Iranian-sponsored Shi‘a from Saudi Arabia, with prodding from Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, despite the fact that bin Laden claimed responsibility not once but twice, in interviews with the London-based newspaper, al-Quds al-‘Arabi.⁸

Hani al-Sayigh, one of the Saudi Arabian Shi‘a accused by the Saudi and US governments of conspiring to attack the Khobar Towers, admitted to Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier, who interviewed him at a Canadian detention facility in May 1997, that he had participated in the surveillance of US military targets in Saudi Arabia on behalf of Iranian intelligence. But, according to the FBI report on the interview, al-Sayigh insisted that Iran had never intended to attack any of those sites unless it was first attacked by the United States. And when Dubelier asked a question later in the interview that was based on the premise that the surveillance effort was preparation for a terrorist attack, al-Sayigh corrected him.⁹

With threats of an Israeli or US bombing attack on Iran, with Saudi complicity, mounting since the mid-2000s, a similar campaign of surveillance of Saudi and Israeli targets in North America would fit the framework of what the Pentagon has called Iran’s “asymmetric warfare doctrine.” If Arbabsiar spoke of such a campaign in his initial meeting with the DEA informant, he certainly would have piqued the interest of FBI counter-terrorism personnel. And this scenario would also explain why the series of meetings in late June and the first half of July did not produce a single statement by Arbabsiar that the administration could quote to advance its case that the Iranian-American was interested in assassinating Adel al-Jubeir or carrying out other acts of terrorism.

A plan to conduct surveillance and be ready to act on contingency plans would also explain why someone as lacking in relevant experience and skills as Arbabsiar might have been acceptable to the Qods Force. Not only would the mission not have required absolute secrecy; it would have been based on the assumption that the surveillance would become known to US intelligence relatively quickly, as did the monitoring of US targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-1995.

The Qods Force officials were certainly well aware that the Drug Enforcement Agency had penetrated various Mexican drug cartels, in some cases even at the very top level. US court proceedings involving Mexican drug traffickers who were highly placed in the Sinaloa drug cartel between 2009 and early 2011 reveal that the US made deals with leaders of the cartel to report what they knew about rival cartel operations in return for a hands-off approach to their drug trafficking. ¹⁰  Further underlining the degree to which the cartels were honeycombed with people on the US payroll, the DEA informant in this case was not merely posing as a drug trafficker but is reportedly an actual associate of Los Zetas with access to its upper echelons, who has been given immunity from prosecution to cooperate with the DEA.¹¹

When Did Arbabsiar Become Part of the Sting?

The Obama administration’s account of the alleged Iranian plot has Arbabsiar suddenly changing from terrorist conspirator to active collaborator with the FBI upon his September 29 arrest at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. He is said to have provided a confession immediately upon being apprehended, after waiving his right to a lawyer, and then to have waived that right repeatedly again while being interviewed by the FBI. Then Arbabsiar cooperated in making the series of secretly recorded phone calls to someone he identified as Shakuri.

For someone facing such serious charges to provide the details with which to make the case against him, while renouncing benefit of counsel, is odd, to say the least. The official story raises questions not only about what agreement was reached between Arbabsiar and the FBI to ensure his cooperation but about when that agreement was reached.

One clue that Arbabsiar was brought into the sting operation well before his arrest is the DEA informant’s demand in a September 20 phone conversation with Arbabsiar in Tehran that he either come up with half the $1.5 million total fee or come to Mexico to be the guarantee that the full amount would be paid.

Yet the FBI account of that conversation shows Arbabsiar telling the informant, without even consulting with his contacts in Tehran, “I’m gonna go over there [in] two [or] three days.” Later in the same evening, he calls back to ask how long he would need to remain in Mexico. Even if Arbabsiar were as feckless as some reports have suggested, he would certainly not have agreed so readily to put his fate in the hands of the murderous Los Zetas cartel — unless he knew that he was not really in danger, because the US government would intercept him and bring him to the United States. Making the episode even stranger, Arbabsiar’s confession claims that when he told Shakuri about the purported Los Zetas demand, Shakuri refused to provide any more money to the cartel, advised him against going to Mexico and warned him that if he did so, he would be on his own.

Further supporting the conclusion that Arbabsiar had become part of the sting operation before his arrest is the fact there was no reason for the FBI to pose the demand — through the DEA informant — for more money or Arbabsiar’s presence in Mexico except to provide an excuse to get him out of Iran, so he could provide a full confession implicating the Qods Force and be the centerpiece of the case against Iran.

The larger aim of the FBI sting operation, which ABC News has reported was dubbed Operation Red Coalition, was clearly to link the alleged assassination plot to Qods Force officers. The logical moment for the FBI to have recruited the Iranian-American would have been right after the FBI recorded him talking about wiring money to the bank account and casually approving the idea of bombing a restaurant and before his planned departure from Mexico for Iran. The only way to ensure that Arbabsiar would come back, of course, would be to offer him a substantial amount of money to serve as an informant for the FBI during his stay in Iran, which he would receive only upon returning. If Arbabsiar had already been enlisted, of course, it would also mean the keystone of the case — the wiring of $100,000 to a secret FBI bank account — was a part of the FBI sting.

FBI Trickery in Terrorism Cases

FBI deceit in constructing a case for an Iranian terror plot should come as no surprise, given its record of domestic terrorism prosecutions based on sting operations involving entrapment and skullduggery. Central to these stings has been the creation of fictional terrorist plots by the FBI itself. In 2006 the “Gonzales Guidelines” for the use of FBI informants removed previous prohibitions on actions to “initiate a plan or strategy to commit a federal, state or local offense.”¹²

Perhaps the most notorious of all these domestic terrorism sting operations is the case in which Yassin Aref and Mohammed Hossain, leaders of their Albany, New York mosque, were sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for allegedly laundering profits from the sale of a shoulder-launched missile for a Pakistani militant group that was planning to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat in New York City.

In fact, there was no such terrorist plot, and the alleged crime was the result of an elaborate FBI scam directed against two innocent men.¹³  It began when an FBI informant pretending to be a Pakistani businessman insinuated himself into Hossain’s life and extended him a $50,000 loan for his pizza parlor. Only months after the informant had begun loaning the money did he show Hossain a shoulder-launched missile, and suggest that he was also selling arms to his “Muslim brothers.” It was a devious form of entrapment; the prosecutors later argued that Hossain should have known the loan could have come from money made in the sale of weapons to terrorists and was therefore guilty of money laundering.

The FBI approach to entrapping Hossain’s friend Aref was even more underhanded. Aref was never even made aware of the missile or the phony story of the illegal arms sale. But on one occasion, when he was present to witness the transfer of loan money, what was later said to have been the missile’s trigger system was left on a table in the room. Prosecutors then argued the theory that Aref had seen the trigger, which looks much like a staple gun, and thus had become part of a conspiracy to “assist in money laundering.”

Many other domestic terrorism cases have involved deceptive tactics and economic inducements deployed by the FBI to involve American Muslims in fictional terrorist plots. The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University’s Law School found more than 20 terrorism cases that involved some combination of “paid informants, selection of investigation based on perceived religious identity, [and] a plot that was created by the government.”¹⁴ This history makes it clear that the Justice Department and FBI are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to fabricate terrorism cases against targeted individuals, and that misrepresenting these individuals’ intentions and actual behavior has long been standard practice. The trickery and deceit in past “counter-terrorism” sting operations provides further reason to question the veracity of the Obama administration’s allegations in the bizarre case of Manssor Arbabsiar.

•  This article was first published in Middle East Research
and Information Project (MERIP)

1. The full text of  of the “amended criminal complaint” is on line.
2. New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Reuters, October 12, 2011
3. New York Times, October 12, 2011 and Bloomberg, October 12, 2011
4. For an official US recognition of Iran’s “assymetric warfare doctrine” as a tool of deterrence of “any would-be invader,” see Department of Defense, Unclassified Report on Military Power of Iran, April 2010, p. 1.
5. Michael Young, “Another Israel-Hezbollah War?” Middle East Security at Harvard, National Security Study Program, February 28, 2008
6. Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1997 and Steve Coll, Ghost Wars (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 276.
7. Gareth Porter, “US Officials Leaked a False Story Blaming Iran,” Inter Press Service, June 24, 2009.
8. Gareth Porter, “FBI Ignored Compelling Evidence of Bin Laden Role,” Inter Press Service, June 25, 2009.
9. Gareth Porter, “US May Have Concealed Deterrent Aim of IranianPlan,” Inter Press Service, October 21, 2011.
10. New York Times, October 24, 2011.
11. So said ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella in his podcast of October 18, 2011, online
12. Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, Targeted and Entrapped: Manufacturing the “Homegrown Threat” in the United States
13. This account of the case is drawn from Petra Bartosiewicz, “To Catch a Terrorist,” Harper’s, August 2011
14. Targeted and Entrapped, pp. 50-52, fn 17

But when the scanty evidence in the FBI account about what Arbabsiar actually proposed is interpreted in the context of Iran’s past strategy for deterring external attack, it suggests that Arbabsiar’s mission may have been to arrange for surveillance of, and contingency plans for, targets to be hit in the event that Iran is attacked by the United States or Israel.

Iran is relatively weak in conventional military strength, so it has relied heavily on unconventional means of deterrence by letting it be known that proxies in other countries could retaliate against U.S. and Israeli targets if those countries attacked Iran. The clearest example of that strategy was an Iranian-directed campaign of surveillance of U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994-95.

The FBI account contains a series of references to operations said to be proposed by Arbabsiar that hint at just such an unconventional deterrent strategy.

The account says Arbabsiar’s interest in the first meeting with an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant included, “among other things, attacking an embassy of Saudi Arabia”. That reference makes it clear that the Iranian interest was not in Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir but in a more generic list of targets.

In a footnote, the FBI account says the “missions” discussed would have involved “foreign government facilities associated with Saudi Arabia and with another country”, located both in the United States and elsewhere.

There is not a single quote from any of that series of meetings between late June and mid-July in which Arbabsiar explains the nature and purpose of those missions, despite the fact that most, if not all, the meetings would have been recorded by the DEA informant under standard FBI procedure.

That signal omission may have been necessary to conceal the fact that Arbabsiar was proposing surveillance of various targets and contingency plans that would be carried out against the targets only in case of an attack on Iran by the United States, Israel or both.

The account has the DEA informant saying that it would “take the one  point five for the Saudi Arabia” and later adds that he would “go ahead and work on Saudi Arabia, get all the information that we can”.

The FBI agent who signed the document then says, “I understand this to mean…that the cost…of conducting the assassination would be 1.5 million dollars.” But there is no actual evidence in the document that the figure had been discussed in connection with a proposal for the assassination of the Saudi ambassador.

