We gather tonight knowing that this generation of heroes has made the United States safer and more respected round the world.

— President Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 24th January 2012

On January 24th, the day President Obama delivered his last State of the Union speech to Congress before the election, citing the “selflessness and teamwork of America’s Armed Forces, (their) focus on the mission at hand”, the “selfless” Staff Sgt. Frank Wuterich, leader of the massacre at Haditha, in Iraq, became the seventh soldier to walk free from the mass murder of twenty four unarmed men, women and children in three homes and a taxi.

It was another chilling, ruthless, cold blooded, up to five hour rampage, revenge for the death a colleague in a roadside bomb which had nothing to do with the rural families that paid the price.

The youngest to die was one year, the oldest was a 76 year old wheelchair-bound amputee, Abdul Hamid Hassan Ali. He died with nine rounds in the chest and abdomen.

Other children who died were aged 3, 4, 5, 8, 10 and 14.

On May 9th, 2007, Sergeant Sanick De la Cruz received immunity from prosecution in return for testimony in which he said that he had watched Wuterich shoot five Iraqis attempting to surrender. He further stated that he and Wuterich had further fired into the dead bodies – and that he had urinated on one of the dead Iraqis.

“Imagine what we could accomplish if we followed (US troops) example”, pondered the President in his speech – in a week which worldwide revulsion was expressed at a video of Marines, allegedly with the 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, urinating on dead bodies in Afghanistan.

It was, of course, “behaviour … not in keeping with the values of the US Armed Forces … not consistent with out core values (or) indicative of the character of the Marines in our Corps”, said a Defence Department spokeswoman.

Ross Caputi, a former Marine who took part in another massacre, Falluja, exactly a year before Haditha, was sickened at what he saw and experienced.  He now campaigns tirelessly for Iraq and for reparation for Falluja, and he disputes the Defence Department’s sunny view of “core values”.

”These attitudes are common in the Marine Corps. The guys who peed on the poor dead Afghans were not ‘bad apples’, they were average Marines”, Caputi told this publication. For his outspokenness, Caputi has received such volume of chilling and obscene threats from former colleagues and US Service personnel (seen by the writer) that they stand testimony to his words.

As Afghanistan, the litany of Iraq’s blood-lettings are silent witness to “core values” of an altogether different kind. In an expression disturbingly mirroring “cleansed”, homes are “cleared.” Grenades are thrown in and then troops storm in, automatic rifles (and more grenades) blazing.

A description of  the assault on one Haditha home from a Lt. William T. Kallop records:

The Marines cleared it the way they had been trained to clear it, which is frags (grenades)first … It was clear just by the looks of the room that frags went in and then the house was prepped and sprayed like, with a machine gun, and then they went in. And by the looks of it, they just … they went in, cleared to room, everybody was down.

In her meticulous, eye-watering article, “The Haditha Massacre:  No Justice for Iraqis“, Marjorie Cohn writes:

Citing doctors at Haditha’s hospital, The Washington Post reported: ‘Most of the shots … were fired at such close range that they went through the bodies of the family members and plowed into walls or the floor’.

She goes on to add that days after the mass murders at Haditha became public, “US forces killed eleven  civilians, after rounding them up in a room in a house in Ishaqi”, in Salahuddin Province.  All were handcuffed (presumably not the six month old) and executed.

The murdered civilians of Ishaqi are:

Turkiya Muhammed Ali, 75 years
Faiza Harat Khalaf, 30 years
Faiz Harat Khalaf, 28 years
Um Ahmad, 23 years
Sumaya Abdulrazak, 22 years
Aziz Khalil Jarmoot, 22 years
Hawra Harat Khalaf, 5 years
Asma Yousef Maruf, 5 years
Osama Yousef Maruf, 3 years
Aisha Harat Khalaf, 3 years
Husam Harat Khalaf, 6 months

“A report by the US military found no wrongdoing by the US soldiers”, writes Professor Cohen.

There are Falluja’s football fields of mass graves, Najav’s hotel and hospital parks turned graveyards, the pathetic uncounted ones in gardens, in yards, the lost buried in the family home across Iraq by families who would be also shot if they ventured with their beloved to the cemetery.

In Falluja, reminiscent of other historic “cleansings”, categorized war crimes, men between fifteen and fifty five were forbidden to leave or enter their city.

Iraqi families shot in their cars by US service personnel are beyond counting – and indeed have not been. “It is not productive to count Iraqi deaths”, as the inimitable General Kimmit reminded the world.

Deaths included the family of Ali Abbas by rogue US missiles in the residential Zafaraniya suburb of Baghdad, with its evocative Convent and ancient Catholic church. Ali lost his pregnant mother, father, brother and thirteen other family members. He also lost his arms. He was twelve years old.

Allegations of summary executions have emerged from Tel Afar, whose blood drenched toddler, her parents shot by troops in their car, remains a never to be erased image; Samarra, Quaim, Taal al Jal, Mukaradeeb, Hamdaniya, Ramadi, Tikrit, Mosul – and throughout the country.

In Mahmudiya, in 2008, fourteen year old Abeer Quasim Hamza was gang raped then killed by five US servicemen — after they had murdered her mother, Fakriyah (34) father Qasim (45) and six year old sister. All were burned in an attempt to cover the crime. There were two convictions.

And never forget Abu Ghraib.

Long forgotten are the wedding and funeral massacres, a particular target for the US military, a litany. One, early in the invasion, was just a month after the first Falluja onslaught.

On May 19th, 2004 46 people celebrating a wedding in Mugrideeb village were mown down by assault helicopters, other attack planes and Marines.

USMC Major General James Mattis at the time simply commented: “How many people go to the middle of the desert to celebrate a wedding …?” He later said that it had taken him thirty seconds to decide to attack.

Eman Khammas of Iraq Occupation Watch braved the dangerous road out to the village as soon as she heard. She found carnage – and remains of the musicians’ instruments, decorations, pots, sacks of rice, improvised bread ovens, sacks filled with leftovers for the animals, all who had been shot – and surviving eyewitnesses.

There were blood stained toys, clothes, childrens’ hair slides, camera batteries. The family were sheep traders. Khammas recalled:

The ground was full of bullets holes of different sizes, spots of blood every where, some a meter wide. In some of them the remains of human flesh were drying in the sun. . . . In one of these remains there was a long black lock still attached to the flesh. I could not see any more. I ran away back to the demolished house.

Those mown down of the Rakaad Naif family as they celebrated were:

1. Mohammad Rekaad, 28
2. Ahmed Rekaad, 26
3. Talib Rekaad, 27
4. Mizhir Rekaad, 20
5. Daham Rekaad, 17
6. Saad Mohammad Rekaad
7. Marifa Obeid, Rekaad’s wife
8. Fatima Madhi, Rekaad’s daughter in law
9. Raad Ahmed, grandson, 3
10. Ra’id Ahmed, grandson, 2
11. Wa’ad Ahmed, grandson, 1 month
12. Inad Mohammad, grandson, 6
13. Anood Mohammad, granddaughter, 5
14. Amal Rekaad, daughter, 30
15. Anood Talib, granddaughter, 2
16. Kholood Talib, granddaughter, 6 months
17. Hamid Monif, son in law, 22
18. Somayia Nawaf, wife, 50
19. Siham Rekaad, daughter, 18
20. Hamda Suleiman, wife, 45
21. Rabha Rekaad daughter, 16
22. Zahra Rekaad daughter,15
23. Fatima Rekaad daughter, 4
24. Ali Rekaad son, 12
25. Hamza Rekaad, 6

Five from a family called Garaghool also died, thirteen of the band and three photographic crew. Forty six mown down for celebrating a wedding..

Kholood, 8 months, Sabha, 22, Iqbal 14, Mouza, 12, Feisal and Adil (children, ages unknown) were hospitalized.

There were no prosecutions.

General Mark Kimmit, questioned on the liquidation of the party goers – the  dead women’s gold also torn from their necks by the troops, according to consistent survivors accounts – simply replied: “Bad people have parties too.” Asked about the near countless other acts of carnage, he responded: “Change the channel.”

As the cost in Iraqi lives at the hands of US troops briefly hits the headlines again, some of the names that are known, in the perhaps 1.7 million lost, should be remembered. They are not “collateral damage” or “regrettable incidents”.  Each one is a unique human being, often a small, fledgling one.

In Haditha the victims were:

House One:

Abdul Hameed Hassin Ali, 76.
Khamisa Tuma Ali, 66, wife of Abdul.
Rashid Abdul Hamid, 30.
Walid Abdul Hamid Hassan, 35.
Jahid Abdul Hamid Hassan, middle aged.
Asma Salman Rasif, 32.
Abdullah Walid, 4.
Injured: Iman, 8 and Abdul Rahman, 5.
Escaped: Daughter-in-law, Hiba, with 2 month old Asia.

House Two:

Younis Salim Khalfif, 43.
Aida Yasin Ahmed, wife of Younis Salim, died shielding her youngest daughter, Aisha.
Muhammad Younis Salim, 10, son.
Noor Younis Salim, 14, daughter.
Sabaa Younis Salim, 10, daughter.
Zainabl Younis Salim, 5, daughter.
Aisha Younis Salim, 3, daughter.
One year old girl staying with the family.
Survived: Safa Younis Salim, 13, who pretended to be dead.

House Three:

Ajamal Ahmed, 41.
Marwan Ahmed, 28.
Qahtan Ahmed, 24.
Chasib Ahmed, 27. Brothers.

Taxi: Passengers were students at the Technical Institute in Saqlawiyah:

20 Ahmed Khadir, taxi driver.
21.Ahram Hamid Flayeh.
22.Khalid Ayada al-Zawi
23.Wajdi Ayada al-Zawri
24.Mohammad Battal Mahmoud.

Lance Corporal Roel Ryan Briones, who, seemingly, was not involved, was ordered to photograph the bodies. He picked up a little girl, shot in the head. The contents of her small skull spilled out on to his trousers. “I need immediate help”, he said.

What of help for then thirteen year old Safa, pretending to be dead amongst her family’s bodies? Of Hiba, lone survivor of her home and her now six year old daughter?

What of  the heroic Taher Thabet al-Hadithi, young journalist and human rights activist, who filmed every minute, bloody detail the following day, and amassed the truth of what had really happened as the Defence Department were busy trying to cover their tracks? He fled to Syria in fear of his own life expectancy should the US military learn of his evidence.

It was his witness materials that made its way into Time magazine, engendering an “inquiry.” Evidence that was indisputable..

The reaction of Major General Steve Johnson, Commander of US Forces in the Province was salutary: “It happened all the time … it was just the cost of doing business …”

Routine massacres.

“The renewal of American leadership can be felt across the globe”, said President Obama, concluding his address, citing, “… the enduring power of our moral example … tyranny is no match for liberty.”

On the wall of the deserted house of one of the Haditha families, silent witness to this “moral example”, is written:

Democracy assassinated the family that was here.

Working with One of Pinochet’s Victims

Owing to the four years I worked with one of his torture victims in my Seattle practice, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London in 1998 was a profoundly moving and personal event. The Spanish extradition order issued by Judge Baltasar Garzon heralded in a new era in international justice. Primary to 1998, deposed dictators like Batista, the Shah of Iran, and Fernando Marcos could look forward to a luxurious and secure retirement, thanks to the American military and intelligence sponsors who brought them to power. The US refuses to recognize International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction over war crimes committed by Americans or foreign dictators they support. Although they have no problem facilitating the transport of political enemies to the Hague, for example Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic (who many believe was innocent), no American will ever stand trial at the ICC for crimes against humanity.

Prior to the 1973 CIA coup that overturned Chile’s democratically elected government (and brought Pinochet to power), Father X taught literature at a Catholic university in Santiago. Except for being antifascist, Father X was totally apolitical. I suspect Pinochet’s military regime arrested and imprisoned him more to set an example than to eliminate one of their adversaries, In one important respect, all intellectuals are enemies in a totalitarian regime. The desire to be well-informed and engage in critical thinking can be very dangerous in a regime that demands total conformity.

Destroying a Man Psychologically

The only scars Father X ever showed me were on his forearms. On both arms the scar tissue was full thickness, indicating the muscle had been cut to the bone. The scars ran from the decubitus (inner elbow) to his wrist. The impact of the psychological pain his captors inflicted was far more damaging. Father X was arrested along with all his fellow priests from his university. Then he was forced to listen as, one by one, they were tortured and killed. His jailers threatened him on a daily basis, “Tomorrow we’re coming to kill you, Father.” To the best of his knowledge, all the other priests were murdered. Mysteriously, one year after his arrest, he was released. Escaping into Argentina, after four years he was granted refugee status in the US.