Those allusions to “the Saudi Arabia” in the context of a discussion of multiple targets involving more than one country’s facilities suggests that the figure was for surveillance of, and contingency plans for, retaliatory attacks against a number of Saudi targets. By spring 2011, when Arbabsiar was asked to make contact with paramilitary forces in Mexico, according to the FBI account, Iran had reason to believe that the danger of an Israeli attack with U.S.complicity had increased significantly.

In November 2010, The Guardian had published the text of a November 2009 U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks revealing that U.S.and Israeli officials had discussed the delivery to Israel of GBU-28 “bunker buster” bombs that would allow an Israeli attack to penetrate underground Iranian nuclear facilities.

U.S. and Israeli officials in the meeting reported in the cable agreed that it would have to be done quietly to avoid any allegations that the U.S. government was helping Israel prepare for an attack on Iran. Then Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright conceded to Newsweek that there was concern among military leaders about how the shipment would be perceived by the Iranians .

The decision to identify Saudi targets for attack in the United States and Mexico presumably reflected strong Iranian suspicions that the Saudi government was prepared to allow Israeli planes to use Saudi airspace to attack Iran, as had been reported by the Times of London and Jerusalem Post in June 2010.

A project to hire a Latin American drug cartel to carry out surveillance of a range of Saudi and Israeli facilities and prepare plans for retaliatory attacks if Iran itself were to be attacked would parallel a similar Iranian campaign involving U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia in 1994 and 1995.

By late 1994, the CIA station in Saudi Arabia was reporting that a number of U.S. targets in the country, including military bases and the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, were under surveillance by Iranians and their Saudi Shia allies, as reported in a Senate Intelligence Committee Staff report in September 1996 and other published sources.

It was generally believed within the intelligence community that this surveillance by Iranian allies in Saudi represented a terrorist threat.

But Ron Neumann, then director of the Office Northern Gulf Affairs in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, observed at the time that Iranian surveillance of U.S. targets had recurred whenever U.S.-Iran tensions were high, and could be defensive maneuvers on Iran’s part to deter an attack rather than signaling an intent to carry out terrorism.

After the Khobar Towers bombing killed 19 U.S. servicemen in eastern Saudi Arabia in June 1996, the United States accused Iran of having ordered the attack, primarily on the ground that it had organised the surveillance of U.S. targets in Saudi Arabia.

In a striking parallel to the reports in recent days of sensitive intelligence linking Iranian government officials to the alleged assassination plot, the Washington Post reported in April 1997 that there was intelligence tying Hani al–Sayegh, a Saudi suspect in the Khobar Towers bombing, to Brigadier General Ahmad Sherifi of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The Post story said that intelligence had “persuaded a growing number of officials in Washington and Ryadh of Iran’s direct involvement in the (Khobar Towers) attack”.

That intelligence consisted of a secretly recorded al-Sayegh phone conversation in Canada about his meeting with Gen. Sherifi two years before the bombing.

When al-Sayegh was interviewed by Assistant Attorney General Eric Dubelier in May 1997 in Ottawa, Canada, he admitted to having participated in the videotaping of another U.S. air base in Saudi Arabia as part of a surveillance programme initiated and directed by Sherifi.

But the FBI record of that interview, to which this writer was given access in 2009, shows that al-Sayegh stated very clearly to Dubelier that the surveillance work for the Iranians was not to prepare for one or more terrorist attacks but to identify potential targets for retaliation in the event of an attack on Iran.

When Dubelier later asked him a question which ignored that distinction, al-Sayegh repeated that it was not to prepare for a terrorist bombing.

Thirteen Saudis, including al Sayegh, were indicted in 2001 for carrying out the Khobar bombing, based entirely on alleged confessions by Shi’a activists detained – and presumably tortured – by the Saudis.

The indictment blamed Iran for directing the bombing, charging that the defendants had “reported their surveillance activities to Iranian officials and were supported and directed in those activities by Iranian officials”.

The 1994-95 Iranian effort in Saudi Arabia, which was apparently not expected to be kept secret from U.S. intelligence, suggests that Iranian officials may have been aiming for a similar effect in seeking a Mexican drug cartel to do surveillance and contingency planning on Saudi and Israeli targets.

“In fact, if the United States were to decide that to garner greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might stretch out indefinitely,” Saban’s think-tankers ruefully observed.

With only one real exception, since the 1978 revolution, the Islamic Republic has never willingly provoked an American military response, although it certainly has taken actions that could have done so if Washington had been looking for a fight. Thus it is not impossible that Tehran might take some action that would justify an American invasion. And it is certainly the case that if Washington sought such a provocation, it could take actions that might make it more likely that Tehran would do so (although being too obvious about this could nullify the provocation). However, since it would be up to Iran to make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at all.

Seemingly undeterred by Iran’s frustrating unwillingness to provide the requisite provocation, the analysts continued to examine this option:

As noted above, in the section on the time frame for an invasion, whether the United States decides to invade Iran with or without a provocation is a critical consideration. With provocation, the international diplomatic and domestic political requirements of an invasion would be mitigated, and the more outrageous the Iranian provocation (and the less that the United States is seen to be goading Iran), the more these challenges would be diminished. In the absence of a sufficiently horrific provocation, meeting these requirements would be daunting.

Ruling out the likelihood of “an overt, incontrovertible, and unforgivable act of aggression—something on the order of an Iranian-backed 9/11 … given Iran’s history of avoiding such acts,” the authors went on to explore where “the question of provocation gets murky.”

“Most European, Asian, and Middle Eastern publics are dead set against any American military action against Iran derived from the current differences between Iran and the international community—let alone Iran and the United States,” they wistfully noted. “Other than a Tehran-sponsored 9/11, it is hard to imagine what would change their minds.”

Even Iran’s long-time Sunni rival in the region appeared recalcitrant to the idea. “Saudi Arabia is positively apoplectic about the Iranians’ nuclear program, as well as about their mischief making in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories,” the pro-Israeli analysts empathised. “Yet, so far, Riyadh has made clear that it will not support military operations of any kind against Iran. Certainly that could change, but it is hard to imagine what it would take.”

Would a dastardly plot to blow up King Abdullah’s “hand-picked, trusted envoy” in a D.C. restaurant suffice, perchance?

At least, the lead author of “Which Path to Persia?” seems to think so. On October 11, Kenneth Pollack opined on “Iran’s Covert War Against the United States”: “It’s shocking, but not entirely surprising to learn that the United States government has evidence that the Iranian regime was trying to kill Saudi Ambassador to the United States Adel al-Jubeir.”

Posing as a responsible skeptic regarding the ludicrous plot, Pollack concluded that the ultra-cautious regime he analysed for the Saban Center two years previously—relevant information not provided to the reader—may have changed for the worse: “But, if this incredible claim is proven true, it should remind us that Iran also is not a normal country by any stretch of the imagination, and that in a Middle East already in turmoil we now face a more aggressive, more risk-taking Iran that may be looking to stir the pot in ways that it once found imprudent.”

As Stephen M. Walt remarked about an earlier Tehran-baiting paper by the Saban Center director, “It is hard to read this piece without hearkening back to Pollack’s The Threatening Storm, the book that convinced many liberals to support the invasion of Iraq in 2003. What made that book especially persuasive was Pollack’s depiction of himself as a former dove who had oh-so-reluctantly concluded that there was no option but to go to war.”

Interestingly, The Daily Beast/Newsweek which published Pollack’s op-ed is partly owned by Jane Harman, whose service in Congress reportedly included a quid pro quo with an Israeli agent, involving political donations from billionaire Haim Saban, to lobby the Department of Justice to reduce espionage charges against two officials at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Pollack, a former member of the National Security Council, was mentioned in the indictment against Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman as one of the government officials who provided information to the two former AIPAC employees about—you guessed it—Iran.

When asked “who would want to create the impression” that the United States needs to engage in military activity against Iran, former CIA operative Michael Scheuer replied, “If I was looking at a counterintelligence operation to decide where this information came from, I’d be very interested to see if I could find an Israeli hand or a Saudi hand.”

Thanks to Kenneth Pollack, that search can now be narrowed.

The media stories generated by the leaks helped divert press attention from the fact that there is no verifiable evidence of any official Iranian involvement in the alleged assassination plan, contrary to the broad claim being made by the administration.

But the information about the two Iranian officials leaked to NBC News, the Washington Post and Reuters was unambiguously false and misleading, as confirmed by official documents in one case and a former senior intelligence and counterterrorism official in the other.

The main target of the official leaks was Abdul Reza Shahlai, who was identified publicly by the Obama administration as a “deputy commander in the Quds Force” of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Shahlai had long been regarded by U.S. officials as a key figure in the Quds Force’s relationship to Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army in Iraq.

The primary objective of the FBI sting operation involving Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant that was started last June now appears to have been to use Arbabsiar to implicate Shahlai in a terror plot.

U.S. officials had learned from the DEA informant that Arbabsiar claimed that Shahlai was his cousin.

In September 2008, the Treasury Department designated Shahlai as an individual “providing financial, material and technical support for acts of violence that threaten the peace and stability of Iraq” and thus subject to specific financial sanctions. The announcement said Shahlai had provided “material support” to the Mahdi Army in 2006 and that he had “planned the January 20, 2007 attack” by Mahdi Army “Special Groups” on U.S. troops at the Provincial Coordination Center in Karbala, Iraq.

Arbabsiar’s confession claims that Shahlai approached him in early spring 2011 and asked him to find “someone in the narcotics business” to kidnap the Saudi ambassador to the United States, according to the FBI account. Arbabsiar implicates Shahlai in providing him with thousands of dollars for his expenses.

But Arbabsiar’s charge against Shahlai was self-interested. Arbabsiar had become the cornerstone of the administration’s case against Shahlai in order to obtain leniency on charges against him.

There is no indication in the FBI account of the   investigation that there is any independent evidence to support Arbabsiar’s claim of Shahlai’s involvement in a plan to kill the ambassador.

The Obama administration planted stories suggesting that Shahlai had a terrorist past, and that it was  therefore credible that he could be part of an assassination plot.

Laying the foundation for press stories on the theme, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday that it was sanctioning Shahlai, along with Arbabsiar and three other Quds Force officials, including the head of the organisation, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, for being “connected to” the assassination plot.

But Michael Issikof of NBC News reported the same day that Shahlai “had previously been accused of plotting a highly sophisticated attack that killed five U.S. soldiers in Iraq, according to U.S. government officials and documents made public Tuesday  afternoon”.

Isikoff, who is called “National Investigative Correspondent” at NBC News, reported that the Treasury Department had designated Shahlai as a “terrorist” in 2008, despite the fact that the Treasury announcement of the designation had not used the term “terrorist”.