Sentenced to Life in the US

Though technically he had his “freedom” in the US and was safe from overt political persecution, Father X was deprived of both his livelihood and the Chilean culture that had been the fabric of his life. Father X had always viewed American culture as shallow and materialistic. In his mind, the US was a country where people were stripped of cultural identity and moral values to get them to spend money and accumulate possessions. He had no illusions about the role the US government had played in creating and supporting Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship. However Argentina was also ruled by a US-appointed dictator, and Father X had no other options. His new life in the US was just another sentence – one that offered no chance of reprieve, short of natural death or suicide.

The American Catholic church had no comparable academic positions to offer him, and he had no experience of parish work. The best the Church could offer was help in applying for Supplemental Security Income (a Social Security program for disabled people with no work history). The latter provides an extremely meager and insecure income and lifestyle. This was especially true after the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Thanks to Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, Father X routinely received letters that his benefits were about to be canceled because of his immigration status.

Judge Garzon and the Bush 6

Although Judge Garzon is most famous for ordering Pinochet arrested, he also indicted Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, as well as issuing an order for British authorities to detain Henry Kissinger for questioning. In 2009, he attempted to indict six former Bush officials for crimes against humanity. The Bush 6 were the legal team who authorized Bush’s use of torture at Guantanamo and elsewhere. They included Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo (Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, Douglas Feith (Undersecretary of Defense for Policy), William Hayne (Donald Rumsfeld’s Chief Counsel), Jay Bybee (Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel), and David Addington (Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff). Wikileaks cables released last year reveal the heavy handed role the Obama administration in played in having Garzon removed from the Bush 6 case and its eventual dismissal.

The December 2010 Wikileaks Cables

The cables also reveal that the US pressured the Spanish government to force Garzon to drop his investigation into the death of a Spanish reporter who was killed by US shelling in Baghdad, into allegations by Spanish Guantanamo detainees of being tortured and into the use of Spanish bases for CIA “rendition” flights (in which the CIA kidnapped foreign nationals and transported them to prisons in countries that openly practiced torture).¹
Prior to Garzon’s May 2010 suspension on so-called “corruption” charges, he was an examining magistrate for the Audencia National, Spain’s central criminal court. He was appointed in 1998 and was responsible for investigating Spain’s most important “organized” crime cases, especially those involving terrorism, criminal syndicates, state corruption and money laundering.

Inquisitorial Justice

The “inquisitorial” legal system used in France and Spain is very different from the adversarial system used in the US, Britain and other former British colonies. In an inquisitorial system, the court actively investigates the facts of a case. In an adversarial system, the court merely functions as an impartial referee, leaving it to the prosecution and defense to collect and present evidence. Inquisitorial justice is based on “civil” or “natural” law. This holds that legislation based on inherent rights and binding rules of behavior is the source of law. An adversarial system is based on “common law.” The latter regards prior judicial precedent (i.e. previous court rulings) as the main source of judicial law.

In Spain the role of an examining magistrate like Garzon is merely to gather facts, not to prosecute or make legal findings. Once a case is referred for prosecution, another judge oversees the trial and makes judicial findings.

Going After the Extreme Right – and Left

Some of Garzon’s more famous investigations include those of Spanish drug traffickers working with Colombia’s Medellin cartel, violent extremists belonging to the Basque separatist movement ETA, and an interior minister who oversaw Spain’s “dirty war” against ETA (involving right wing vigilantes and mercenaries who engaged in extrajudicial killings and other atrocities). In 1999 he helped convict the Mayor of Marbella for corruption.

Spanish law, which recognizes universal jurisdiction, allows an examining magistrate to charge and investigate a war criminal from another country, provided their own country chooses not to charge them. This is based on the principle that crimes against humanity warrant prosecution, even when they occur outside the national boundaries of the country exercising judicial authority. Because genocide, torture, and similar abuses of state power, are crimes against all, many jurists argue that it’s wrong to limit their prosecution to national boundaries. Especially as countries like the US, which refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court, are unlikely to charge their own leaders with crimes against humanity.

Garzon’s indictment of Pinochet was the first high profile example of universal jurisdiction. His international cases include genocide charges he filed against Argentine military officers for their activities during the 1976-1983 military dictatorship, resulting in the successful prosecution of two of them.

The Charges Against Garzon

Judge Baltasar Garzon himself faces three charges. On reviewing the charges, the Spanish Supreme Court has ruled he must face trial on all of them. The first alleges that he dismissed a tax evasion case against the director of Banco Santander, in return for a 302,000 euro donation to fund human rights classes Garzon taught at the Juan Carlos I Center at the University of New York in 2005-2006. Although no funds went to Garzon personally, the prosecution has a letter he signed requesting the donation from the bank’s chairman Emilio Botin. The evidence suggests the judge may be guilty of a conflict of interest. Although he took the case against Santander more than a year after Biotin made the donation, strictly speaking he should have stepped aside to allow another judge to oversee the investigation. In the US, judicial conflict of interest charges occasionally result in censure, but are more likely to be ignored.²

The second charge relates to violating attorney-client privilege by ordering “illegal” phone taps between defendants (top politicians of the opposition party) and their lawyers. Garzon insists the taps were necessary because the attorneys were serving as financial messengers in a criminal scheme.

Investigating Crimes against Humanity: Illegal under Spanish Law

The third and most serious charge is that Garzon exceeded his authority in investigating crimes against humanity by the brutal Franco regime, in violation of Spain’s 1977 Amnesty Law. If found guilty, Garzon could be disqualified from the bench for 20 years. His supporters find it ironic that he has stood up to multiple death threats from Colombian and Spanish drug dealers, Basque and Islamic terrorists, and organized crime figures – only to be blind-sided by archaic legislation considered illegal under international law.

The charge stems from an order Garzon issued, at the request of families, to exhume the remains of victims assassinated and/or disappeared by the Franco regime. Garzon and the more than two hundred international organizations that condemn the prosecution against him, contend that international law supersedes a national amnesty law in dealing with crimes against humanity. In 2008 the UN Committee on Human Rights advised Spain to repeal the 1977 Amnesty Law. Likewise the European Tribunal of Human Rights has warned that a guilty verdict on this charge will result in Spain’s suspension.

Although Garzon was suspended from his official duties in May 2010, the Spanish authorities allowed him to work as a consultant to the International Criminal Court in La Hague for six months been May and November 2010. In October 2010, an Argentine judge successfully petitioned Spain to be allowed to investigate Franco regime crimes that Garzon was barred from pursuing.

Recognizing and Supporting Moral Courage

I shouldn’t have to make the case why all Americans, across the political spectrum, should support courageous judges like Garzon. They take enormous personal risks to take a stand against US officials who further their political interests by committing crimes against humanity. Without brave individuals like Baltasar Garzon, genuine political change would be impossible. Join the Support Baltasar Garzon Facebook page.

1. See.
2. See a, b, and c.

In the United States today, the Declaration of Independence hangs on schoolroom walls, but foreign policy follows Machiavelli.

— Howard Zinn, 1922-2010

On 5 December, the first day of the solemn, predominantly Shi’a Muslim marking of Ashura, the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson in 680 AD, in a statement few of the mainstream media thought worthy of mention, Saad Al Muttalibi, a Minister, ironically, at the Iraqi Ministry of National Dialogue and Reconciliation, announced another impending murder. Tareq Aziz, Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister under Saddam Hussein, would be executed as soon as the Americans left.

The US troops were due to leave by 31 December, but remaining troops slunk out under cover of darkness – as did the British four years earlier – on 18 December. Another barbaric act representing the “New Iraq” may well be imminent.

At a ceremony marking the US military retreat at Baghdad Airport on 15 December, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta acknowledged that: “We spilled a lot of blood here … to achieve … making the country sovereign and independent and able to secure itself.”

The independence of this now US client state is as much a myth as the security, since the occasion took place with America’s home-bound heroes cowering behind vast blast walls. Chairs reserved for the Prime Minister, President and others in Iraq’s quisling government were empty. Perhaps they were too busy planning more celebratory post-departure blood spilling.

Tareq Aziz has to be top of the list. The fiercely patriotic, nationalistic reminder of an illegally overthrown government, which, whatever else, had put Iraq first and poured the country’s oil revenues into health care, education, clean water, modern infrastructure, turning a beautiful, but run down “third world” country into a “near first world” one, to use the West’s patronizing patois.

Last year, Tareq Aziz gave his first interview in his then over seven years incarceration by the Americans. His insight was as astute as ever as was his love and despair for his country.

There is nothing here any more. Nothing. For thirty years Saddam built Iraq, and now it is destroyed. There are more sick than before, more hungry. The people don’t have services. People are being killed every day in the tens, if not hundreds. We are all victims of America and Britain. They killed our country.

He talked of the Iraq prior to the invasion, feeling vulnerable to Iran, the US and Britain. It was this feeling of vulnerability which led, for a long time, to Iraq not saying categorically it had no weapons of mass destruction. Instead of those that threatened being uncertain if Iraq could retaliate, the country would be seen as the sitting duck they proved to be.

Further:  “We are Arabs, we are Arab nationalists. We must be proud.”

Aziz knows the full extent of both Western and Iranian duplicity toward his country.

Prior to the invasion, this canny politician and diplomat opined that: “What the United States wanted, was not ‘regime change’ in Iraq, but rather ‘region change.’“ Recent years prove him chillingly correct.

He summed up the Bush Administration’s reason for war against Iraq tersely as “Oil and Israel.”

With a Prime Minister and others having deep ties to Israel, Iran, and the largest US Embassy on earth representing many still seeking to cover the tracks of illegalities, lies and duplicity, no wonder whilst the West counted down to Christmas, this indomitable, frail, ill, incarcerated seventy-four year old was alone, trying to count how many days he has left on earth.

The terrible shadow of Saddam Hussein’s sickening death in the Christmas season just before the the West’s New Year dawned, also on the eve of the great Muslim Feast of Eid al Awda, must lie as terror across the hours.

A Christian, he is also reminder of the secular nature of the previous regime, in a country now riven with sectarian divides. “divide and rule” played to murderous perfection. By 2006 half of Iraq’s Christians had fled the country fearing for their lives.   Thousands more have fled since.

Last year, Aziz reached such a low ebb he expressed to his lawyer simply a wish that the nightmare of incarceration, isolation, injustice, and untreated illness was over with. Even his hope, indeed courage – as all the former regime, he swore he would never abandon Iraq and did not – faltered.  Now he wants to spend his remaining time with the wife and family he has been parted from for nearly eight years. Ominously, this year he was denied a Christmas phone call with them for the first time.

In April 2003, he negotiated safe passage for his family with the invading US: “I told the Americans that if they took my family to Amman (in neighbouring Jordan) they could take me to prison. My family left on an American plane. And I went to prison on a Thursday.” The weight of pain and guilt on the family can only be imagined.

“My father served his country for more than twenty two years. He delivered himself to the US Army (after the fall of Hussein) because he wasn’t afraid. He didn’t do anything wrong. He served his country,” Aziz’s daughter, Zainab Aziz, has said. “He has been wronged.”

Forgotten or conveniently buried is that Tareq Aziz’s trials were entirely American affairs. The Judge who tried him and Saddam Hussein was “trained” by a legal team from Notre Dame University at South Bend, Indiana — ironically, a Catholic University.

Unsurprisingly there were also highly political overtones. The law professor, who led the training, Jimmy Gurule, has served, among other public law enforcement positions, as “point person in the hunt for financiers of terrorism in the wake of September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks on America” to which the US was so keen to attempt to link Iraq.

On September11th, 2008, Nashville,Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University announced that the Iraqi Judge who convicted Saddam Hussein, Ra’id Juhi ,  was to join the US lawyers who created the Iraqi Special Tribunal, the kangaroo court responsible for his lynching.) “Vanderbilt law Professor Mike Newton played a pivotal role in the creation of the (Tribunal) that tried Saddam. He led the training for its judges and continues to advise the Tribunal today.”

Chicago’s De Paul University: “ … has designed and managed human rights and rule of law projects in Iraq”, since 2003.(vi) Saddam Hussein’s hideous treatment, or Tareq Aziz’s alleged forced appearance in Court in his pyjamas, both heckled by the Judge, are hardly De Paul’s finest legal zenith either.

St Paul also devised a “Comprehensive Strategic Plan for the Iraq Judiciary”, assisted with drafting the new Iraqi Constitution and the trials of former Ba’ath party members and affiliates. So much for Iraq sovereignty and George W.Bush’s:”Let freedom reign.”

Sabah Al Mukhtar, President of the UK-based Arab Lawyers Association, takes a dim view of this Colonial approach:

Under the Geneva and Vienna Conventions, the occupying force has both responsibility and limitations. There is a duty of protection for citizens, children and the environment. The law  of the occupied territories cannot be changed.

Holding the British equally responsible, he argues that the occupiers were part of a leadership with: “Huge responsibility, who set up a system of trials that do not meet the basic international standards”, in accordance with the Vienna and Geneva Conventions.

Further: “Execution is the ultimate abuse of human rights.”

He points out that in the pre-invasion, formerly secular Iraq, where those of all faiths and none, previously shared feasts and celebrations, and where all religious institutions were annually provided maintenance grants by the government equally,Tareq Aziz, a Christian, was, in fact, charged with undermining Islamic movements.

Referring to a “Kangaroo Court”, Al Mukhtar is emphatic that it is incumbent on the Vatican and the Churches also to demand clemency for the seventy-four year old.

Aziz, of course, visited the Pope in 2003 to plead for the Vatican to intervene to avert invasion and save his country and people, who had suffered so terribly from 1991 onwards.

Further, says Al Mukhtar: “The US and the UK still have the duty, and indeed the power, to protect Tareq Aziz. This proposed execution is simply vengeance in its lowest form.”

Tareq Aziz is the man who, above all, stands between the lies, the duplicity, and who knows the wickedness of the spin, illegalities, duplicity, subterfuge, betrayal, bribery, theft, traitors and big business – prepared to cull every last Iraqi, so long as they could get their hands on the oil – and establish a base in this strategically vital country. The biggest US Embassy in the world looks pretty much like “mission accomplished” – for the moment.

Badi Arif, an attorney who used to represent Mr Aziz, said there is a political motive behind the death sentence: “Mr. Aziz used to always tell me, ‘They’ll find a way to kill me and there is no way for me to escape this’“, Arif commented.

Nuri Al Maliki made his groveling subservience to Washington clear when, on 12 December, he requested to go to the city’s Arlington Military Cemetery and jointly lay a wreath with President Obama at the Memorial to the Unknown Soldier, to pay his respects to US service personnel who lost their lives decimating the country of which he is – for now – Prime Minister.

Thanking the murderous, marauding, illegal, infanticide-addicted, raping and pillaging invader must be a historic first.

An extensive search has found no record of  Maliki visiting Iraq’s lost and bereaved – from Falluja to Basra, Mosul to Mahmudiyah – the latter where fourteen year old Abeer al Janabi was multiply raped by US troops, then murdered and set fire to, with all her family. Presumably, they were also Obama’s “unbroken line of heroes”, to which he referred in another defeat ceremony at Fort Bragg.

If legality does not prevail in the case of not alone Tareq Azis and his colleagues, but of all those unaccountably detained simply for differing political or religious beliefs, facing a terrible  demise in the name of Western “liberation”, all we collectively profess to hold dear, with legality’s Treaties and Conventions, stand condemned.

They include the relevant silent United Nations Organisations, cocooned in their great New York and Geneva Ivory Towers; their apparently speech deprived Secretary General; the great religious bastions, the Vatican; Archbishop Rowan Williams, Lambeth Palace; Vincent Nicholls, Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and staff in his great building; Amnesty International; Human Rights Watch; The State Department; the UK Foreign Office; the European Union’s relevant, increasingly life threatened Organs; and the worlds great bastions of international law. They have been repeatedly approached and remained silent to the point of complicity.

Speaking at the 400th Anniversary of the printing of the King James Bible, on 16th December 2011, Prime Minister Cameron stated of the UK:

We are a Christian country and we should not be afraid to say so . The Bible has helped to give Britain a set of values and morals which make Britain what it is today. Values and morals we should actively stand up and defend. The alternative of moral neutrality should not be an option.

A start would be displaying Britain’s “morals and values … standing up and defending” a brave, frail, Christian man from a barbarity imposed by an illegal invasion – a “Crusade” that Cameron voted for – and demanding of the US, who call Britain the “indispensable ally”, that they ensure Aziz is returned to his family and that 2012 starts with a prisoner amnesty in Iraq.

It shouldn’t be a problem. The US still has 8,000 troops, 14 war planes, 125 helicopters and 28 drones, largely based in Iraqi Kurdistan. (Their “total withdrawal” apparently nearly as phony as George W. Bush’s photo shoot,  presenting the troops with a Thanksgiving turkey, which turned out to be plastic. )

“Moral neutrality” is indeed not an option for one who enjoined in killing this former Foreign Minister’s country.

Aggressive wars are war crimes

Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, said: “To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” The U.S. attack on Iraq, a war crime, eroded U.S. credibility and standing worldwide, and an attack on Iran would only worsen this situation.

The campaign against Iran

It is alarming that only Ron Paul, among all the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, has positions on Iran consistent with those of U.S. intelligence agencies and international law. Paul pointed out that Iran doesn’t threaten our national security and there is no proof that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. He also said that western sanctions are “acts of war” that are likely to lead to an actual war. Paul added that if Iran did build a nuclear bomb, “What are the odds of them using it? Probably zero. They just are not going to commit suicide. The Israelis have 300 of them.”

Many supporters of an attack on Iran point to the recent International Atomic Energy Agency’s report as proof of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. However, Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor started his November 9th article with: “The latest United Nations report on Iran’s nuclear program may not be the ‘game changer’ it was billed to be, as some nuclear experts raise doubts about the quality of evidence — and point to lack of proof of current nuclear weapons work.” Several informed critics of the report consider it as being more of a political document than a credible scientific analysis.

Seymour Hersch’s November 18th New Yorker article also challenged mainstream reporting on the IAEA report, referring to, among other sources, an Arms Control Association’s assessment of the report. According to the ACA, the IAEA report suggested Iran “is working to shorten the timeframe to build the bomb once and if it makes that decision. But it remains apparent that a nuclear-armed Iran is still not imminent nor is it inevitable.”

Hersch added that Greg Thielmann, a former State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst who was one of the authors of the ACA’s assessment told him, “Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.”

Estimate of U.S. Intelligence Agencies

The National Intelligence Estimate of 2007, a consensus estimate from the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, expressed a high level of confidence that Iran had stopped work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The agencies also had a moderate level of confidence that the work remained frozen.

February 2011 testimony from James Clapper, Director of the National Intelligence Agency, reiterated many of the key findings from the 2007 report. Clapper also said that the advancement of Iran’s nuclear capabilities strengthened the intelligence community’s assessment that Tehran has the capacity to produce nuclear weapons eventually, “making the central issue the political will to do so.”

Iran‘s Political Will

In 2005 the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a fatwa against the production, stockpiling and use of nuclear weapons and reiterated this idea in 2009 saying: “We fundamentally reject nuclear weapons.”

Conclusion

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. We cannot allow nor afford a much larger version of the unnecessary, illegal and costly Iraqi debacle that left a devastated and unstable Iraq.

They will kill me but they will not kill my voice,
because it will be the voice of all Afghan women.
You can cut the flower but  you cannot stop the coming of spring.
— Malalai Joya

Within weeks of my leaving Kabul in mid-August 2011, the US Embassy there was shelled by rocket-propelled grenades. The Embassy then “canceled all trips in and out of Afghanistan for its diplomats, and suspended all travel within Afghanistan.”¹

In my 30 days in Kabul I never saw another westerner outside guarded compounds – except in military convoys. Such fear reveals how illusory any US claims of “progress” have been over these past ten years – despite the hundreds of billions of dollars squandered. Not to mention all the orphans and the numerous number of limbs and lives lost.

In the States, only now do we seem to be waking up to the absolute failure of this war – by any standard except that of generating mega-profits for certain “defense” corporations. Few, including our leaders, have firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan. Few can conceive of the tenacity of the armed  resistance, its willingness to risk, its willingness to sacrifice.

Few of us have any idea how the Afghan people suffer from our ten-year invasion and from our hamstrung occupation. Those of us opposing war need to better understand war and its toll on human beings.

Haunted by this gap in my own education, I went to Afghanistan  with a small Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation. Among us were two vets – one, Jacob, a paratrooper and explosives specialist, had done three tours of duty in Afghanistan.

Nervous Armed Men

Early on we learn that, according to the Red Cross, security is worse here than it’s been in the last 30 years of war. In Kabul life is lived opaquely — except for the internal refugees’ mud huts, homes huddle in compounds behind thick metal doors and high walls topped with barbed wire.

Kabul is a city of sandbags and nervous, armed men, both on foot and in big, shiny, urgently honking vehicles. Approach the international airport and Afghan soldiers will have you out of your vehicle three times, patting you down before you even reach the parking lot.

Our delegation is restricted in our movements. Do we avoid venturing forth from the clipped lawns and rose gardens of our guest house compound? Hardly. But every morning until our driver arrives, we stay inside those high walls, never lingering together outside on the street. Then we scoot into his van. With preternatural reflexes, Imam plunges us into what must be some of the densest, scariest, least-regulated (no traffic lights) traffic on the planet.

We’re off to visit a primary school, a women’s co-op, a photo gallery, a de-mining museum, a refugee camp. Or we tour the Kabul zoo – with its pack of scrawny wolves and its flock of vultures. On one of the few occasions we stay out after dark, we attend a US Embassy-sponsored film festival showcasing young Afghan filmmakers.

We have 40 or so meetings with teachers, journalists, editors, social entrepreneurs, and with the staff of various NGOs — internationals, Afghan-Americans, and Afghans. Whether guarded or candid, perplexing or illuminating, each encounter provides a piece (a figment?) of the puzzle. We glimpse complexities and contradictions — and tragedies — some beyond our sheltered imaginations.

I journeyed to Afghanistan expecting to hear what Afghans think about Reaper drones. I think the Reaper is cowardly. Here in Central New York at Hancock air base, young technicians  pilot these robot planes – equipped with Hellfire missiles and 500-pound bombs – over Afghanistan, frequently killing civilians.

I expected to meet with drone survivors. But staff at Kabul’s no-questions-asked Emergency Hospital (Italian-run, specializing in war wounds) tell us that drone victims would be treated elsewhere – if at all – closer to where drones prey. And where we westerners dare not go.

One human rights NGO staffer allows that, yes, drones kill civilians, but—ta da! — they also destroy madrassas (Islamic schools). I wince at this functionary’s equanimity: rural Afghans may be rather less cavalier about such aerial terrorism.  But few of our contacts seem  interested  in drones. Instead they’re angered by the US military’s night raids on homes – terrorism stalking Kabul itself.

Malalai & Ian

Several of  those we meet with are inspiring. Malalai Joya (a pseudonym) is a young woman barely five feet tall. She was elected to Parliament from a remote region, but was drummed out of that august body for publicizing the war crimes of her parliamentary colleagues. While this notoriety led to international speaking tours, it also led to assassination attempts. Malalai only survives by moving with her guards from safe house to safe house.

To find her, we get our directions via several cell phone calls en route; we don’t know our exact destination until moments before we arrive. Through heavy metal doors, we enter one of those unmarked compounds on a nameless unpaved street (typical of Kabul) and are met by two armed men. One stands a few feet off, gun poised, while the other frisks us — and has us snap photos with our cameras and write with our pens to confirm that these aren’t disguised weapons.

Malalai comes out to greet us and invite us inside. Immediately I’m captivated by the care and courage she radiates.  Malalai’s remarks to us suggest why she is a marked woman:

~ If more US troops leave, one more enemy will be gone – no more bombing, no more white phosphorus….

~ The US military are expanding military bases here. They won’t leave us. They work for Balkanization….It’s a big lie that the U.S. will leave by 2014. [In fact, the US is quietly lobbying the Karzai government to agree to permanent US bases.]

~ When you are in the heart of Asia, you’re surrounded by other countries with oil and gas. From here these can be controlled.

~ Under the UN the Taliban have been replaced by the war lords.

~ Afghan and foreign NGOs are corrupt. [She refers to  them as “NGO lords.”]

~ Afghanistan has the second biggest copper mine in the world.

~ Under the Taliban 185 tons of poppy were exported; now over 4000 tons are exported. [Hmmm. Who gets the lion’s share of  drug traffic profit – Afghans or Americans?]

In her “Message on the Tenth Anniversary of NATO’s War and the Occupation  of Afghanistan,” Joya declares:

Ten years ago the US and NATO invaded my country under the fake banners of women’s rights, human rights, and democracy. But after a decade, Afghanistan still remains the most uncivil, most corrupt, and most war torn country in the world. The consequences of the so-called war on terror have only been more bloodshed, crimes, barbarism, human rights and women’s rights violation, which has doubled the miseries and sorrows of our people.²

Malalai, it’s clear, is not one of those who entwine their interests with those occupying her country. Check out her memoir,A Woman Among Warlords [Scribner, 2009].