On Saturday, the Washington Post published a report closely paralleling the Issikof story but going even further in claiming documentary proof of Shahlai’s responsibility for the January 2007 attack in Karbala. Post reporter Peter Finn wrote that Shahlai “was known as the guiding hand behind an elite militia of the cleric Moqtada al Sadr”, which had carried out an attack on U.S. troops in Karbala in January 2007.

Finn cited the fact that the Treasury Department named Shahlai as the “final approving and coordinating authority” for training Sadr’s
militiamen in Iran. That fact would not in itself be evidence of involvement in a specific attack on U.S. forces. On the contrary, it would suggest that he was not involved in operational aspects of the Mahdi Army in Iraq.

Finn then referred to a “22-page memo that detailed preparations for the operation and tied it to the Quds Force….” But he didn’t refer to any evidence that Shahlai personally had anything to do with the operation.

In fact, U.S. officials acknowledged in the months after the Karbala attack that they had found no evidence of any Iranian involvement in the operation.

Talking with reporters about the memo on April 26, 2007, several weeks after it had been captured, Gen. David Petraeus conceded that it did not show that any Iranian official was linked to the planning of the Karbala operation. When a journalist asked him  whether there was evidence of Iranian involvement in the Karbala operation, Petraeus responded, “No. No. No… [W]e do not have a direct link to Iran involvement in that particular case.”

In a news briefing in Baghdad July 2, 2007, Gen. Kevin Bergner confirmed that the attack in Karbala had been authorised by the Iraqi chief of the militia in question, Kais Khazali, not by any Iranian official.

Col. Michael X. Garrett, who had been commander of the U.S. Fourth Brigade combat team in Karbala, confirmed to this writer in December 2008 that the Karbala attack “was definitely an inside job”.

Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Quds Force, is on the list of those Iranian officials “linked” to the alleged terror plot, because he “oversees the IRGC-QF officers who were involved in this plot” , as the Treasury Department announcement explained. But a Reuters story on Friday reported a claim of U.S. intelligence that two wire transfers totaling 100,000 dollars at the behest of Arbabsiar to a bank account controlled by the FBI implicates Soleimani in the assassination plot.

“While details are still classified,” wrote Mark Hosenball and Caren Bohan, “one official said the wire transfers apparently had some kind of hallmark indicating they were personally approved” by Soleimani.

But the suggestion that forensic examination of the wire transfers could somehow show who had approved them is misleading. The wire transfers were from two separate non-Iranian banks in a foreign country, according to the FBI’s account. It would be impossible to deduce who approved the transfer by looking at the documents.

“I have no idea what such a ‘hallmark’ could be,” said Paul Pillar, a former head of the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center who was also National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East until his retirement in 2005.

Pillar told IPS that the “hallmark” notion “pops up frequently in commentary after actual terrorist attacks,”, but the concept is usually invoked “along the lines of ‘the method used in this attack had the hallmark of group such and such’.”

That “hallmark” idea “assumes exclusive ownership of a method of attack which does not really exist,” said Pillar. “I expect the same could be said of methods of transferring money.”

As The Washington Post reported last month, the “commingling” of CIA officers, JSOC paramilitary troops and contractors “occupy an expanding netherworld between intelligence and military operations” where “congressional intelligence and armed services committees rarely get a comprehensive view.”

Or any “view” at all, which is precisely what the CIA and Pentagon have long desired; an oversight-free zone where American policymakers operate, as Dick Cheney infamously put it, on the “dark side,” a position fully-embraced by the “hope and change” administration of Barack Obama.

Awlaki’s state-sponsored killing, like the May 2 murder of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, resurfaces many unanswered questions concerning the 9/11 attacks, the so-called trigger for America’s global “War on Terror.”

But before turning to those issues, it is necessary to take a detour and examine administration actions; specifically the deliberations undertaken by Obama’s national security team which culminated in Awlaki’s death.

White House “Death Panel”

Unlike the fantasies of the corporate-controlled Tea Party who charged during the run-up to the White House sell-out of health care reform that the administration would create “death panels” to deny care to the elderly, it has since emerged that Team Obama has stood-up the authentic article.

According to The Washington Post, President Obama’s Justice Department “wrote a secret memorandum authorizing the lethal targeting” of Awlaki. The Post reports that the memorandum “was produced following a review of the legal issues raised by striking a U.S. citizen and involved senior lawyers from across the administration. There was no dissent about the legality of killing Aulaqi.”

That memorandum, according to The New York Times, was drafted in June 2010, some six months after Awlaki had been placed on the White House hit list, by Office of Legal Counsel attorneys “David Barron and Martin Lederman.”

Both former OLC lawyers are prominent “liberals” from prestigious universities; Barron at Harvard and Lederman at Georgetown University.

Ironically enough, in several scholarly articles they had railed against the previous administration’s adaptation of the “Unitary Executive Theory” promulgated by “torture memo” authors Jay Bybee and John Yoo.

Under Bush, OLC opinions were used to justify everything from warrantless wiretapping, the domestic deployment of the military to arrest Americans, to the torture and indefinite detention of “terrorist” suspects at the Guantánamo Bay prison gulag and CIA “black sites.”

This, of course, begs the question: if Awlaki’s murder was “legal,” why then was the authorization to do so reached in camera by officials following a deliberative process which can’t be shared with the public because of “national security”?

The answer should be chilling and shocking to all Americans: because the nucleus of a death squad state recalling those stood up in Chile and Argentina during the “dirty war” period of the 1970s may now exist.

Reuters disclosed that Americans “are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials.”

“There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel,” reporter Mark Hosenball wrote, “which is a subset of the White House’s National Security Council. … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.”

According to Reuters, “targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC ‘principals,’ meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval.”

A “former official” told Hosenball that “one of the reasons for making senior officials principally responsible for nominating Americans for the target list was to ‘protect’ the president,” i.e., provide Obama legal cover under the thin veneer afforded by “plausible deniability.”

McClatchy News reported that “broadly speaking” White House orders to kill Awlaki were based on claims that “the nation’s inherent right of self-defense [is] recognized under international law.” However, “international law also imposes limits: Targeted killing is banned except to protect against ‘concrete, specific and imminent’ danger.”

And although the administration now claims that Awlaki was targeted for death because “his role in AQAP had gone ‘from inspirational to operational’,” Reuters disclosed that “officials acknowledge that some of the intelligence purporting to show Awlaki’s hands-on role in plotting attacks was patchy.”

In fact, the White House has failed to provide any proof whatsoever that Awlaki posed an “imminent danger” to the United States, although there is considerable evidence that he was on the radar of U.S. and allied secret state intelligence agencies for more than a decade, had close ties to several of the 9/11 hijackers and could have been picked up and indicted at any time.

Instead, federal law enforcement officials gave Awlaki a green light to leave the United States, unlike thousands of innocent Muslim-Americans swept-up and detained by the FBI in the post-9/11 hysteria that followed the attacks.

A “former military intelligence officer who worked with special operations troops to hunt down high-value terrorism targets,” told the right-wing Washington Times: “I think it’s pretty easy to understand why they didn’t take him alive. Would you want to deal with the hassle of trying to put him on trial, an American citizen that has gotten so much press for being the target of a CIA kill order? That would be a nightmare. The ACLU would be crawling all over the Justice Department for due process in an American court.”

That about sums up the dominant mindset of an Empire in sharp decline: the rule of law and due process for criminal suspects reduced to a “hassle.”

Slouching Towards Dictatorship

Obama’s national security team justified whacking Awlaki, as with their earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, by referencing the Bush-era Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), hastily passed by Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

“A decade later,” McClatchy reported, “the Obama administration contends that this wartime authority remains even if it’s evolved for reasons the administration won’t fully elucidate.”

The relevant section of AUFM reads: “IN GENERAL — That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.” (emphasis added)

Readers will undoubtedly note that in passing the resolution, Congress not only ceded its authority to declare war to the Executive Branch but also planted the seeds of the administration’s preemptive war doctrines along with an unprecedented expansion of its domestic surveillance powers.

More pertinently is the reason why the administration “won’t fully elucidate” how the Bush-era AUMF “evolved” chiefly due to the fact that secret annexes now exist which authorize the killing of Americans, not only in Yemen or other “War on Terror” fronts, but right here in the United States itself?

After all, it’s not beyond the Obama administration to play fast and loose with the truth or hide repressive policies under layers of top secret presidential “findings” or a multitude of CIA and Pentagon black programs, as did the previous Bush government.

Recall that during the run-up to the reauthorization of three expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, civil libertarians decried the use of secret legal memos justifying everything from unchecked access to internet and telephone records to the deployment of government-sanctioned malware on private computers during “national security” investigations.

Recall too, that the Obama administration, as The New York Times disclosed in June, handed the FBI “significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.”

These “news rules,” the Times averred, will give agents “more latitude” to investigate citizens even when there is no evidence they have exhibited “signs of criminal or terrorist activity.”

It gets worse.

Last month, The New York Times revealed that the FBI “is permitted to include people on the government’s terrorist watch list even if they have been acquitted of terrorism-related offenses or the charges are dropped.”

Under these new standards, the Bureau may deem someone a “known or suspected terrorist,” not based on evidence gathered through a criminal investigation, but solely if officials have “particularized derogatory information,” including that derived from First Amendment protected activities, to support to support an individuals’ watch listing or placement on a “no-fly” list.

One administration wag, speaking on condition of anonymity because to do otherwise would reveal “closely held deliberations within the administration,” but did so anyway because this was clearly a sanctioned leak to stenographer Peter Finn, told The Washington Post that “what constitutes due process in [the Awlaki case] is a due process in war.”

“The administration officials refused to disclose the exact legal analysis used to authorize targeting Aulaqi,” Finn wrote, “or how they considered any Fifth Amendment right to due process.”

We now know, thanks to Reuters, that authorization came from a White House death panel, an extra-constitutional committee of anonymous officials operating outside the rule of law.

As we have seen since Barack Obama took office, as under the previous Bush government, the Constitution is a meaningless scrap of paper with some words on it, duly trotted out on national holidays only to be cast aside in practice; that is, when it isn’t used as a rhetorical hammer against assorted “new Hitlers” or geopolitical rivals whose resources corporate America seek to “liberate.”

Dead Men Tell No Tales

As toxic to democratic norms and the rule of law as the Awlaki affair clearly is, there are underlying parapolitical themes surrounding his murder which strengthen suspicions that what took place in Yemen on September 30 is more than just another story about an overt power grab by the Executive Branch.

While the government and media continue to cover-up the role played by the CIA and other secret state agencies in alleged intelligence “failures” leading up to the 9/11 attacks, evidence suggests that the Awlaki killing, as with last May’s murder of former bête noire and on-again, off-again ally, Osama Bin Laden, may have been a “clean-up” operation designed to remove inconvenient witnesses with knowledge of Agency involvement in the plot.