*****

Ian Pounds is a long-term volunteer at one of the several orphanages we visit. Ian tells us that Afghanistan has over a million orphans. He notes that “the US is part and parcel of the drug trade.” He goes on, “The US has no intention of leaving Afghanistan. The US is here to pressure Iran….The US was ready to go into Afghanistan before 9/11; it’s not here to save the women.”

Now “80% of the girls don’t go to school and many end  up in forced marriages.” The women’s prisons here “are full of women who have been raped and therefore accused of having sex out of marriage.” (For an extended  report on Afghan women, especially those in prison, see Ann Jones’ grimly eloquent 2006 book, Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace in Afghanistan.

Shortly after our visit Ian emails us some stats drawn from the Afghanistan section of Save the Children’s July 2011 report on the “State of the World’s Mothers.” Among them:

~ Fifty women die in childbirth each day.

~ One in five children die before age five.

~ One in three women are physically or sexually abused.

~ Women’s life expectancy: 44 years.

The report declares Afghanistan the worst country in the world to be a mother.

Staring Through the Keyhole

To begin understanding this harrowed land you must see its teeming capital. Yet Kabul provides only an incomplete and, indeed, distorted picture of the country as a whole.

From our too few day-trips outside the capital, it’s clear that Kabul bears little resemblance to the hinterland. One might as well try to imagine an elephant having only seen its trunk. Or one might seek to understand the US by visiting only Washington or New York…or Syracuse.

Swollen with internal refugees, Kabul is said to now have about a fifth of Afghanistan’s population. Kabul’s social structures are not those of the countryside. Nor do urban agendas and interests—or security issues—reflect those of the rural areas where most Afghans live.

I belabor this point because I’m taken aback by how many of those we meet in the capital seem to favor an ongoing US military presence (or do some – not knowing us – say what they think visiting US Americans must want to hear?) Perhaps some prefer the devil they’ve come to depend on to other, less well-heeled, devils? Many surely fear chaos if the US leaves and its corrupt puppet government dissolves – “within three days,” an academic and former US Embassy contractor tells us.

They fear the ensuing civil war — as if for years the invader hadn’t been making night raids, humiliating women, detaining and  torturing their male relatives, arming fundamentalist warlords, fostering corruption, promoting ethnic hatred, paying off the Taliban, displacing hundreds of thousands, waging air war…and  testing its high-tech weapons systems on the Afghan people.

Some, especially among the NGO strata, have a stake in the status quo. Why not? In a region where many earn less than $2 a day, the status quo seems to work well enough for those Kabulis with internationally-derived incomes. Without the invader such emoluments would vanish. But I keep wondering how rural Afghans — already savaged by the occupation and by those resisting the occupation — would see things. Mostly confined  to Kabul, how are we to know?

Reparation

My few weeks in Afghanistan reinforce what I already do know: US taxpayers must face our complicity in the terror of US militarism. As the war on Afghanistan is now into its eleventh year, we must overcome our chauvinism and uncritical thinking. We must get beyond our bubble.

This past century teaches that no war truly ends. Its consequences endure and ramify. As with the people of Viet Nam and Iraq,  the Afghan people – the orphaned, the widowed, the amputated, the displaced, the heartsick, the driven mad – will continue to suffer long after the last US soldier leaves, the last base is closed, the last drone is grounded.

Even then our responsibility to the people of Afghanistan will remain. We must provide reparation for the wounds we have inflicted. Dollars cannot compensate for the lives lost or the infrastructure devastated. Nonetheless, we must give our utmost. We must get out of the way of Afghans and (judiciously) provide the economic support they need to rebuild their country and their lives.

We must also begin the overdue reparation of ourselves. We must end our worship of violence. We must mend our hearts that have tolerated so long what we’ve been doing to the Afghan people. We must fully support the healing of our returned soldiers who, maimed in body and soul, are doomed to live out their days having experienced what we have done. And we must hold accountable those who conned us into invading Afghanistan and those who keep us there.

We must convert our war-besotted economy to one that profits from life, not death. We must dismantle our bloated military. To stop subverting and invading the Islamic oil lands, we must own up to  our Islamophobia and  break our addiction to oil. We must struggle to free not only Afghan children, but our own, from the destitution and killing that threatens to engulf us.

We must no longer avert our eyes.

1. 14 Sept. 11 Associated Press.
2. 7 Oct. 11, CommonDreams.org.

In spite of its claims to be concerned about the “protection” of civilians and the state of “human rights” in Syria, the Western press was more concerned with demonising the Syrian governmnent than the barbarians who carried out the savage terrorist attacks in Damascus.

Attacks of this kind have terrorized countries in the Middle East for decades and have generally been attributed to terrorist groups. Attacks targeting civilians tend to bear all the hallmarks of Al-Qaida, yet, in an act of obscene cynicism, the Western press attempted to lay the blame on the Syrian government for the attacks. Le Monde carried the headline: “Attentats a Damas. L’Opposition syrienne accusent le régime, qui accuse Al-Qaida.” The headline which translates as “Attacks in Damascus. The Syrian opposition accuses the regime, who accuses Al-Qaida.” Terrorist attacks in a given country normally imply an opposition to the government of that country, yet the ludicrous conspiracy theory of a government “inside-job” is given credence in the spin of the French daily’s headline, which prioritizes the claims of the Syrian opposition.

The terrorist attacks in Damascus massacred men, women and children. Bodies were ripped to pieces. Yet Western government and “human rights” organizations and the “independent” press refused to say what any decent human being would say: that these attacks were crimes against humanity and should be unequivocally condemned.

Conspiracy theory was also the order of the day in the editorial offices of Sky News, who gave much credence to the claims of the “opposition” that the Syrian government planted the bombs themselves.

Sky News was also convinced of a diabolical plot hatched by the Assad régime so as to discredit the “peaceful pro-democracy” groups who oppose the government. So, it seems conspiracy theory has finally invaded the pages of the mainstream media.

According to Wikipedia, the term conspiracy theory “is sometimes used to automatically dismiss claims that are deemed ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish or irrational.”

The idea that the Syrian government, which is facing all-out warfare from Western powers under the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine, is surely worthy of such adjectives as “ridiculous,” “misconceived,” “paranoid,” “unfounded,” “outlandish,” and “irrational.”

There is not a shred of evidence to support the paranoid and deranged conspiracy theory that claims the Syrian government was behind the attacks in Damascus. However, instead of sympathizing with the victims of these crimes against humanity, the Western media establishment prefers to promote wile conspiracy theories.

What has been proved, however, is that the so-called Syrian opposition are heavily armed; are targeting civilians and security forces and are backed by Western intelligence agencies.

While there is no evidence that the Syrian government is planting bombs on its own people, there is a plethora of evidence to show that the United States wants regime change in Damascus and is prepared to use all means necessary to achieve this.

Since the promulgation of the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 and the admission of general Wesley Clark to Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007 that Syria was to be one of seven countries slated for US-backed regime change, all the available evidence shows that Syria has long been an object of US military aggression.

In a time of year so often associated with peace and kindness, the Western political establishment and their public relations servants in the mass media and “human rights” organizations have shown yet again what scant regard they have for human lives.

The nefarious political agenda of the West’s most prestigious “human rights” organisations can be clearly seen from the deafening silence of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation of Human rights and their affiliates, as their dear peaceful “pro-democracy” activists blew Syrian citizens to pieces in Damascus.

Human rights discourse has provided a lethally effective camouflage for Western imperialist strategies in the Middle East since the outbreak of the US-backed people-power coups in Tunisia and Egypt this year.

Throughout nine months of incessant bombing of civilian targets in Libya, human rights groups such as the International Federation for Human Rights, inter alia, provided the justification for NATO’s mass terror campaign against the Libyan people.

Amnesty International only admitted a paucity of the crimes committed by the putschists of Benghazi, while maintaining a hysterical chorus of neo-colonial war-mongering against the legitimate Libyan Jamahirya, repeatedly pinning crimes committed by the NATO rebels on “Gaddafi’s forces”.

The unrelenting war-mongering of globalisation’s pious “human rights” groups over the past year should provide ample proof of François-Noël Babeuf’s prescient critique of the French revolution’s droit de l’homme doctrine and the subsequent critique of human rights ideology by Karl Marx.

In his famous essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx argued that the doctrine of human rights was a creation of the property-owning class or the bourgeoisie. Abstract human rights, Marx predicted, would be used to further the interests of the capitalist class.

The callous silence of so-called human rights groups in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed in Damascus on December 23rd coupled with the paranoid conspiracy theories of the corporate media are a damning indictment of what Oscar Spengler described as Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the decline of the West.

The Syrian Human Rights Network have warned the Syrian people of “mass grave” fabrications by NATO’s proxy terrorists which will be blamed as the crimes of the mass media’s new bogey-man President Baschar al-Assad.

The recourse to car-bomb terrorism by the Western-backed jihadists shows that the colour revolution strategy has been a total failure in Syria. The destabilisation of Syria is now likely to require even higher levels of mass media mendacity.

Fabricated stories of mass graves, death camps and mass killings have garnered public support for imperialist adventures in the past.

In April 1993, James Harff of the American PR firm Ruder and Finn boasted on French TV about how they managed to fool American Jews into supporting US “humanitarian” bombing in Yugoslavia stating:

At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations…. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia…. By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The PR firms “tremendous coup” cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians and tore a multi-ethnic and tolerant society apart.

The media reductio ad Hitlerum process of Syria’s president Bashar Al-Assad is likely to intensify in the new year as humanitarian warfare and human-rightism spreads from North Africa to the borders of Russia and China.

The thugs of the hills are only the icing on the cake. Most of the work is being done by thugs wearing kid gloves. Unlike the people who threw the stone at the deputy brigade commander, these are fan favorites in Israel. The flesh of our flesh. Officers and soldiers, military jurists, architects and contractors in the service of the army, Interior Ministry and National Insurance Institute clerks. The hands are their hands. The head is the head of the demos, the Israeli-Jewish people, who by the democratic process send governments to be the dictator over the Palestinians.

What is the Israeli dictatorship over the Palestinians? Not only control of their space and the creation of isolated enclaves; not only the 19-year-olds who are sent — masked and armed to the teeth — on military raids (560 last month, according to the monitoring group in the PLO’s negotiations department); not only daily arrests (257 arrests in November, including 15 Gazans) and the 758 temporary roadblocks that were placed on West Bank roads that month.

The dictatorship is not even just a ban on Palestinian construction in more than 60 percent of the West Bank, permission to invent a new law every day to disenfranchise and expel, and the demolition, during 2011, of 500 Palestinian dwellings, wells, cisterns, animal pens, toilets and other essential structures. The dictatorship is all that together, and much more.

The Israeli dictatorship is the art of the double standard (Palestinians cannot build on their agricultural land so as not to impair rural zoning, but the state can legalize a Jewish outpost on Palestinian agricultural land). It is the champion of self-righteousness and arrogance (“the only democracy”), and holds an advanced degree in hypocrisy (“ready to return to negotiations any time”). Instead of going crazy with rage, the Palestinians know that these characteristics will hurt the Israelis themselves.

Anyone who has been harmed by the Israeli dictatorship feels alone, weak, angry and desperate. But every family in its own way cultivates its humanity. In a curious and moving way — despite internal rivalries, an unfair distribution of the burden, manifestations of ignorance and opportunism and disappointing leadership — the ability to remain steadfast and social solidarity are the overall result.

That’s the summud that attorney Raja Shehadeh wrote about ages ago, when we still deluded ourselves that the Israeli-Jewish people can heal itself from the disease of lordship. This totality also typifies every individual and family: the ability to remain resilient and show wise restraint, which has become routine bravery and will be translated in due time into mass collective resistence.

The Palestinians are heroes, and that’s not simply a flowery journalistic phrase. It’s a fact not intended for the thugs, but rather for people who shut their eyes — and they are many. Those who shut their eyes do so because they seek normalcy. What they don’t see doesn’t exist and doesn’t bother them. Israeli normalcy longs for the Palestinians to disappear, or at least to remain silent and finally surrender. But Palestinian bravery will continue to thwart the longings of Israeli normalcy.

In 2005, the relatives of nine Spanish nationals killed in Rwanda and the Congo in 1994, 1996, 1997 and 2000, filed a lawsuit against the government of Rwanda resulting in the issuing of Interpol international arrest warrants for 40 Rwandan officials of Kagame’s régime.

On 6 February 2008, the Spanish Investigative Judge Andreu Merelles issued an indictment charging 40 current or former high-ranking Rwandan military officials with serious crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and terrorism, perpetrated over a period of 12 years, from 1990 to 2002, against the civilian population, and primarily against members of the Hutu ethnic group.