As Antifascist Calling reported nearly two years ago in the wake of the aborted 2009 bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day over Detroit, a plot for which Awlaki was accused of orchestrating, though evidence can’t be supplied because it’s “secret,” The Washington Post disclosed that Awlaki had extensive contacts with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar and Hani Hanjour who “had spent time at his mosques in California and Falls Church.”

In a series of 2010 articles (here, here, here and here), I reported on the stark parallels between September 11 and the Flight 253 affair.

And as with the 2001 attacks we were told “changed everything,” far from being a failure to “connect the dots,” intelligence and law enforcement officials possessed sufficient information that should have prevented accused bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, from boarding that plane and placing the lives of nearly 300 air passengers at risk.

And while Awlaki wasn’t given a free pass by the administration in that botched attack, earlier government failures to apprehend him certainly set the stage.

According to History Commons, “shortly before the [FBI] investigation [into Awlaki's alleged ties to the now-shuttered Holy Land Foundation] is closed,” in 2000, Awlaki “is beginning to associate with hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar shortly before the investigation ends.”

“For instance,” History Commons avers, “on February 4, one month before the FBI investigation is closed, al-Awlaki talks on the telephone four times with hijacker associate [and suspected Saudi intelligence agent] Omar al-Bayoumi.”

“The 9/11 Commission will later speculate that these calls are related to Alhazmi and Almihdhar, since al-Bayoumi is helping them that day, and that Alhazmi or Almihdhar may even have been using al-Bayoumi’s phone at the time. Al-Bayoumi had also been the subject of an FBI counterterrorism investigation in 1999.”

Keep in mind that at least two of the hijackers, Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, figure prominently in recent revelations by researcher Kevin Fenton, the author of Disconnecting the Dots.

In a recent conversation with Boiling Frogs Post’s Sibel Edmonds and Peter B. Collins, Fenton said that during the course of his investigation, drawn from the Congressional 9/11 Joint Inquiry, the 9/11 Commission, the Justice Department’s Inspector General’s report, and the CIA’s still-redacted Inspector General’s report, he discovered that the CIA had deliberately withheld information from the FBI that the future hijackers had entered the United States with multiple entry visas issued in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Even though the Agency had identified the pair as international terrorists who attended a 2000 Al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia where they and others, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Khallad Bin Attash, one of the principle architects of the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, planned the assault on the USS Cole and the 9/11 attacks, they kept this from the FBI, information that could have led straight to the heart of Al-Qaeda’s “planes operation.”

Fenton provides substantial evidence that the CIA’s Alec Station Director Richard Blee and deputy, Tom Wilshire, concealed intelligence from investigators, concluding this “information was intentionally omitted in order to allow an al-Qaeda attack to go forward against the United States.”

As part of this continuing cover-up, Awlaki’s ties to the 9/11 hijackers were far more extensive than secret state officials have led us to believe.

In fact, although the Obama administration has justified killing Awlaki with false claims that he was AQAP’s “external operations” chief, his role before 9/11 was substantially more significant from an investigatory perspective: that of a “fixer,” first in San Diego where he assisted Saudi spook Omar al-Bayoumi in “settling” Alhazmi and Almihdhar, and later in Falls Church, Virginia, where he did the same for Hani Hanjour.

In 2002, Newsweek revealed that “some federal investigators suspect that al-Bayoumi could have been an advance man for the 9-11 hijackers, sent by Al Qaeda to assist the plot that ultimately claimed 3,000 lives.”

“Two months after al-Bayoumi began aiding Alhazmi and Almihdhar,” Newsweek disclosed, “al-Bayoumi’s wife began receiving regular stipends, often monthly and usually around $2,000, totaling tens of thousands of dollars.

Payments arrived “in the form of cashier’s checks, purchased from Washington’s Riggs Bank by Princess Haifa bint Faisal, the daughter of the late King Faisal and wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi envoy who is a prominent Washington figure and personal friend of the Bush family.”

With startling similarities to the Awlaki case, ten days after the attacks, al-Bayoumi is picked up by British authorities in London, where he had relocated in July 2001, at the request of the FBI. Although his phone calls, bank accounts and associations are scrutinized, the Bureau claim they found no connections to terrorism.

The Washington Post will report that by 2002 the FBI had concluded, the same year Awlaki leaves the U.S., “that no evidence could be found of any organized domestic effort to aid the hijackers.”

Recall that new information linking some members of the Saudi royal family and its intelligence apparatus to the attacks has recently surfaced. Last month, The Miami Herald revealed that two weeks before the kamikaze assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a Saudi family “abruptly vacated their luxury home near Sarasota, leaving a brand new car in the driveway, a refrigerator full of food, fruit on the counter–and an open safe in a master bedroom.”

Investigative reporters Anthony Summers and Dan Christensen learned that “law enforcement agents not only discovered the home was visited by vehicles used by the hijackers, but phone calls were linked between the home and those who carried out the death flights–including leader Mohamed Atta–in discoveries never before revealed to the public.”

“Ten years after the deadliest attack of terrorism on U.S. soil,” Summers and Christensen wrote, “new information has emerged that shows the FBI found troubling ties between the hijackers and residents in the upscale community in southwest Florida, but the investigation wasn’t reported to Congress or mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.”

In a follow-up piece that significantly advanced the story, researcher Russ Baker reported on the WhoWhatWhy web site “that those alleged confederates were closely tied to influential members of the Saudi ruling elite.”

Building on information first disclosed by the Herald, Baker, the author of Family of Secrets, reports that this “now-revealed link” between those who consorted with the hijackers in Florida “and the highest ranks of the Saudi establishment, reopens questions about the White House’s controversial approval for multiple charter flights allowing Saudi nationals to depart the U.S., beginning about 48 hours after the attacks, without the passengers being interviewed by law enforcement–despite the identification of the majority of the hijackers as Saudis.”

Is there a pattern between the hands-off treatment afforded well-connected Saudis and Anwar al-Awlaki’s casual, and inexplicable, flight from the United States?

“After 9/11″ History Commons points out, “the FBI will question al-Awlaki, and he will admit to meeting with Alhazmi several times, but say he does not remember what they discussed. He will not claim to remember Almihdhar at all.” Other accounts suggest that the relationship was much closer.

“The 9/11 Congressional Inquiry,” History Commons avers, “claim that Alhazmi and Almihdhar ‘were closely affiliated with [al-Awlaki] who reportedly served as their spiritual adviser during their time in San Diego. … Several persons informed the FBI after September 11 that this imam had closed-door meetings in San Diego with Almihdhar, Alhazmi, and another individual, whom al-Bayoumi had asked to help the hijackers’.”

“Around August 2000,” History Commons reports, “al-Awlaki resigns as imam and travels to unknown ‘various countries.’ In early 2001, he will be appointed the imam to a much larger mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. During this time frame, Alhazmi, Almihdhar, and fellow hijacker Hani Hanjour will move to Virginia and attend al-Awlaki’s mosque there.”

Anecdotally, in 2003 Newsweek reports: “Lincoln Higgie, an antiques dealer who lived across the street from the mosque where Aulaqi used to lead prayer, told Newsweek that he distinctly recalls the imam knocking on his door in the first week of August 2001 to tell him he was leaving for Kuwait. ‘He came over before he left and told me that something very big was going to happen, and that he had to be out of the country when it happened,’ recalls Higgie.”

The antiques dealer later told The New York Times, that when he learned that Awlaki would be permanently leaving San Diego, “he told the imam to stop by if he was ever in the area–and got a strange response.” Higgie said, “‘I don’t think you’ll be seeing me. I won’t be coming back to San Diego again. Later on you’ll find out why’.”

Although the FBI suspected Awlaki “had some connection with the 9/11 plot,” authorities claim there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him, nor can he be deported because he’s an American citizen. And when the Bureau hatched an ill-conceived plan to arrest him on an obscure charge of “transporting prostitutes across state lines,” that plan collapsed when Awlaki left the U.S. in March 2002.

“But on October 10, 2002,” History Commons reports, “he makes a surprise return to the U.S.” Although his name is on a terrorist watch list and he is detained by Customs’ officials when he lands in New York, they are informed by the FBI that “his name was taken off the watch list just the day before. He is released after only three hours.”

“Throughout 2002,” History Commons informs us, Awlaki is the “subject of an active Customs investigation into money laundering called Operation Greenquest, but he is not arrested for this either, or for the earlier contemplated prostitution charges. At the time, the FBI is fighting Greenquest, and Customs officials will later accuse the FBI of sabotaging Greenquest investigations.”

Awlaki again leaves the U.S., this time for good. Although the FBI admits they were “very interested” in Awlaki, they fail to stop him leaving the country. One FBI source told U.S. News and World Report, “We don’t know how he got out.”

Inexplicably however, it was not until 2008 that secret state officials concluded that Awlaki was an Al-Qaeda operative! This beggars belief, and raises the question as to why he was allowed to leave in the first place. It certainly can’t be for lack of evidence or that when Awlaki set-up shop, first in London and finally in Yemen, he is continually under surveillance by British, Yemeni and American intelligence agencies.

Although interviewed four times by the FBI after September 11, the Bureau concluded, according to The New York Times, that Awlaki’s “contacts with the hijackers and other radicals were random.”

Other investigators, however, disagreed. “One detective,” the Times reported, whose name has been scrubbed from 9/11 Commission files, told staff that he believed Awlaki “was at the center of the 9/11 story.” At the time of the Flight 253 affair, I wrote that “despite, or possibly because of these dubious connections he was allowed to leave the country.”

In fact, the curious disinterest exhibited by authorities in bringing Awlaki to ground following September 11, were neither “errors in judgement” nor “mistakes” by overtaxed investigators but are rather, a modus operandi which suggests that Awlaki and others were part of a CIA domestic operation which allowed the 9/11 plot to go forward.

Nothing in what I have written above should be construed as justification for the extrajudicial assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, the opposite conclusion can be drawn. The available evidence indicates that Awlaki could have been arrested multiple times. At the least serious end of the criminal justice spectrum he could have been charged with providing “material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization,” to whit, Al-Qaeda, and legally taken out of circulation.

That he wasn’t and continued to operate freely as a propagandist, despite substantial corroboration from multiple law enforcement sources that he was a key figure in the pre-9/11 domestic support network, suggests that Awlaki may have been a double agent, albeit one who had decidedly gone “off the reservation.”

Awlaki’s handling by authorities raise serious questions about just how extensive U.S. support for Al-Qaeda was prior to, and possibly even after the September 11 attacks, particularly in resource-rich global hot-spots.