While the investigations were initially based on complaints from families of nine Spaniards who were killed, harmed or disappeared during the period at issue, the indictment was subsequently expanded to include crimes committed against Rwandan and Congolese victims, based on the universal jurisdiction doctrine. The indictment rules out the prosecution of Paul Kagame, arguing that he may not be prosecuted as long as he holds the position of President of Rwanda.

According to Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou Loverdos:

Spain’s Audencia Nacional was only met by silence when it duly and formally asked the U.N. to hand over the evidence of these crimes perpetrated against people in 1996 and 1997 or the evidence of the pillaging of valuable mineral resources conducted in these same years or earlier. The international media which had access to the UN report have made public the fact that the UN High Commissioner responsible for the report  keeps- separately from the latter- a confidential  data bank containing evidence that implicates individual Rwandan and Ugandan military officials.

In spite of threats and intimidation from agents linked to Western governments and from the United Nations, the Spanish High Court authorities are continuing to hear evidence against the Ugandan and Rwandan proxy forces of the United States in Africa.

Keith Harmon Snow has been researching the real facts of the tragedy known to the world as the Rwandan genocide since 1994, and has, along with many other experts, evidence to prove that the United States, Britain and Israel were responsible for the training, financing and covert military and logistic support of Kagame and Museveni’s forces.

On 6 April 1994, the UPDF/RPA proxy forces assassinated the Rwandan and Burundian presidents (Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira), their military chiefs of staff, and the French pilots of the plane they were flying on, thus provoking and participating in the extermination of hundreds of thousands of Hutus and Tutsis in one of the most violent civil wars in modern history.

Snow also presented detailed evidence of the war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity committed by Kagame and Museveni’s proxy forces, after they invaded the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1996, again backed by the Pentagon, Israel and NATO allies. The Congo/Zaire invasion was commanded by generals Paul Kagame and James Kabarebe, and they involved an officer attached to Kabarebe named Hyppolite Kanambe — alias Joseph Kabila, the strongman in Congo today.

The ongoing Rwandan occupation and plunder of eastern Congo has resulted in the deaths of some ten million people, making this the worst war since the Second World War. The Central African holocaust has been largely ignored by the global mass media corporations who are calling for “humanitarian intervention” in Syria, much as they did to justify invading Libya, by the same countries responsible for supporting mass carnage in Africa.

In spite of orders from Laurent Désire Kabila (Congo’s interim president of 1998-2001), to disengage from the Congo, the RPA and UPDF re-invaded the Congo in 1998, resulting in the Second Congolese War. Although the war is said to have ended in 2001, mass killing of the populations in the mineral rich Kivu provinces of Eastern Congo, under the leadership of these US-backed dictators, has continued to this day.

Contrary to its stated “peacekeeping” mission, the United Nations Observers Mission for the Congo (MONUC) and its follow on dependent, Monusco, has been deployed in the Congo since 2000 and has been involved in sexual violence and contraband activities. MONUC has provided cover for the Rwandan, Ugandan and Burundi forces, USAID, the Pentagon’s new Africa Command (AFRICOM), and scores of Western mining corporations who are plundering the Eastern Congo.

Snow gave detailed testimony to the Audencia Nacional of the American, British, Belgian, German, Israeli and Australian mining corporations who have profited from the Pentagon’s holocaust in the Congo.  Banro Corporation, Barrick Gold and many companies run by the Blattner dynasty have profited astronomically from the pillaging of the Congolese people’s resources, as domestic warlords and Western elites enrich themselves while the local people starve.

Snow alleges that these corporations have direct links to the criminal networks run by Paul Kagame, who are plundering the Kivu provinces of the Eastern Congo and massacring the Hutu Rwandan refugees there.

Though the majority of victims have been from the populations of Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis and Twa have also been targeted, both in Congo and Rwanda, and many Congolese ethnic groups have been targeted in the Congo. The Kagame regime is determined to eliminate all possible opposition to its rule and to occupy and annex eastern Congo to create a “Republic of the Volcanoes” controlled by Rwanda and populated with satellite US military bases.

Snow told the Spanish court that details collected by the UN Panel of Experts report of 2001 to 2010, detailing the illegal occupation, plunder and war crimes in the Congo, have been watered down by special interest groups linked to Western governments, thus shielding Western corporations and governments from scrutiny by the International Criminal Court and the Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda.

Trained in the notorious Fort Levenworth, Kansas (USA) and advised by former British prime minister Tony Blair, Paul Kagame is without question one of the most evil dictators in modern history. The scale and intensity of his atrocities dwarf those of Pinochet, Suharto and Somoza combined.

In spite of expertise gained on the ground throughout Central Africa spanning 20 years, expert testimony to the US House of Representatives in 2001, extensive work as genocide consultant to the United Nations and numerous meticulously documented reports, Keith Harmon Snow’s work continues to be ignored by the corporate media and many outlets who claim to be ‘progressive’ and ‘independent’ .

According to  Snow:

U.S.-based groups fronted by the intelligence and defense establishment and pretending to be ‘grass roots non-government organizations’ — such as the ENOUGH project, Raise Hope for Congo, Resolve, STAND and Save Darfur — have co-opted the grass roots movement and are whitewashing the issues and controlling the media, academic and public spaces to prevent the true grass roots voices for Central Africa from being heard and to prevent the deeper issues from being understood.¹

In preparation for a documentary film to be released next year on the African holocaust, Keith Harmon Snow has just completed a series of interviews with distinguished scholars, investigative journalists and lawyers from France, Spain, Germany, Camaroun and Rwanda. The film, as yet untitled, is expected to be aired in film festivals throughout the world and will also be available online for mass viewing.

Rwanda and the Congo belong to the ninth circle of global capitalism’s Dantesque inferno. It is the circle of betrayal; betrayal of the high ideals of the United Nations to uphold the rule of law and work towards the goal of international peace and stability; betrayal of the trust ordinary citizens of the world have in media corporations to tell them what is really happening in the world, so that leaders and potentates can be held to account.

Uncovering the truth about the role of Western imperialism in the violence that has beset Central Africa since the fall of the USSR to the present day, is of vital importance, as the obscene and racist myth of an African genocide America “failed to prevent” constitutes the mendacious and  insane basis for the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine.

Western governments and their pro-Kagame lobbies in the mainstream media are quick to smear as ‘genocide deniers’ those who challenge the lies and distortions of the official genocide narrative of the current Rwandan régime by exposing the inconvenient and politically incorrect facts. In the case of Rwanda and the Congo, it should now be abundantly clear who those genocide-deniers are.

1. E-mail correspondence with Keith Harmon Snow

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.

The “Bush tax cuts” are still called that, while Bush has been gone for years. The corporate trade agreements are rolling through at a pace Bush couldn’t have managed. While Social Security was protected by anti-Bush agitation, it now has its neck on a chopping block and the progressive position is that the taxes that pay for it should be cut — rather than expanded to apply equally to large incomes. President Obama has repeatedly blocked serious global efforts to address climate change. And you’re concerned about which Republican buffoon doesn’t know the difference between Iraq and Iran, or which other one thinks the United States has an embassy in Iran. Are you kidding me?

President Obama, the United States Congress, and the Federal Reserve are united in their generosity toward Wall Street and the war machine — both financial generosity and the equally generous provision of immunity from legal prosecution. In the Bush era we were locked in free-speech cages, and we raised hell about it. Now we’re locked in jails, beaten, tear gassed, pepper sprayed, and otherwise brutally assaulted, and . . . wait! Look over there! Is that a presidential candidate who wants to publicly declare his desire to secretly murder Iranians? How outrageous!

For the love of everything decent, the current president is right now murdering Iranians, and it’s not very secret. What in the hell is the matter with you people?

Illegality is over, says Harold Koh (“the good John Yoo”). This is the same guy who claims massive slaughter by bombing of foreign nations is neither war nor an act of hostility as long as no significant number of U.S. citizens die immediately in the process.

How can illegality be over, when the crimes have not been prosecuted and have, in fact, been legalized? The current Department of Justice, at the direction of President Obama, has radically expanded claims of state secrets and made greater use of the Espionage Act to punish whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. The current president has formalized, legalized, systematized, and normalized warrantless spying, lawless imprisonment (Bagram is booming!), prisoner abuse, assassination (including of members of the 5% of humanity we’re supposed to care about), war making in direct violation of the will of Congress (Cf. Libya), and the radically expanded use of drones to do much of this dirty work. And you want me to care that some house-broken elephant who’s been trained to parrot platitudes is in favor of child labor? Really?

It is not pleasant to face, but our children are done for if we proceed down either of the paths you are obsessing over the choice between. Behind curtain A is increased plutocratic militarization. Behind curtain B is the same damn thing. It’s an evil choice. Choose which of your children should be shot. This one. No, wait. This one. It is not a choice we have time to dignify with our attention. It is not something we should waste 10 months of inaction and misdirected resources on.

We must do what has finally, finally, finally been begun. We must occupy public space. We must move the entire culture. We must reshape this society. We must drag both political parties and everybody in them and the majority of the population which has long since grown sick up to the eye balls of both of them, we must drag everyone kicking and screaming to a better place, to a place where we do not choose between putting 65% or 62% of discretionary federal spending into war preparation without an enemy in sight. What kind of a range of options is that?

This government will halt the foreclosures only after we have halted the forclosures. This government will forgive student debt only after we have blocked its payment. This government will regulate Wall Street only after we have divested from it. And this government will stop dumping our hard-earned pay into wars we don’t want and cannot survive only when we have made that path (that running of the gauntlet of K Street’s opposition) easier for every type of misrepresentative than continuing on the current trajectory.

Self-government is not a spectator sport. Elections are not reality shows. There is much more at stake than a soap opera. The first step, and it is a more difficult step than sleeping in a tent in the ice cold rain, is to cease giving a damn what some individual who is stripping away your rights and the fruits of your labors really feels in his heart of hearts. Stop it. We do not have the time. Politicians who make speeches opposing everything they do must be pushed to match action to words, not treated as if words speak more loudly than actions. That attitude is what leads us to focus on what a gaggle of misfits with no power and less wisdom have to say about each other, just because they’re on the teevee screen.

Get serious. Get independent. Get principled. And stay nonviolent toward everything in the world except your television.

A slump occurs when “capacity outstrips demand” – that is to say, when people can no longer afford to buy all that is being produced. This is inevitable in a capitalist system, where productive capacity is privately owned, because the global working class as a whole are never paid enough to purchase all that they collectively produce. As a result, unsold goods begin to pile up, and production facilities – factories and the like – are closed down. People are thrown out of work as a result, their incomes decline, and the problem gets worse. This is exactly what we are seeing happen today.

In these circumstances, avenues for profitable investment dry up – the holders of capital can find nowhere safe to invest their money. For them, this is the crisis – not the unemployment, the famine, the poverty etc (which, after all, remain an endemic feature of the global capitalist economy even during the ‘boom times’, albeit on a somewhat reduced scale). The governments under their control – through ownership of the media, currency manipulation and control of the economy – must then set to work creating new profitable investment opportunities.

One way they do this is by killing off public services, and thus creating opportunities for investment in the private companies that replace them. In 1980s Britain, Margaret Thatcher privatised steel, coal, gas, electricity, water, and much else besides. In the short term, this plunged millions into unemployment, as factories and mines were closed down, and in the long term it resulted in massive price rises for basic services. But it had its intended effect – it provided valuable investment opportunities (for those with capital to spare) at a time when such opportunities were scarce, and created a long term source of fabulous profits. This summer, for example, saw the formerly publicly owned gas company Centrica hiking its prices by another 18% to bring in a £1.3billion profit. The raised prices will see many thousands more pensioners than usual die from the cold this winter as a result, but gas – like all commodities in capitalist society – is not there to provide heat, but to increase capital.

In the global South, privatisation was harsher still. Bodies like the IMF and the World Bank used the leverage provided by the debt-extortion mechanism (whereby interest rates were hiked on unpayable loans that had rarely benefited the population, often taken out by corrupt rulers imposed by Western governments in the first place) to force governments across Asia, Africa and Latin America to cut public spending on even basics such as health and education, along with agricultural subsidies. This contributed massively to the staggering rates of infant mortality and deaths from preventable disease, as well as to the AIDS epidemic now raging across Africa. But again the desired end for those imposing the policies was achieved, as new markets were created and holders of giant capital reserves could now invest in private companies to provide the services no longer available from the state. The profit system was given a new lease of life, its collapse staved off once again.