As numerous journalists and researchers have painstakingly documented, Al-Qaeda, allied terrorist outfits and international narco-trafficking networks have a long, sordid history of supporting U.S. covert operations that targeted America’s geopolitical rivals even as Bin Laden’s far-flung organization plotted to attack the United States itself.

In this light, Awlaki’s “targeted killing” as with the earlier hit on Osama Bin Laden, may be part of a larger CIA/Pentagon operation to remove inconvenient participants and witnesses from the scene who might have a thing or two to say about the crimes and intrigues hatched by the imperialist Empire.

After all, dead men tell no tales…

But he made no mention of powerful American ally Saudi Arabia, which has not escaped the Arab Spring uprisings. One report noted: “Saudi Arabia’s worst nightmare – the arrival of the new Arab awakening of rebellion and insurrection in the kingdom – is now casting its long shadow over the House of Saud. Provoked by the Shia majority uprising in the neighbouring Sunni-dominated island of Bahrain, where protesters are calling for the overthrow of the ruling al-Khalifa family, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is widely reported to have told the Bahraini authorities that if they do not crush their Shia revolt, his own forces will.”

When the White House backed the uprisings beginning with the fall from power of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, another long-time U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia might have been worried about what Obama’s 19 May (2011) speech might have contained. They need not have.

The relationship between the U.S and Saudi Arabia is a long and complex one. The public attention that the Arab Spring uprisings brings to Saudi Arabia has the potential to drive a wedge between the two countries. Attention to the Saudi-American relationship tends to focus on the idea that America is Saudi’s protector in the region. This is an idea rejected by the House of Saud. But it was only in 1990, when Iraq’s Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait that the Saudis turned to the U.S. military for protection. Iran is considered as an enemy state by both the US and Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabian concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is deep-seated, dating to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, which brought into being the first Shiite-led Arab nation in modern history. In Lebanon, Washington has not been able to stop Iranian-backed Hezbollah from steadily expanding its political clout.

Recent events are also ominous. The Saudis, armed with the best U.S. military technology, are claiming themselves as guardians of the Arab status quo. They have made it clear that they will not accept popular rule anywhere in the states under the Council for the Arab States of the Gulf.

It is the status quo (including American support) that is the very thing the Arab Spring protesters want to overthrow. Moreover, America has steadily become wedged itself, accounting for its slow official response to the events that have been occurring in Northern Africa and the Middle East since December 2010.

Successive American administrations have not as been as strident on human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia as they have been elsewhere. This is the trade off for having Saudi Arabia as an American sphere of influence in the region. Now with the protestors demanding reform, a rejection of regimes backed by outside states for geo-political self-interests, and the delivery of human rights, America is itself wedged and the Saudi’s have been worried about why Barrack Obama might do.

Associated Press has reported that there is a “deepening political divide” between the Obama administration and the rule of King Abdullah bin Abdul-Aziz. Privately however the U.S. and the Saudi Arabia are quietly expanding defense ties on a vast scale, led by a little-known project to develop an elite force to protect the kingdom’s oil riches and future nuclear sites. The U.S. also is in discussions with Saudi Arabia to create an air and missile defense system with far greater capability against the regional rival the Saudis fear most, Iran.

Britain’s Amnesty International had already issued a press release ahead saying Obama needed to make it clear that his administration is “committed to promoting freedom, justice and accountability with friend and foe alike”. This seems problematic given the Saudi government ranks low on The Economist’s Democracy Index.

For a president elected on a platform of change, and with a speech embracing opportunity, Obama’s silence on Saudi Arabia is deafening.

But let us affect a certain credulity and assume that there was such a person and that some general information can safely believed to be true; what of the available stories can we accept as most believable? Here are my selections:

Osama bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Yemeni contractor of major industrial construction projects with connections to the Saudi royal family. He was one of 20 plus sons (his father had several wives) and of above average height. Though trained as an engineer, he had a philosophical turn of mind and fancied himself a warrior poet. He was political. He was a committed Muslim. His wealth, social position, height, attractiveness and manner would all suggest a person who could easily develop narcissistic tendencies, possibly seeing himself as important, even pivotal, in the struggle with modernity’s impress on Muslim beliefs and the political challenges from the USA and others as forces from outside the region attempted to dominate the Middle East for reasons of oil and its geopolitical centrality. Many events support this perception of him.

There will be more of this as I go along, but I want to dispense with the primary issue early on. I don’t know if Osama bin Laden was a bad man or not. I am told that he was; I am told that he was the worst of men, that he was the devil. It is repeated endlessly with no objection allowed.¹ The image is posed of bin Laden as the central controlling agency for the US embassy bombings in Africa, the bombing of the USS Cole, the 9/11 attack and a list of bombings in Europe and Asia. This is all predicated on the importance of his role in the operation of an organization that has come to be called al Qaeda.

I will not dwell on the history or importance of al Qaeda, there are may sources that the reader can go to by googling “history al qaeda”, but I have no reason to believe that such an organization exists in the form that the media has come to reflexively present it. Almost no evil occurs in the present world without one media person asking another media person, “and what, do you think, was the role of al Qaeda?” For al Qaeda to be involved in all the actions associated with such questions would require it to have the powers, reach and structure of the CIA.²

The organization funded and directed by bin Laden in Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion was more like the regiments raised by business and political figures in the American Civil War than the formation of a clandestine terrorist organization: a few thousand men brought into the country, equipped and funded by a self proclaimed “general.” It was during this time that bin Laden, a seemingly practiced networker, developed contacts with the American CIA. Given his education and knowledge of Middle Eastern history, he could not have trusted them. But his family’s close ties with the Saudi Royal family, the Royal family’s ties with the US government and his own family’s ties with US oil companies must have complicated the situation for him. It is almost too easy to speculate about how Papa Bush’s oil and CIA relationships might have figured in.

For all of the smoke and heat generated in the world media about this thing called al Qaeda there is little evidence of a consistently directed enterprise. The actions attributed to al Qaeda in the US include the fantasies of Jose Padilla, the burned feet of the Shoe Bomber, the burned groin of the underwear bomber, the smoking car of the failed New York city bomber and 2 or 3 clumsy entrapment stories from the FBI. The Fort Hood shootings in Texas seem not to be related to bin Laden although you wouldn’t know that from watching TV news.

Lacking better evidence than that delivered by a chronically dishonest media, the principle of parsimony forces the assumption that al Qaeda, in the form used to support the stories of Osama bin Laden as the ultimate terrorist, does not and has never existed. It seems to have begun as part of a record keeping project, a need to keep track of especially Saudis coming into Afghanistan in the 1980s, more a list than a political or religious movement; though bin Laden was almost certainly acting religiously, politically and militarily at the time.

Those who call themselves al Qaeda seem, today, to be largely self-assigned; at least in part as a result of the publicity given to the name by the media. The parade of ‘frightening’ foreign sounding names, the constant assertion of al Qaeda’s malevolent omnipresence and the attribution of unique evil to bin Laden all seem to be propaganda aimed at frightening and controlling the common folk, to create distractions from the truly devastating plans that the economic and power elite have for us.

We need only compare the danger of being harmed by a crazy person empowered by some dream of glory to the possibility of being harmed by having access to medical services reduced or removed; it is obvious where the greater danger lies. Compare the odds of a terror attack with the harm created by the increased redistribution of wealth to the top 1%; doubling and tripling the wealth of the wealthiest contributes to social instability, economic weakness, loss of economic safety and actual starvation on a scale hundreds of times greater than all the terrorism of the last 20 years.³ But I wander in my intended purpose.

Removed from the prejudgments constantly applied by the media and government, Osama bin Laden appears to have been a regional actor trying to protect his religion, his tribal and national affiliations and the resource/economic base of his homeland.⁴ Foreign invaders, for thousands of years, had marched across Arabia and for thousands of years the desert tribes had driven them away. This was the tradition in which bin Laden probably saw himself. The rest is detail – some of it quite damning to be sure.

His relationship with the CIA, his willingness to fund and otherwise support the killing of innocent human beings, his associations with Pakistani intelligence services, his association with drug smuggling and other unsavory activities, but these are all obligations in the world of armed conflict – and these are the people that own the ball with which the game is played.

From the information available to us, information with some reasonable value, we can be confident that there is a much deeper game being played here. We can also be sure that the real Osama bin Laden is (was) nothing like the cartoon one used to frighten the children. And if he died as he is said to have died, then it was the murder of one of the players of that deeper game and not the removal of evil incarnate making this a safer world.

And that funny aftertaste; that is the bitterness of being lied to yet again. Neither bin Laden or al Qaeda were in charge of the narrative; US and British officialdom and corporate actors used the events that occurred, created those didn’t occur on their own and constructed from the disconnected, even unrelated, stories, narratives to support their goals. bin Laden’s death is no different – and ultimately will make no difference on its own terms.

1. Another part to this story is the irony of bin Laden’s code name for the operation that killed him: he was codenamed Geronimo. Geronimo, a hero to his people, was fighting an overwhelming power with, what would be called today, terrorist tactics; bin Laden might have chosen such a name for himself. It is entirely possible that Osama bin Laden was, right-headedly or wrong-headedly, trying to defend his view of his people, religion and region from the oppressive influence, domination and thievery of the Western powers. Certainly the case can be made that the US and Europe have used the Middle East’s peoples, land and resources for their own interests and in the process caused no end of suffering and troubles there. What is difficult to understand is how few prominent freedom fighters there have been from the Middle East, not that they occasionally occur.

   The indignation of many Indigenous peoples at the codename represents the (mis)understanding of bin Laden as a bad man; this is the same kind of prejudiced and “simplistic” understanding suffered by the Indians during their struggles with the US government, business interests and media. Geronimo was maligned in the media and was the ‘devil’ of his time in the American southwest. In fact, the treatment of those who have been fighting against the destruction of historical Middle Eastern culture by colonial powers is not dissimilar to the treatment, and its explanations, once (and to some extent continuing to be) delivered to Indigenous peoples. This is something that Indigenous peoples should understand.

   The military’s use of Geronimo as a codename for bin Laden was a thoughtless and stupid choice, but finally not because of the insensitive use of the name of a good man for a bad one, but for the more telling prospect that a man once vilified is used to name a man presently vilified – and the possibilities of understanding therein.

2. Consider the madness! Media Story: years of planning, millions of dollars, thousands upon thousands of man-hours, extensive training, deep infrastructure of information collection, analysis and military acumen required to discover and invade a house with about 7 or 8 adults and some children. But bin Laden is supposed to be controlling the world’s most dangerous terror shop out of a cave with a few hundred to a few thousand half literate followers… and using ‘runners’, not radios, to deliver messages.
3. An honest comparison would be the human costs of the Middle Eastern Oil Wars over the last 90 years with the retributive response of oppressed peoples that we call terrorism; the differences would be on the order of many thousands to one.
4. Furthermore, the national governments of the Middle East had all been to some extent co-opted by the Western powers, political and corporate, so as to allow the slow and not so slow appropriation of resource and culture.

Of the deaths mentioned above, the six in Ohio and Mississippi occurred during protests against the US invasion of Cambodia–a clear expansion of the war in Southeast Asia. The murders in Augusta were related to the ongoing struggle by African-Americans for equal rights in a country that had not only never granted such rights to these members of their nation but had by forcibly removed them from their homelands to become chattel slaves in the New World. That struggle had been going on since the first families arrived in the American South. It had seen its worst violence during the civil war and what was perhaps its second bloodiest episode in the decade preceding the aforementioned Augusta slayings. It seemed like in each of the previous ten years, there had been a bloody outbreak of anger and rage somewhere in the United States that was related to the freedom struggle of black people in the United States. From the bullwhips and police dogs of Bull Connor’s police in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 to the US Army’s tanks moving down the streets of Washington, DC and a dozen other cities in 1968, the forces of US law and order (read white supremacy) brutally shed the blood of these people who refused to remain in bondage any longer.

The freedom struggles of African-Americans did release them from legalized apartheid. Admission to schools and employment can no longer be legally denied to them because of their skin tone. Neither can housing or other accommodations. These reforms were realized due to the cooperation of certain elements of the freedom movement, well-meaning liberals in government, the media and the general population, and conservative politicians that understood the need to allow blacks into the system in order to maintain their dominance. Some considered this cooperation to be something much more akin to a hijacking of the movement than anything else. As most everyone will acknowledge, a divide between white skinned and darker toned people continues to exist in the United States. The divide derives from a fundamentally unjust economic system that conspires by its history and continued existence to keep most black people poor and a few white people very wealthy, with the rest of the population fighting each other to get ahead. This situation will not, indeed can not, be resolved until a new economy comes into existence. That scenario involves a struggle most of us seem unwilling to undertake.

Anyhow, I mention the freedom struggle of African-Americans in the Sixties here primarily to make a comparison to western governments’ reaction to the uprisings currently taking place across northern Africa and the Middle East. As I see it, the comparison between the two works like this: in almost all of the nations involved, millions of people have been denied their basic rights by a system that is nothing short of dictatorial in its dealings with them. The struggles of these millions are not new but in most cases have recently reached a critical mass and, like the movements of the Sixties, know no borders. The movement in each nation is unique, yet is also universal. Furthermore, most seem to be contrived of a multitude of political, religious and other philosophies.

The most common factor found in each movement is the response of the national government. In every instance that response has been repression. While the brutality and duration of that repression has differed, there is no denying either the repression or its brutality. Nor is there any denying that, with the possible exception of Egypt, the repression has been greater in those nations that Washington has multiple dealings with. Indeed, it can easily be argued that the closer the relationship (once again with the possible exception of Egypt, which can probably be attributed to Washington’s unpreparedness), the greater the repression of the freedom movements. The general fact of the bloody repression is the similarity to the African-American freedom struggle that strikes me as the most evident. At the same time, it is the one which is not discussed, especially by those in the Washington establishment crowing the loudest for more US intervention in some of the nations now experiencing an uprising. In other words, while blacks in the US were fighting, often quite violently, for their freedom in Sixties, the regime in Washington sent its military to quash those uprisings, killing hundreds in the process. Yet, never once did anyone in the circles of power in DC, London, Rome, Paris or any other western capitol suggest that the government in DC should be overthrown and replaced. In contrast, not only are there voices in each of those capitols calling for regime change in the affected region today, there are military forces from those capitols involved in aiding those forces attempting to overthrow those governments. Naturally, the regimes being attacked by western forces are the regimes whose interests differ from those that direct those forces. Meanwhile, with the exception of Egypt and Tunisia, repression by regimes that serve western interests continues virtually without comment. This alone causes one to wonder what the true motivations of the western governments actually are.

The point of this comparison is not to oppose the legitimate desires for freedom by those fighting across the region. Instead, it is to point out that those of us who genuinely support the freedom struggle in northern Africa and the Middle East should be wary of those governments who claim to do the same. After all, if the same scenario were unfolding within the borders of those nations, would the repression be any less? The experience of black freedom struggle in the US some forty years ago makes it quite clear that the answer is no. History can’t hide hypocrisy.

To the United States, terrorism has one principal appearance, the faces of those who committed the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on U.S. soil. From this cataclysmic event, U.S. authorities shaped their definition of terrorists and devised a strategy to combat them. Due to a lack of recognition of the contradictions between an asymmetrical war and a war to achieve global objectives, the War on Terrorism has been converted into conflicts to preserve American corporate interests. The U.S. government has sidetracked its assignment and betrayed its duty to the American public.

Almost immediately, the battle to prevent terrorism evolved into conflagrations in Iraq and Afghanistan; the former having no relation to terrorism and the latter still of undefined meaning. As of March 2011, total U.S. military deaths in the post 9/11 engagements in Iraq (4441), Afghanistan (1401,) together with deceased due to violence in the Gulf States (100), approximately 6000, more than double the 2752 civilian deaths incurred in the 9/11 attack. Add to the casualty list, thousands of wounded, psychologically destroyed, and distraught families from the two wars. Combine economic casualties from the effects of a shift of priorities during an economic decline with the battle casualties, and the War on Terrorism seems to have served the “terrorists.” Consider that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have suffered several 9/11’s due to the wars, and we have the War on Terrorism equating to another, “We had to kill them in order to save them.”

Despite the severe negative balance in its War on Terrorism, and the counter-productive effects on its own citizens, the U.S. administration refuses to modify its strategy, hoping that a failing and contradictory strategy will miraculously change and accomplish desired results. One glaring failure in the strategy – an inability to recognize who might serve as principal allies in the battle and who already serve as principal contributors to terrorism. Start from a well known beginning.

U.S. actions motivated a successful formation of Al Qaeda

Although the Soviet Union had significant influence in Afghanistan’s affairs and the Asian nation was only peripheral to the Cold war struggle, the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan provoked U.S. President Jimmy Carter to exclaim “The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is the greatest threat to peace since the Second World War.” U.S. military assistance to the Mujahideen, funneled through Pakistan, assisted the Afghani insurgents to expel their Soviet occupiers. After the United States exited from the battle, the Pakistan government enabled the Taliban to stabilize a strife-ridden Afghanistan and Osama bin-Laden to find a new home.

Bin-Laden arrived in Pakistan during the mid-’80′s to disburse Saudi funds to the Mujahideen and provide training camps in Pakistan for foreign fighters. His organization, Al Qaeda (the Base), emerged from the Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK), the Afghan Services Bureau, which is believed to have been founded in 1984 with the purpose of raising funds and recruiting foreign fighters for the war against the Soviets. Bin-Laden eventually moved his operations to the Taliban controlled land. The rest is history.

The U.S. government followed its first gigantic error – assisting a Radical Islamic movement in the replacement of the Soviets – with a counterproductive program that promotes terrorism. The U.S. contests nations that contest terrorists and assists nations that spawn terrorists. Reference to nations in the map of the Middle East demonstrates the veracity of this charge.

The Middle East can be conveniently divided between the nations that the U.S. confronts and have been antagonistic to Radical Islam and the nations that the U.S. befriends and whose policies have contributed to terrorist actions against the United States.

The former nations, The Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, occupy the northern area of the Middle East. The latter nations, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen occupy the Middle East’s southern frontier.

Iran, Saddam Hussein’s’ Iraq, Lebanon’s 21st century Hezbollah and Gaza’s Hamas have not contributed any fighters to the international terrorist organizations that are accused of attacking the United States or its interests. A few terrorists have been of Syrian origin. All of these nations have fought counterparts of Al-Qaeda on their soil and have been sworn enemies of bin Laden.

Examine these nations more closely.

Iran tried reconciliation and assistance after the 9/11 tragedy

At the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, the Iranians showed willingness to create a new Afghanistan by pledging $560 million worth of assistance, which is a large amount for a not-fully-developed country and about the same amount as the United States pledged at the same conference.

After the Northern Alliance Afghan troops played a significant role in driving the Taliban out of Kabul in November 2001, the alliance demanded 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government and blocked agreement with other opposition groups. According to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, Iran played a “decisive role” in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands and “insisted on including language in the Bonn agreement on the war on terrorism.”

Dobbins mentioned a March 2002 meeting with an Iranian delegation and a General who had been responsible for military assistance to the Northern Alliance during its engagements with the Taliban. “The general offered to provide training, uniforms, equipment, and barracks for as many as 20,000 new recruits for the nascent Afghan military. All this was to be done under U.S. leadership,” Dobbins recalls, “not as part of a separate program under exclusive Iranian control.”

After briefing Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of Defense David Rumsfeld of his meeting, Richard Dobbins later claimed: “To my knowledge, there was never a response.”

Iran has arrested Al-Qaeda agents on its territory and has ample reason to combat bin-Laden’s organization. Al-Qaeda has linked the Shiite Muslims, represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with “the Crusaders, Zionists and Jews” as its most bitter enemies. Deceased al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, Al-Zarqawi, in a speech, said: “Days go by, and events follow one after the other. The battles are many, and the names used are varied. But the goal (of the Crusaders) is one: a Crusader-Rafidite war against the Sunnis.” Who are the Rafidites? Sunnis who refuse to accept Shi’a Islam as a valid form of Islam use the word “rafida” to identify the Shi’a.

The U.S. gave al-Qaeda affiliates, who were previously constrained to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, a base to maneuver in Iraq. Except for Ansar al-Islam, a northern radical Islamic group close to the Iran border, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contained no Al-Qaeda affiliated elements. In 2003, Taliban fugitives, housed in Western Pakistan, became irritated with neighboring and uncontrollable Al-Qaeda members. Due to the friction, the Taliban permitted Pakistan military to operate against Al-Qaeda in South Waziristan and demolish its training camps. After the U.S. invasion of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi armed forces and policing functions, fleeing Al Qaeda members moved into Iraq, the Kurdish Ansar al-Islam terrorist group fortified itself throughout the East of the Kurdish province, and foreign fighters entered the hostile atmosphere and formed a new ally of Al-Qaeda. The latter eventually termed themselves ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq.’

By invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S. extended the battle against terrorism rather than confining it. The extension of the battlefield weakened available resources required for the battle.

Secular Syria has been fighting Radical Islam in its northern provinces

According to U.S. officials, after Sept.11, 2001, Syrian information was instrumental in catching militant Islamists around the world.

Nicholas Blanford | Special to The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2002.