The World Bank’s closure of the Indian government’s grain rationing and distribution service, for example, meant that a scheme providing affordable grain to all Indian citizens was closed down, allowing private companies to come in and sell grain at massively increased prices (sometimes up to ten times higher). Whilst this has led to huge numbers of Indians being priced out of the market, and a resulting 200 million people now facing starvation in India, it has also led to record profits for the giant private companies now holding the world’s grain stocks – which is the whole point.

This round of global privatisation from the 1980s onwards, however, was so thorough that when the 2008 crisis hit, there were few state functions left to privatise. Creating investment opportunities now is much trickier than it was thirty years ago, because so much of what is potentially profitable is already being thoroughly exploited as it is.

In Europe, what is left of public services is hastily being dismantled, as right wing political leaders happily privatise what is left of the public sector, and currency speculators use their firepower to pick off any country that attempts to resist. David Cameron, following the path forced on the global South over recent decades, for example, is busy opening up Britain’s National Health Service to private companies, and massively cutting back on public service provision for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and the jobless.

In the global South, however, there is little left for the West to privatise, as successive IMF policies have long ago forced those countries in their grip to strip their public services to the bone (and beyond) already.

But there is one state function which, if fully privatised across the world, would make the profits made even from essentials such as health care and education look like peanuts. That is the most basic and essential state function of all, indeed the whole raison d’etre for the state: security.

Private security companies are one of the few growth areas during times of global recession, as growing unemployment and poverty leads to increased social unrest and chaos, and those with wealth become more nervous about protecting both themselves, and their assets. Furthermore, as the Chinese economy advances at a rate of knots, military superiority is fast becoming the West’s only “competitive advantage” – the one area in which it’s expertise remains significantly ahead of its rivals. Turning this advantage, therefore, into an opportunity for investment and profit on a large-scale is now one of the chief tasks facing the rulers of Western economies.

A recent article in the Guardian noted that British private security firm Group 4 is now “Europe’s largest private sector employer”, employing 600,000 people – 50% more than make up the total armed forces of Britain and France combined. With growth last year of 9% in their “new markets” division, the company have “already benefited from the unrest in north Africa and the Middle East.” Group 4 are set to make a killing in Libya, following the total breakdown of security, likely to last for decades, resulting from NATO’s incineration of the country’s armed forces and wholesale destruction of its state apparatus. With the rule of law replaced by warfare between rival gangs of rebels, and no realistic prospect of a functioning police force for the foreseeable future, those Libyans able to manoeuvre themselves into positions of wealth and power will likely have to rely on private security for many years to come.

When Philip Hammond, Britain’s new Defence Secretary and a multi-millionaire businessman himself, suggested that British companies “pack their suitcases and head to Libya”, it was not only oil and construction companies he had in mind, but private security companies.

Private military companies are also becoming huge business – most famously, the US company Blackwater, renamed Xe Services after its original name became synonymous with the massacres committed by its forces in Iraq. In the USA, Blackwater has already taken over many of the security functions of the state – charging the Department of Homeland Security $1000 per day per head in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, for example. “When you ship overnight, do you use the postal service or do you use FedEx?” asked Erik Prince, founder and chairman of Blackwater. “Our corporate goal is to do for the national security apparatus what FedEx did to the postal service”. Another Blackwater official commented that “None of us loves the idea that devastation became a business opportunity. It’s a distasteful fact. But that’s what it is. Doctors, lawyers, funeral directors, even newspapers – they all make a living off of bad things happening. So do we, because somebody’s got to handle it.”

The danger comes when the economic climate is such that the world’s most powerful governments feel they must do all they can to create such business opportunities. During the Cold War, the US military acted (as indeed it still does) to keep the global South in a state of poverty by attacking any government that seriously sought to challenge this poverty, and imposing governments that would crush trade unions and keep the population cowed. This created investment opportunities because it kept the majority of the world’s labour force in conditions so desperate they were willing to work for peanuts. But now this is not enough. In slump conditions, it doesn’t matter how cheap your workforce is if nobody is buying your products. To create the requisite business opportunities today – a large global market for its military expertise – Western governments must impose not only poverty, but also devastation. Devastation is the quickest route to converting the West’s military prowess into a genuine business opportunity that can create a huge new avenue for investment when all others are drying up. And this is precisely what is happening.  David Cameron is, for once, telling the truth, when he says “Whatever it takes to help our businesses take on the world – we’ll do it.”

As The Times put it recently, “In Iraq, the postwar business boom is not oil. It is security.” In both Iraq and Afghanistan, a situation of chronic and enduring instability and civil war has been created by a very precise method. Firstly, the existing state power is totally destroyed. Next, the possibility of utilising the country’s domestic expertise to rebuild state capacity is undermined against by barring former officials from working for the new government (a process known in Iraq as “de-Ba’athification”). Linked to this, the former ruling party is banned from playing any part in the political process, effectively ensuring that the largest and most organised political formation in each country has no option but to resort to armed struggle to gain influence, and thereby condemning the country to civil war. Next, vicious sectarianism is encouraged along whatever religious, ethnic and tribal divisions are available, often goaded by the covert actions of Western intelligence services. Finally, the wholesale privatisation of resources ensures chronically destabilising levels of unemployment and inequality.  The whole process is self-perpetuating, as the skilled and professional sections of the workforce – those with the means and connections – emigrate, leaving behind a dire skills shortage and even less chance of a functioning society emerging from the chaos.

This instability is not confined to the borders of the state which has been destroyed. In a masterfully cynical domino effect, for example, the aggression against Iraq has also helped to destabilise Syria. Three quarters of the 2 million Iraqi refugees fleeing the war in their own country have ended up in Syria, thus contributing to the pressure on the Syrian economy which is a major factor in the current unrest there.

The destruction of Libya will also have far reaching destabilising consequences across the region. As the recent United Nations Support Mission in Libya stated, “Libya had accumulated the largest known stockpile of Manpads [surface-to-air missiles] of any non-Manpad-producing country. Although thousands were destroyed during the seven-month Nato operations, there are increasing concerns over the looting and likely proliferation of these portable defence systems, as well as munitions and mines, highlighting the potential risk to local and regional stability.” Furthermore, a large number of volatile African countries are currently experiencing a fragile peace secured by peacekeeping forces in which Libyan troops had been playing a vital role. The withdrawal of these troops may well be damaging to the maintenance of the peace. Similarly, Libya, under Gaddafi’s rule, had contributed generously to African development projects; a policy which will certainly be ended under the NTC – again, with potentially destabilising consequences.

Clearly, a policy of devastation and destabilisation fuels not only the market for private security, but also for arms sales – where, again, the US, Britain and France remain market leaders. And a policy of devastation through blitzkrieg fits in clearly with the big three current long term strategic objectives of Western policy planners:

1. To corner as large a share as possible of the world’s diminishing resources, most importantly oil, gas and water. A government of a devastated country is at the mercy of the occupying country when it comes to contracts. Gaddafi’s Libya, for example, drove a notoriously hard bargain with the Western powers over oil contracts – acting as a key force in the 1973 oil price spike, and still in 2009 being accused by the Financial Times of “resource nationalism”. But the new NTC government in Libya have been hand picked for their subservience to foreign interests – and know that their continued positions depend on their willingness to continue in this role.
2. To prevent the rise of the global South, primarily through the destruction of any independent regional powers (such as Iran, Libya, Syria etc) and the destabilisation, isolation and encirclement of the rising global powers (in particular China and Russia).
3. To overcome or limit the impact of economic collapse by using superior military force to create and conquer new markets through the destruction and rebuilding of infrastructure and the elimination of competition.

This policy of total devastation represents a departure from the Cold War policies of the Western powers. During the Cold War, whilst the major strategic aims remained the same, the methods were different. Independent regional powers in the global South were still destabilised and invaded – and regularly – but generally with the aim of installing ‘compliant dictatorships’. Thus, Lumumba was overthrown and replaced with Mobutu; Sukarno with Suharto; Allende with Pinochet; etc, etc. But the danger with this ‘imposed strongmen’ policy was that strongmen can become defiant. Saddam Hussein illustrated this perfectly. After having been backed for over a decade by the West, he turned on their stooge monarchy in Kuwait. Governments that are in control can easily get out of control. However, for as long as these strongmen were needed for the services provided by their armies (protecting investments, repressing workers struggles, etc), they were supported. The crisis now underway in the economies of the West, however, calls for more drastic measures. And the development of private security and private mercenary companies mean that the armies provided by these strongmen are starting to be deemed no longer necessary.

Congo is a case in point. For three decades, the Western powers had supported Mobutu Sese-Seko’s iron rule of the Congo. But then, in the mid-90s, they allowed him to be overthrown. However, rather than allowing the Congolese resistance forces to take power and establish an effective government, they then sponsored an invasion of the country by Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. Although these countries have now largely withdrawn their militias, they continue to sponsor proxy militias which have prevented the country seeing a moment’s peace for nearly fifteen years, resulting in the biggest slaughter since the end of the Second World War, with over 5 million killed. One result of this total breakdown of functioning government has been that the Western companies that loot Congo’s resources have been able to do so virtually for free. Despite being the world’s largest supplier of both coltan and copper, amongst many other precious minerals, the total tax revenue on these products in 2006-7 amounted to a puny £32 million. This is surely far less than what even the most useless neo-colonial puppet would have demanded.

This completely changes the meaning of the word ‘government’. In the Congo, the government’s best efforts to stabilise and develop the country have so far proved no match for the destabilisation strategies of the West and its stooges. In Afghanistan, it is well known that the government’s writ has no authority outside of Kabul, if there. But then, that is the point. The role of the governments imposed on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, like the one they are trying to impose on Syria, is not to govern or provide for the population at all – even that most basic of functions, security. It is simply to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy for the occupation of the country and to award business contracts to the colonial powers. They literally have no other function, as far as their sponsors are concerned.

It goes without saying that this policy of devastation is turning the victimised countries into a living hell. After now more than thirty years of Western destabilisation, and ten years of outright occupation, Afghanistan is at or very hear the bottom of nearly every human development indicator available, with life expectancy at 44 years and an under-five mortality rate of over one in four. Mathew White, a history professor who has recently completed a detailed survey of the humanity’s worst atrocities throughout history, concluded that, without doubt, “chaos is far deadlier than tyranny”. It is a truth to which many Iraqis can testify.

The Russian investigative journalist, Nikolay Starikov, has written a book which discusses the role of unknown snipers in the destabilization of countries targeted for regime change by the United States and its allies. The following article attempts to elucidate some historical examples of this technique with a view to providing a background within which to understand the current cover war on the people of Syria by death squads in the service of Western intelligence.

Romania, 1989

In Susanne Brandstätter’s documentary Checkmate: Strategy of a Revolution aired on Arte television station some years ago,  Western intelligence officials revealed how  death squads were used to destabilize Romania and turn its people against the head of state Nicolai Ceaucescu.

Brandstätter’s film is a must see for anyone interested in how Western intelligence agencies, human rights groups and the corporate press collude in the systematic destruction of countries whose leadership conflicts with the interests of big capital and empire.

Former secret agent with the French secret service, the DGSE(La Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) Dominique Fonvielle, spoke candidly about the role of Western intelligence operatives in destabilizing the Romanian population.

How do you organize a revolution? I believe the first step is to locate oppositional forces in a given country. It is sufficient to have a highly developed intelligence service in order to determine which people are credible enough to have influence at their hands to destabilize the people to the disadvantage of the ruling regime.

This open and rare admission of Western sponsorship of terrorism was justified on the grounds of the “greater good” brought to Romania by free-market capitalism. It was necessary, according to the strategists of Romania’s “revolution”, for some people to die.

Today, Romania remains one of the poorest countries in Europe. A report on Euractiv reads:

Most Romanians associate the last two decades with a continuous process of impoverishment and deteriorating living standards, according to Romania’s Life Quality Research Institute, quoted by the Financiarul daily.

The western intelligence officials interviewed in the documentary also revealed how the Western press played a central role in disinformation. For example, the victims of Western-backed snipers were photographed by presented to the world as evidence of a crazed dictator who was “killing his own people”.

To this day, there is a Museum in the back streets of Timisoara Romania which promotes the myth of the “Romanian Revolution”.  The Arte documentary was one of the rare occasions when the mainstream press revealed some of  the dark secrets of Western liberal democracy. The documentary caused a scandal when it was aired in France, with the prestigious Le Monde Diplomatique discussing the moral dilemma of the West’s support of terror in its desire to spread ‘democracy’.

Since the destruction of Libya and the ongoing cover war on Syria, Le Monde Diplomatique has stood safely on the side of political correction, condemning Bashar Al Assad for the crimes of the DGSE and the CIA. In its current edition, the front page article reads Ou est la gauche? Where is the left ? Certainly not in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique !

Russia, 1993

During Boris Yeltsin’s counter-revolution in Russia in 1993, when the Russian parliament was bombed resulting in the deaths of thousands of people, Yeltsin’s counter-revolutionaries made extensive use of snipers. According to many eye witness reports, snipers were seen shooting civilians from the building opposite the US embassy in Moscow. The snipers were attributed to the Soviet government by the international media.

Venezuela, 2002

In 2002, the CIA attempted to overthrow Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, in a military coup. On the 11th of April 2002, an opposition march towards the presidential palace was organized by the US-backed Venezuelan opposition. Snipers hidden in buildings near the palace opened fire on protestors killing 18. The Venezuelan and international media claimed that Chavez was “killing his own people” thereby justifying the military coup presented as a humanitarian intervention.  It was subsequently proved that the coup had been organized by the CIA but the identity of the snipers was never established.

Thailand, April 2010

On April 12th 2010, Christian Science Monitor published a detailed report of the riots in Thailand between “red-shirt” activists and the Thai government. The article headline read: ‘Thailand’s red shirt protests darken with unknown snipers, parade of coffins’.

Like their counterparts in Tunisia, Thailand’s red shirts were calling for the resignation of the Thai prime minister. While a heavy-handed response by the Thai security forces to the protestors was indicated in the report, the government’s version of events was also reported:

Mr. Abhisit has used solemn televised addresses to tell his story. He has blamed rogue gunmen, or “terrorists,” for the intense violence (at least 21 people died and 800 were injured) and emphasized the need for a full investigation into the killings of both soldiers and protesters. State television has broadcast repeated images of soldiers coming under fire from bullets and explosives.

The CSM report went on to quote Thai military officials and unnamed Western diplomats:

Military observers say Thai troops stumbled into a trap set by agents provocateurs with military expertise. By pinning down soldiers after dark and sparking chaotic battles with unarmed protesters, the unknown gunmen ensured heavy casualties on both sides.

Some were caught on camera and seen by reporters, including this one. Snipers targeted military ground commanders, indicating a degree of advance planning and knowledge of Army movements, say Western diplomats briefed by Thai officials. While leaders of the demonstrations have disowned the use of firearms and say their struggle is nonviolent, it is unclear whether radicals in the movement knew of the trap.

“You can’t claim to be a peaceful political movement and have an arsenal of weapons out the back if needed. You can’t have it both ways,” says a Western diplomat in regular contact with protest leaders.

The CSM article also explores the possibility that the snipers could be rogue elements in the Thai military, agents provocateurs used to justify a crack down on democratic opposition. Thailand’s ruling elite is currently coming under pressure from a George Soros funded colour revolution hysteria called the Red Shirts.

Kyrgystan, June 2010

Ethnic violence broke out in the Central Asian republic of  Kirgystan  in June 2010. It was widely reported that unknown snipers opened fire on members of the Uzbek minority in Kyrgystan. Eurasia.net reports:

In many Uzbek mahallas, inhabitants offer convincing testimony of gunmen targeting their neighborhoods from vantage points. Men barricaded into the Arygali Niyazov neighborhood, for example, testified to seeing gunmen on the upper floors of a nearby medical institute hostel with a view over the district’s narrow streets. They said that during the height of the violence these gunmen were covering attackers and looters, assaulting their area with sniper fire. Men in other Uzbek neighborhoods tell similar stories.

Among the rumours and unconfirmed reports circulating in Kyrgyzstan after the 2010 violence were claims that water supplies to Uzbek areas were about to be  poisoned. Such rumours had also been spread against the Ceaucescu regime in Romania during the CIA- backed coup in 1989. Eurasia.net goes on to claim that:

Many people are convinced that they’ve seen foreign mercenaries acting as snipers. These alleged foreign combatants are distinguished by their appearance – inhabitants report seeing black snipers and tall, blonde, female snipers from the Baltic states. The idea that English snipers have been roaming the streets of Osh shooting at Uzbeks is also popular. There’ve been no independent corroborations of such sightings by foreign journalists or representatives of international organizations.

None of these reports have been independently investigated or corroborated. It is therefore impossible to draw any hard conclusions from these stories.

Ethnic violence against Uzbek citizens in Kyrgyzstan occurred pari pasu with a popular revolt against the US-backed regime, which many analysts have attributed to the machinations of Moscow.

The Bakiyev régime came to power in a CIA-backed people-power coup known to the world as the Tulip Revolution in 2005.

Located to the West of China and bordering Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan hosts one of America’s biggest and most important military bases in Central Asia, the Manas Air Base, which is vital for the NATO occupation of neighbouring Afghanistan.

Despite initial worries,US/Kyrgyz relations have remained good under the regime of President Roza Otunbayeva. This is not surprising as Otunbayeva had previously participated in the US-created Tulip Revolution in 2004, taking power as foreign minister.

To date no proper investigation has been conducted into the origins of the ethnic violence that spread throughout  the south of Kyryzstan in 2010, nor have the marauding gangs of unknown snipers been identified and apprehended.

Given the geo-strategic and geo-political importance of Kyrgyzstan to both the United States and Russia, and the formers track-record of using death squads to divide and weaken countries so as to maintain US domination, US involvement in the dissemination of terrorism in Kyrgyzstan cannot be ruled out. One effective way of maintaining a grip on Central Asian countries would be to exacerbate ethnic tensions.

In August 6th 2008, the Russian newspaper Kommersa`nt reported that a US arms cache had been found in a house in the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek, which was being rented by two American citizens. The US embassy claimed the arms were being used for “anti-terrorism” exercises. However, this was not confirmed by Kyrgyz authorities.

Covert US military support to terrorist groups in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia proved to be an effective strategy in creating the conditions for “humanitarian” bombing in 1999. An effective means of  keeping the government in Bishkek firmly on America’s side would be to insist on a US and European presence in the country to help “protect” the Uzbek minority.

Military intervention similar to that in the former Yugoslavia by the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe  has already been advocated by the New York Times, whose misleading article on the riots on June 24th 2010 has the headline “Kyrgyzstan asks European Security Body for Police Teams”. The article is misleading as the headline contradicts the actual report which cites a Kyrgyz official stating:

A government spokesman said officials had discussed an outside police presence with the O.S.C.E., but said he could not confirm that a request for a deployment had been made.

There is no evidence in the article of any request by the Kyrgyz government for military intervention. In fact, the article presents much evidence to the contrary. However, before the reader has a chance to read the explanation of the Kyrgyz government, the New York Times writer presents the now all too horribly familiar narrative of oppressed peoples begging the West to come and bomb or occupy their country:

Ethnic Uzbeks in the south have clamored for international intervention. Many Uzbeks said they were attacked in their neighborhoods not only by civilian mobs, but also by the Kyrgyz military and police officers.

Only towards the end of the article do we find out that the Kyrgyz authorities blamed the US-backed dictator for fomenting ethnic violence in the country, through the use of Islamic jihadists in Uzbekistan. This policy of using ethnic tension to create an environment of fear in order to prop up an extremely unpopular dictatorship, the policy of using Islamic Jihadism as a political tool to create what former US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Bzrezinski called “ an arc of crisis”, ties in well with the history of US involvement in Central Asia from the creation of Al Qaida in Afghanistan in 1978 to the present day.

Again, the question persists, who were the “unknown snipers” terrorizing the Uzbek population, where did their weapons come from and who would benefit from ethnic conflict in Central Asia’s geopolitical hotspot?

Tunisia, January 2011

On January 16th 2011, CNN reported that ‘’armed gangs’’ were fighting Tunisian security forces.  Many of the murders committed throughout the Tunisian uprising were by “unknown snipers”. There were also videos posted on the internet showing Swedish nationals detained by Tunisian security forces. The men were clearly armed with sniper rifles. Russia Today aired the dramatic pictures.

In spite of articles by professor Michel Chossudovsky, William Engdahl and  others showing how the uprisings in North Africa were following the patterns of US backed people-power coups rather than genuinely popular revolutions, left wing parties and organizations continued to believe the version of events presented to them by Al Jazeera and the mainstream press. Had the left taken a left from old Lenin’s book they would have transposed his comments on the February/March revolution in Russia thus:

The  whole course of events in the January/February Revolution clearly shows that the British, French and American embassies, with their agents and “connections”,… directly organized a plot.. in conjunction with a section of the generals and army and Tunisian garrison officers, with the express object of deposing Ben Ali

What the left did not understand is that sometimes it is necessary for imperialism to overthrow some of its clients. A suitable successor to Ben Ali could always be found among the feudalists of the Muslim Brotherhood who now look likely to take power.

In their revolutionary sloganeering and arrogant insistence that the events in Tunisia and Egypt were “spontaneous and popular uprisings” they committed what Lenin identified as the most dangerous sins in a revolution; namely, the substitution of the abstract for the concrete. In other words, left wing groups were simply fooled by the sophistication of the Western backed “Arab Spring” events.

That is why the violence of the demonstrators and, in particular, the widespread use of snipers possibly linked to Western intelligence was the great unthought of the Tunisian uprising. The same techniques would be used in Libya a few weeks later, forcing the left to back track and modifiy its initial enthusiasm for the CIA’s “Arab Spring”.

When we are talking about the” left” here, we are referring to genuine left wing parties, that is to say, parties who supported the Great People’s Socialist Libyan Arab Jamahirya in their long and brave fight against Western imperialism, not the infantile petty bourgeois dupes who supported NATO’s Benghazi terrorists.  The blatant idiocy of such a stance should be crystal clear to anyone who understands global politics and class struggle.

Egypt, 2011

On October 20th 2011, the Telegraph newspaper published an article entitled, “Our brother died for a better Egypt”. According to the Telegraph, Mina Daniel, an anti-government activist in Cairo, had been ‘shot from an unknown sniper, wounding him fatally in the chest”

Inexplicably, the article is no longer available on the Telegraph’s website for online perusal. But a google search for ‘Egypt, unknown sniper, Telegraph’ clearly shows the above quoted explanation for Mina Daniel’s death. So, who could these “unknown snipers’’ be?

On February 6th Al Jazeera reported that Egyptian journalist, Ahmad Mahmoud, was shot by snipers as he attempted to cover clashes between Egyptian security forces and protestors. Referring to statements made by Mahmoud’s wife, Enas Abdel-Alim, the Al Jazeera article insinuates that Mahmoud may have been killed by Egyptian security forces:

Abdel-Alim said several eyewitnesses told her a uniformed police captain with Egypt’s notorious Central Security forces yelled at her husband to stop filming. Before Mahmoud even had a chance to react, she said, a sniper shot him.

While the Al Jazeera article advances the theory that the snipers were agents of the Mubarak regime, their role in the uprising still remains a mystery. Al Jazeera, the Qatar-based television stations owned by the Emir Hamid Bin Khalifa Al Thani, played a key role in provoking protests in Tunisia and Egypt before launching a campaign of unmitigated pro-NATO war propaganda and lies during the destruction of Libya.

The Qatari channel has been a central participant in the current covert war waged by NATO agencies and their clients against the Republic of Syria. Al Jazeera’s incessant disinformation against Libya and Syria resulted in the resignation of several prominent journalists such as Beirut station chief Ghassan Bin Jeddo and senior Al Jazeera executive Wadah Khanfar who was forced to resign after a Wikileaks cable revealed he was a co-operating with the Central Intelligence Agency.

Many people were killed during the US-backed colour revolution in Egypt. Although, the killings have been attributed to former US semi-client Hosni Mubarak, the involvement of Western intelligence cannot be ruled out. However, it should be pointed out that the role of unknown snipers in mass demonstrations remains complex and multi-faceted and therefore one should not jump to conclusions. For example, after the Bloody Sunday massacre (Domhnach na Fola) in Derry, Ireland 1972, where peaceful demonstrators were shot dead by the British army, British officials claimed that they had come under fire from snipers. But the 30 year long Bloody Sunday  inquiry subsequently proved this to be false.  But the question persists once more,  who were the snipers in Egypt and whose purposes did they serve?

Libya,  2011

During the destabilization of Libya, a video was aired by Al Jazeera purporting to show peaceful “pro-democracy” demonstrators being fired upon by “Gaddafi’s forces”. The video was edited to convince the viewer that anti-Gaddafi demonstrators were being murdered by the security forces. However, the unedited version of the video is available on utube. It clearly shows pro-Gaddafi demonstrators with Green flags being fired upon by unknown snipers. The attribution of NATO-linked crimes to the security forces of the Libyan Jamahirya was a constant feature of the brutal media war waged against the Libyan people.