“In July 2005, the Syrian government returned alleged Islamist terrorists to Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. In June 2006, Syria’s state security forces and Islamists fought a gun battle in Damascus. The Syrian government cited the September 27, 2008 car bombing in Damascus, which killed seventeen people, as an indication that Islamist terrorists—in this case it named Fatah al-Islam—had targeted the country for its cooperation with U.S. efforts to strengthen security along its border with Iraq.”

The U.S. characterization of Hezbollah and Hamas as terrorist organizations is dubious

Both organizations have issues with Israel, which is separate from international terrorism. Neither of these organizations has committed verified terrorist acts against the United States.

Fateh el-Islam, a terrorist group that battled the Lebanese army at the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli for over three months in 2007, received no support from Hezbollah. In Gaza, Hamas has fought Jund Ansar Allah, a radical Islamic group that wants to proclaim an Islamic Emirate in Gaza. Weakening Hamas strengthens Jund Ansar Allah and other radical Muslim groups in Gaza.

The positive qualities of the northern Middle East nations, all of which could be beneficial to the U.S in its anti-terrorism activities, are politely neglected. None of these nations have identity with al Qaeda, none of them have supplied terrorists from their ranks who have confronted Americans, and none of them have perpetrated terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.

The Middle East nations in the southern frontier, those of Israel, Egypt, Morocco, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia present an opposite image

Is there any doubt that America’s unqualified support of Israel has provided terrorists with a reason to augment its ranks? Evidently Osama bin Laden believes this to be true and he should know:

(AFP) – Sep 13, 2009, WASHINGTON

“Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden told Americans in a new message that their support for Israel had prompted him to launch the September 11, 2001 attacks, a US-based terror monitoring group said.”

Regardless of what many Americans believe, the United Nations and most of the world’s peoples characterize Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands as defiance of UN resolutions, its settlements in the West Bank as illegal, and its treatment of the Palestinians as brutal.

Poll explores Arabs’ views on Obama, Israel and Iran by Safaa Abdoun Daily News Egypt, August 6, 2010

“When asked to name two countries that pose the biggest threat to Arabs, Israel came in first with 88 percent followed by US with 77 percent.”

Israel is not struggling against an insurrection in its own lands; it has caused an insurrection by usurping lands owned by Palestinians. It is not fighting to maintain its own territory. It is fighting to gain new territory and, at the same time, is bringing about the total destruction of the Palestinian community. Making it seem that the Palestinian rebellion is part of a larger international plot to destroy western civilization diverts attention from Israel’s own military actions.

Terrorists recruit by intimidation and provocation. Israel helps in the recruitment by reactions to its intimidations, indoctrinations, and teachings.

Shulamit Aloni, former Member of Knesset who served in Labour government Cabinets; Ha’aretz, March 7th, 2003.

“Many of our children are being indoctrinated, in religious schools, that the Arabs are Amalek, and the bible teaches us Amalek must be destroyed. There was already a rabbi (Israel Hess) who wrote in the newspaper of Bar Ilan University that we all must commit genocide, and that is because his research showed that the Palestinians are Amalek. Murder of a population under cover of righteousness.”

No matter how many terrorists the U.S. forces remove from the international terrorism scene, without an agreed solution to the Palestinian/Israeli crisis, the terrorists will continually replace their ranks and terrorist actions will continue.

Mubarrak’s previous Egypt, and President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s Yemen exhibit commonalities and are discussed together

Each of these nations has had cordial relations with the United States, each has contributed many terrorists in actions against the United States and each has rebellious populations demanding democracy. In totality, they have been ineffective in preventing the training of terrorists on their lands, have highlighted the hypocrisy of U.S. promotion of democracy and have aroused severe resentment in their populations due to oppressive policies, which fuel terrorism.

Relations with Saudi Arabia clearly demonstrate how the U.S. has blended its battle against terrorism with preservation of American global interests

The Saudi Arabia kingdom can be the poster child for a characterization of the Middle East as an area that contains despotic governments and deprives its peoples of freedom and basic human rights. Most of the 9/11 conspirators and other al-Qaeda members, including bin-Laden, were of Saudi origin. Saudis have been accused of financing terrorist activities, and the Saudi government’s support of worldwide Islamic charities and schools, which have questionable links to terrorism, has been criticized.

Although claiming to adhere to Koran principles, the desert kingdom allows the United States, a hostile and non-Muslim nation, to construct bases on its territory, accumulates vast wealth for a few extended families, refuses equitable income distribution, and uses oil revenue to support the lifestyle of a group of jet setters. These operations enrage Islamist extremists, who sense the Saudi family is hypocritical and violates religious tradition. Authoritarianism, political persecution and extensive human rights violations fuel a bubbling dissent that is prepared to explode. The vast and barren areas are not easily controlled and terrorists have both internal support and places to hide. It is certainly not deliberate, but Saudi Arabia is fertile ground for producing international terrorists.

During the 1980′s the Saudi Kingdom supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran and had friendly relations with the Taliban until the 9/11 terrorist attack. The monarchy, as part of its commitment to Islam, funds Islamic schools and charities, some of whom have been accused of fomenting anti-Western attitudes, contributing to terrorist organizations and developing terrorists. Most damaging is evidence that linked the wife of the Saudi ambassador in Washington to the family of a Saudi man in San Diego who befriended and assisted two of the Sept. 11 hijackers. Princess Haifa al-Faisal, the wife of Ambassador Bandar bin Sultan, provided tens of thousands of dollars in what she believed were charitable gifts for medical care to Osama Bassnan. After learning they had befriended and assisted two of the Saudi hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, the F.B.I. questioned Mr. Bassnan and a Saudi neighbor, Omar al-Bayoumi.

Although reports of the FBI meetings have been classified, the New York Times, August 2, 2003, claimed the two Saudis might have been Saudi intelligence agents.

James Risen and David Johnston, Washington, Aug. 1, 2002

“The classified part of a Congressional report on the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, says that two Saudi citizens who had at least indirect links with two hijackers were probably Saudi intelligence agents and may have reported to Saudi government officials, according to people who have seen the report.”

Most of the Al-Qaeda operatives in post-Hussein Iraq came from Saudi Arabia and neighboring Yemen. These terrorists, as well as those training and operating on Saudi soil are undoubtedly receiving funds from a close source. Considering the vast and unchecked funds flowing through Saudi banks and institutions, it’s reasonable to assume that some of the oil revenues are unknowingly being siphoned to illicit activities and arrive in terrorist hands. The Saudi Ministry of Interior detained 520 terror suspects, who they claimed had targeted an oil facility. One of them admitted to receiving an equivalent of $133,000 (from whom?) and Saudi security forces seized another equivalent of $40,000 cash, which was hidden in remote desert areas. Although Mauritania, Yemeni and Iraqi nationals, some of who had university degrees and came to the Kingdom on private drivers’ visas, composed the terrorist cell, Saudis composed the majority of those detained.

Associated Press, December 8, 2006
By SALAH NASRAWI in CAIRO, Egypt (AP)

“Private Saudi citizens are giving millions of dollars to Sunni insurgents in Iraq and much of the money is used to buy weapons, including shoulder fired anti-aircraft missiles, according to key Iraqi officials and others familiar with the flow of cash. Saudi government officials deny that any money from their country is being sent to Iraqis fighting the government and the U.S.-led coalition. But the U.S. Iraq Study Group report said Saudis are a source of funding for Sunni Arab insurgents. Several truck drivers interviewed by The Associated Press described carrying boxes of cash from Saudi Arabia into Iraq; money they said was headed for insurgents.”

Separate the battle against international terrorism from general foreign policy initiatives and compare the activities of the Northern Arab nations, with whom the U.S. is extremely hostile, with the southern Arab nations and Israel, whom the U.S. supports. Comparison demonstrates the U.S. is confusing the objectives of its War on Terrorism with its global objectives and complicating its War on Terrorism.

The United States government has made the battle against terrorism its highest priority. It owes its citizens constructive policies that do not disable those who impede terrorism and do not enable others to create terrorism. It’s a fine line in foreign policy, but the margin between victory and defeat can be a fine line, or as Somerset Maugham wrote, “as sharp as a razor’s edge.”

“What More Would You Like the U.S. to Do?”

The newsreader stopped the activist short to ask her if she knew that U.S. President Barack Obama had issued a declaration criticizing the infusion of Saudi forces and calling on the Bahrain regime to avoid undue violence and to seek a peaceful political solution. Yes, the activist responded, she was aware of the White House’s proclamation, but she was not impressed. She wanted “The World’s” listeners to know that Bahrain ’s democracy movement required “more than statements” from Washington. The Obama administration’s words were one thing, the activist felt, but what really mattered were its deeds. She mentioned the United States ’ massive financial and military support for highly repressive regimes across the region, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, the Arab Emirates, and, of course, Bahrain, the Middle East ’s leading financial hub and home to the U.S. Navy’s critical Fifth Fleet.

As the activist knew, the Saudi and UAE troops entered Bahrain just one day after U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates dined with the Bahraini ruling family in a show of support. Gates refused to meet with pro-democracy protesters who had been marching by the thousands for a month. The royal family “probably bugged [Gates] that they need to use force to suppress this,” Husain Abdulla, director of Americans for Democracy and Human Rights in Bahrain, told Democracy Now!  “And next day, immediately after he left, the Saudi troops came to Bahrain. This is no coincidence. This is all planned.” Certainly the Obama administration is deeply complicit in the Saudi invasion of supposedly sovereign Bahrain – an incursion that was requested by the Al Khalifa family.

That’s a pretty remarkable thing for “the world’s leading democracy” to green-light. As Amitabb Pal observed on the web site of The Progressive last week:

Imagine if East Germany ’s Erich Honecker had successfully requested a Soviet invasion in 1989. Or, to take a more contemporary example, imagine if Muammar Gadaffi got one of his very few friends to invade in order to defeat the armed rebellion … imagine the global outrage.

The “public” newsreader seemed taken aback by the activist’s critique of Washington . “What more,” she asked the activist, “would you like the United States to do?” The newsreader’s tone communicated exasperation with the impudent notion that the United States was not doing everything it could be reasonably expected to do to defend democracy in Bahrain .

I did not get to hear the activist’s response because the N“P”R station became inaudible as my Honda crossed into the Delaware Water Gap in western New Jersey, but let me imagine a reasonable response based on my elementary grasp of the U.S. role in the region. It might have gone like this: “Well, we’d like the White House to stop sponsoring murder and authoritarianism. We’d like the administration to pick up a telephone and inform its friend, the absolute ruler of Bahrain, that he and his regime will no longer receive military and financial support from the U.S. and its regional allies. We’d like Obama and Hillary Clinton to order their client states, Saudi Arabia and UAE, to remove their troops immediately. We’d like the U.S. to cease and desist from funding and equipping arch-repressive and authoritarian governments across the region. We’d like the U.S. to insist on an end to state violence and the beginning of a transition to popular, democratic governance in Bahrain. We’d like the U.S. to freeze the foreign assets of the king of Bahrain and to tell him that the Fifth Fleet and other military forces intend to protect basic democratic rights in Bahrain.”

All impossible, of course: the last thing the U.S. foreign policy establishment wants to see break out in majority Shia Bahrain and, by demonstration effect, in Saudi Arabia, where Shia Muslims constitute a significant minority population in oil-rich territories. As far as the American imperial elite is concerned, that would potentially threaten U.S. control of, and access to, the Middle East’s hyper-strategic oil reserves, whose greatest material prize falls under the nominal sovereignty of the U.S.-sponsored Saudi monarchy.

Obama’s Own Colonial War

But, of course, there are many places in the world where a simple withdrawal of expensive U.S. support for oppressive regimes would help open the door for democratic liberation. In Honduras, to take one example, the White House and Pentagon under Obama have significantly funded and militarily equipped a thuggish right wing regime that overthrew a democratically elected, left-leaning president (Manuel Zelaya) in the spring of 2009. The administration initially responded to the Honduran putsch with what sounded like words of condemnation but it promptly angered much of the world and most of Latin America by continuing the standard U.S. practice of bankrolling, equipping, training, and running cover for Central and South American reaction, giving the new authoritarian regime the okay to kill, torture, and imprison democracy activists.

The crucifixion of Palestine by Israel continues to receive critical financial and military backing and diplomatic cover from Uncle Sam, who has never sought to enforce a no-fly zone to prevent Israel from bombing children and hospitals in the open air apartheid prison called the Gaza Strip.

Washington continues to fund, train, and equip state repression in the deceptive name of  “the war on Drugs” across Central America — repression that supports Washington-imposed neoliberal trade and investment policies that deepen the extreme poverty that drives so many Latin Americans to seek access to lower ends of the U.S. labor market. This feeds right wing anti-immigrant sentiments on the part of North Americans conditioned to think that Washington has nothing to do with endemic misery south of the Rio Grande. Obama naturally made no effort to undo these core imperial policy continuities during his recent trip to Latin America, which coincided with the launching of his first wholly owned imperial adventure – code-named “Operation Odyssey Dawn” (hereafter “OOD” – which advertising firms come up with these military campaign brandings, anyway?) – in Libya . “What more” could the U.S, do to support democracy? Stop murdering it abroad and at home.

The notion that Uncle Sam is hopelessly hamstrung in terms of what it might do beyond offer nice words in support of freedom and democracy abroad is contradicted by the curious case that has recently grabbed the headlines from Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions, Wisconsin protestors, and the Japanese earthquake and nuclear crisis — Libya.

Here a recently U.S.-tolerated dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, has been re-declared a grave public enemy to western ideals and his nation has been target-bombed by a U.S.-led “coalition” of “the international community” (selected national elites from the wealthy West) in the enforcement of a no-fly zone. The White House claims that OOD seeks only to protect Libyan citizens, not just Gaddafi, but Hillary Clinton’s recent comment to the effect that the dictator should leave the country certainly suggests that the Bush Doctrine’s notion of imposing regime change (in the name of democracy) on a poor nation that poses no serious risk or imminent danger to the United States1 lives on – along with so much else from the dark days of Dubya – in the “new” age of Obama, the Empire’s New Clothes, who is attacking Libya without the pretense of congressional authorization¹ that George Bush obtained before assaulting Iraq.

The official reasons given for OOD are out of Bill Clinton’s Serbia and George W. Bush’s Iraq playbooks. They are that the United States is driven by humanitarian and democratic concern for the suffering Libyan people. But what about the millions of other world citizens living under the oppressive rule of sadistic autocrats across Africa and in, for example, the key U.S. ally, Saudi Arabia, home to perhaps the world’s single most reactionary government? The United States is not moving towards targeted bombings and no-fly zones to protect victims of oppression or to discipline oppressors in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Palestine, Israel, or Yemen, where the U.S.-supported president Ali Abdullah Seleh has recently butchered and maimed hundreds of protestors.

The American military and financial aid keeps flowing to unjust rulers in these and numerous other U.S.-backed states. Those rulers and their cronies are not subjected to travel bans and asset freezes and Western-led prosecution for crimes against humanity. They continue to receive official designation as U.S. allies in the “war on terror.”

What supposedly privileges Libyans over and above other victims of tyranny when it comes to the United States supposed goals of freedom protection? And what about the large number of Libyan civilian casualties that can be expected to result from an aerial assault on Tripoli, home to 1.1 million? Couldn’t an U.S. aerial attack actually increase regime violence on the ground? What about the likelihood that imperial assault will result in greater popularity within Libya for the dictator that Washington claims to oppose (on the model of how murderous U.S.-imposed “economic sanctions” and no fly zones deepened Saddam Hussein’s popularity and weakened his opposition inside Iraq )?

What about the unsavory nature of many atop Gaddafi’s hastily formed opposition, who are leading a civil war, not a peaceful people’s uprising on the model of Tunisia, Egypt, Wisconsin, and Bahrain? And what about the distinct possibility that Western military intervention could prolong a bloody civil war in Libya by undermining the opposition’s ability to pursue negotiations and through the instability that large-scale civilian casualties can produce?

These and other problems raise serious questions about the honesty of Washington’s justifications, suggesting that something other than humanitarian and democratic ideals – petroleum-related strategic and political concerns emerging from America’s imperial role in the Middle East – are at play in the design and execution of OOD, Barack Obama’s first full-fledged, non-inherited colonial war. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose: the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Just the Opposite…

The left U.S. foreign policy critic Phyllis Bennis has recently noted a dark irony behind many Americans’ support of the Libyan action. That support was premised on the notion that Gaddafi’s successful crushing of his opposition “would send a devastating message to other Arab dictators: Use enough military force and you will keep your job.” Things are working out quite differently, with the American intervention seeming to feed top-down repression, not bottom up rebellion in the Middle East.  As Bennis observes:

Instead, it turns out that just the opposite may be the result: It was after the UN passed its no-fly zone and use-of-force resolution, and just as US, British, French and other warplanes and warships launched their attacks against Libya, that other Arab regimes escalated their crack-down on their own democratic movements….In Yemen, 52 unarmed protesters were killed and more than 200 wounded on Friday by forces of the US-backed and US-armed government of Ali Abdullah Saleh. It was the bloodiest day of the month-long Yemeni uprising…Similarly in US-allied Bahrain, home of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, at least 13 civilians have been killed by government forces. Since the March 15 arrival of 1,500 foreign troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE, brought in to protect the absolute power of the king of Bahrain , 63 people have been reported missing.

Wag the Dog

The American and western left is currently at some risk of tearing itself up yet more than it is already torn up over the question of how to understand and respond to OOD. My instincts are pretty much always anti-White House and anti-Pentagon when it comes to foreign policy, and I personally can’t get behind even limited support for a no-fly zone in Libya. Still, my desire to get into a finger-pointing and shouting match with “progressives” who offer qualified support to Obama’s new war is inhibited to some degree by my sense that the current imperial extravaganza is taking on a disastrous “wag the dog” aspect in the hands of America ’s dominant Orwellian mass war and entertainment media.

It is diverting public attention from at least three critical and ongoing policy and political issues: the epic state-level state-capitalist assault on public sector workers, organized labor, and working people more generally and the remarkable popular rebellion against that assault within and beyond Madison, Wisconsin; the equally epic nuclear disaster in Japan and the deadly implications of aging and revamped nuclear power operations (horrifying epitomes of the underlying and very possibly exterminst irrationality of the state-capitalist profits system) within and beyond the United States, where a deadly, old, and accident-prone nuclear plant (Indian Point, home to 2 of the nation’s 105 currently operating nuclear power reactors) is located just 30 miles north of the world’s financial capital, New York City; the counter-assault on democratic protests in U.S, sponsored regimes like (to name just three) Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain.

Even as they steal vast, desperately needed public resources away from the real and potential meeting of social needs and help distribute wealth upwards (to “defense” contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, and other elite, high-tech corporate interests) at home ² moreover, imperial adventures and the bloodlust they reflect and promote are great authoritarian populace-diverters and domestic democracy-destroyers – all too consistent with the warnings of American Founding Father James Madison, who observed that:

The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons for defense against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers abroad.

1. In 2007, candidate Obama was asked the following question when it was feared that the United States was going to attack Iran: Under what circumstances would the president have the constitutional authority to bomb Iran without first seeking authorization from Congress? His answer: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation. As Commander-in-Chief, the President does have a duty to protect and defend the United States. In instances of self-defense, the President would be within his constitutional authority to act before advising Congress or seeking its consent. History has shown us time and again, however, that military action is most successful when it is authorized and supported by the Legislative branch.” Essentially, Obama said that the president had the authority to act first and seek approval later if there were an imminent threat to the security of the United States and that the president could not order a military attack without the approval of the Congress if a threat to the United States was not imminent. Both statements were accurate but neither applies to the current situation in Libya. They have pretty much disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole as far as many of Obama’s liberal and centrist supporters are concerned. Many of those supporters would likely be complaining about constitutional violations if the Libya venture was being conducted by a President McCain. Likewise, many Republicans would be muzzling the constitutional concerns they are currently voicing if one of their party currently held the title of Commander in Chief. Such is the moral and intellectual level and situational politics of partisan identity and behavior within, and beyond, Washington .
   
2. A recent Huffington Post item reports that “In the opening days of the assault on Libya, the United States and the United Kingdom launched a barrage of at least 161 Tomahawk cruise missiles to flatten Muammar Gadhafi’s air defenses and pave the way for coalition aircraft….In fiscal terms, at a time when Congress is fighting over every dollar, the cruise missile show of military might was an expenditure of nearly a quarter of a billion dollars. Each missile cost $1.41 million, close to three times the cost listed on the Navy’s website…Raytheon Corp. is the manufacturer of the Tomahawk Block IV, a low-flying missile that travels at 550 miles per hour. During a decade of war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Libya, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on the Tomahawk. A year ago, Raytheon boasted of its 2,000th Block IV delivery to the Navy.” See Sharon Weinberger, “Cruise Missiles: The One Million Dollar Weapon,” Huffpost Business (March 25, 2011) at 161 X $1.4 million = $225 million Tomahawk Cruise Missile expenditure in just the early stage of Obama’s Libya adventure, including a nice cost-plus profit for leading “defense” (Empire) contractor, Raytheon. Someone other than I can calculate the social opportunity cost of $225 million as more and more Americans run out of ammunition in the war on economic destitution.