Syria, 2011

The people of Syria have been beset by death squads and snipers since the outbreak of violence there in March. Hundreds of Syrian soldiers and security personnel have been murdered, tortured and mutilated by Salafist and Muslim Brotherhood militants. Yet the international media corporations continue to spread the pathetic lie that the deaths are the result of Bashar Al Assad’s dictatorship.

When I visited Syria in April of this year, I personally encountered merchants and citizens in Hama who told me they had seen armed terrorists roaming the streets of that once peaceful city, terrorizing the neighbourhood. I recall speaking to a fruit seller in the city of Hama who  spoke about the horror he had witnessed that day. As he described the scenes of violence to me, my attention was arrested by a newspaper headline in English from the Washington Post  shown on Syrian television: “CIA backs Syrian opposition”. The Central Intelligence Agency provides training and funding for groups who do the bidding of US imperialist interests. The history of the CIA shows that backing opposition forces means providing them with arms and finance, actions illegal under international law.

A few days later, while at a hostel in the ancient, cultured city of Aleppo, I spoke to a Syrian business man and his family. The business man ran many hotels in the city and was pro-Assad. He told me that he used to watch Al Jazeera television but now had doubts about their honesty. As we conversed, the Al Jazeera television in the background showed scenes of Syrian soldiers beating and torturing protestors. “ Now if that is true, it is simply unacceptable” he said. It is sometimes impossible to verify whether the images shown on television are true or not. Many of the crimes attributed to the Syrian army have been committed by the armed gangs, such as the dumping of mutilated bodies into the river in Hama, presented to the world as more proof of the crimes of the Assad regime.

There is a minority of innocent opponents of the Assad regime who believe everything they see and hear on Al Jazeera and the other pro-Western satellite stations. These people simply do not understand the intricacies of international politics.

But the facts on the ground show that most people in Syria support the government. Syrians have access to all internet websites and international TV channels. They can watch BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, read the New York Times online or Le Monde before tuning into their own state media. In this respect, many Syrians are more informed about international politics than the average European or American. Most Europeans and Americans believe their own media. Few are capable of reading the Syrian press in original Arabic or watching Syrian television. The Western powers are the masters of discourse, who own the means of communication. The Arab Spring has been the most horrifying example of the wanton abuse of this power.

Disinformation is effective in sowing the seeds of doubt among those who are seduced by Western propaganda. Syrian state media has disproved hundreds of Al Jazeera lies since the beginning of this conflict.  Yet the western media has refused to even report the Syrian government’s position lest fair coverage of the other side of this story encourage a modicum of critical thought in the public mind.

Conclusion.

The use of mercenaries, death squads and snipers by Western intelligence agencies is well documented.  No rational government attempting to stay in power would resort to unknown snipers to intimidate its opponents. Shooting at innocent protestors would be counterproductive in the face of unmitigated pressure from Western governments determined to install a client regime in Damascus. Shooting of unarmed protestors is only acceptable in dictatorships that enjoy the unconditional support of Western governments such as Bahrain, Honduras or Colombia.

A government which is so massively supported by the population of Syria would not sabotage its own survival by setting snipers against the protests of a small minority.

The opposition to the Syrian regime is, in fact, miniscule. Tear gas, mass arrests and other non lethal methods would be perfectly sufficient for a government wishing to control unarmed demonstrators.

Snipers are used to create terror, fear and anti-regime propaganda. They are an integral feature of Western sponsored regime change. If one were to make a serious criticism of the Syrian government over the past few months, it is that they have failed to implement effective anti-terrorism measures in the country. The Syrian people want troops on the streets and the roofs of public buildings. In the weeks and months ahead, the Syrian armed forces will probably rely more and more on their Russian military specialists to strengthen the country’s defenses as the Western crusade begun in Libya in March spreads to the Levant. There is no conclusive proof that the snipers murdering men, women and children in Syria are the agents of Western imperialism. But there is overwhelming proof that Western imperialism is attempting to destroy the Syrian state. As in Libya, they have never once mentioned the possibility of negotiations between the so-called opposition and the Syrian government. The West wants regime change and is determined to repeat the slaughter in Libya to achieve this geopolitical objective.

It now looks likely that the cradle of civilization and science will be overrun by semi-literate barbarians as the terminal decline of the West plays itself out in the deserts of the East.

In the overland five trips I have made to Gaza since March, 2009, I have seen the disastrous effect of the brutal Israeli land and sea blockade has had on the Palestinian people.  I have seen the terrible level of destruction that the 2008-2009 Israeli attack wrecked on Gaza, in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed in the 22 day attack, 5,000 were wounded and 50,000 were made homeless.  I was on the Gaza Freedom March in 2009 and I was a passenger on the US Boat to Gaza, the “Audacity of Hope” that was forbidden from sailing June, 2011 by the Greek government on behalf of the Israeli government.

As one of two American citizens on the Gaza “Freedom Waves,” I represented hundreds of thousands of Americans who are challenging Israeli and US policies concerning Palestine.  We are using a variety of methods to let Israeli government officials know that international citizen activists are not going to stop challenging their policies.  Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions programs, international citizens who attempt to protect Palestinians as they farm, fish and go to school, students confronting Israeli officials as they speak around the world and flotillas and waves of boats are part of the international effort. I am very proud to be a part of this movement.

Passenger on the “Tahrir”

Passengers on the Canadian Boat to Gaza, the “Tahrir,” left Turkey in good spirits Wednesday, November 2, 2011 despite having its passenger list whittled down by the Turkish Port Authorities who allowed only 12 out of 35 passengers who had travelled to Turkey to get on the boat.  The Turks cited regulations that decreed that only 12 persons could be on a boat rated as a “pleasure craft” to depart Turkey for international waters, no matter that the vessel was rated for 50+ passengers. My fellow Americans Medea Benjamin, Robert Neiman, Paki Wieland, Tighe Barry and David Schermerhorn became our ground crew in Turkey when the passenger reduction was forced on us.  On the day we left the Turkish port of Fetiyah, they rented a third boat to attempt to transfer in international waters the 23 passengers who had not been allowed onto the boats in port.

Working with our sister ship, the “Saoirse”, from Ireland, we hit the high seas full throttle headed to Gaza continuing the previous flotillas efforts to end Israel’s illegal, immoral  naval blockade of Gaza, which, in combination with Israel’s land blockade, has made the 1.6 million people of Gaza, prisoners in a tiny land that is roughly 25 miles long and five miles wide.

Our team, on the Tahrir, consisted of five journalists, including Democracy Now’s Jihan Hafiz, six international delegates and the captain.  We bonded quickly and settled in to our various chores.  Captain George delegated crew duties, journalists set up their satellites and computer stations, cooks and medics tended to physical needs and everyone vied for computer time to reach out to the world.

Canadian Boat to Gaza organizers did an excellent job stocking the boat with food, water and medical supplies plus $30,000 of medical aid to be delivered in Gaza.   The next two days were filled with blogging, filming, battling seasickness, sleeping, eating, non-violent training and preparation for probable Israeli confrontation and imprisonment.

Arriving in Danger Zone in the Daylight

Getting into international waters without the Turkish Coast Guard turning us back was our first success.  In hopes of not being boarded by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) during darkness, we slowed our speed so it would be daylight Friday morning, November 4, 2011, when we approached 100 nautical miles off Gaza’s shore and probable contact with the IDF.

Each hour brought us 10 miles closer to Gaza.  We were thankful to make it past the 70 mile mark where the Mavi Marmara was so brutally attacked in June, 2010.

Three Giant Warships Looming on the Horizon

A momentary excitement permeated the ship as the captain announced we were 50 miles offshore– until we saw the 3 giant warships looming on the horizon.

We got on the satellite phones and computers to get out our last messages.  I was on the phone with CNN and I remember them saying, “call me when something happens” and I said, “This is probably the last you’re going to hear from me as our communications will be cut….” and then they were.

17 Israeli Warships Surround and Force collision between Freedom Waves boats–Water Cannons blew out windows and almost sunk the Irish boat Saoirse

We were told by the Israeli Navy to change our course.  Organizers of both boats restated that we were sailing to “the goodness of humanity.”

Within a half an hour we were surrounded by 17 boats; gunboats, water cannon boats, zodiacs.

The IDF radioed that they wanted to inspect our boats, meanwhile two zodiacs were harassing the Saoirse by driving in circles around them, finally forcing the Irish boat to crash into the Tahrir causing damage to the Saoirse.

The Saoirse pulled away and was chased by the IDF commandos who proceeded to blow out their windows and fill the ship with water from the water cannons.  If the Saoirse’s auxiliary power had not kicked in, the boat would have sunk.

Meanwhile, the IDF blasted the Tahrir with water cannons.  Over bullhorns, IDF soldiers told us to go to the bow of the boat where they were hitting our boat with the most force with the water cannons. We tried to protect ourselves by staying behind the wheel house.

One passenger and a cameraman attempted to remain on the bow of the Tahrir but moved away as the commandoes jumped the rail.  Commandos snatched the camera and 25 masked commandos shoved their way on board screaming, “Shut Up! Sit Down,! Move! Get Up!,  Shut Up!, Move!”  over and over for the next half hour.

One Passenger Tasered by IDF

Two passengers stayed at the wheelhouse and one was tasered by the IDF commandos.  They were shoved out the wheelhouse and dragged to the benches where they were forced at gunpoint to sit.  Commandos continued to yell, “Sit! Shut up! Don’t move!”  Our male passengers were searched first with commandos pointing guns and tasers at them.  Everyone had to keep their empty hands visible at all times.

Computers, Cameras, Satellite Phones Taken

I asked if  we could go down below as it was getting dark and cold and they corralled us into the tiny galley room and “guarded” us  while other soldiers  searched our backpacks and suitcases and threw our computers, cameras,  and bags on the floor.  Computers, cameras and other electronics confiscated on the boat were never returned to us.

IDF Commandos Brainwashed into Committing Horrific, Illegal Actions

I felt sad and angry looking into the young masked eyes of the IDF soldiers who had been so successfully brainwashed into doing horrific, illegal acts for the Israeli government.  They pirated our ship, kidnapped us and tasered us and now many of them were asleep on the benches, every bit as tired as we were.

Strip Searched at Port of Ashdod

About three hours later we arrived at the Israeli port of Ashdod, where Israeli officials strip searched, demeaned and dehumanized us. However, nothing they did to us is comparable to what the Palestinians endure.

The officials in the Israeli Immigration and Deportation office processed us.  They told us that if we signed a document that stated we had entered Israel illegally, we would be deported the next day.  This was one of the many lies we were told by Israeli authorities. Another untruth that they told us was that after 72 hours we would be deported automatically.

Three Days in Israeli Prison

After processing at the port, we were separated again and taken in small groups to the Givon prison where once again we were strip searched.  Our packs pawed through by at least ten people and we were then handed a list of our possessions that they were going to keep.

Women’s Wing of the Prison

Five women including myself spent the next three days in our own wing of the prison.  We were locked in our cells, locked in the women’s section of the prison and then locked behind two more locked gates.  Still, the guards repeatedly counted us and checked to make sure we weren’t plotting an escape, as if we could dig our way out through the floors. Maybe they thought “the criminals” could break out with the flimsy toothbrushes we were given!  Again, only a small taste of what Gazans have felt for years.

No American Embassy Presence or Phone Call for Two Days

I didn’t get my phone call out, nor did we see any one from the American Embassy for two days, whereas a representative of the Irish Embassy to Israel met the Irish boat when they arrived at the Port of Ashdod.

When the American Embassy officials finally arrived at the prison, they recommended I sign the form saying I had entered Israel illegally.  I refused.

The Embassy officials did contact my family and continued to keep in touch with them during my stay in the Israeli prison.  However, the official later told me there wasn’t much the US Embassy could do since we were in Israel and Israel was calling the shots, despite the US giving $3 billion in military aid annually to Israel!

Inside the Prison

We were locked in our cells for hours on end and ended up having a sit down strike in the corridor demanding that we be allowed out of the cells more than once a day.  We were tormented all one night by an irate guard beating on our door and awakened many times a night so they could “count us.”  We were berated and treated like criminals the entire time.

Paying for My Own Deportation

Finally Monday night, November 7th, after almost 72 hours, the Israelis said I could “leave” if I paid for my own deportation air ticket.  I agreed so that I could get back to the U.S. and tell the story of the “Freedom Waves.”  I was taken to the notorious Ben Gurion Airport Detention Center with a fellow passenger, who flew out that night. I was locked up in the airport facility for another 14 hours until my flight left on Tuesday, November 8.

Israeli Defiance of International Law and Basic Human Decency

There is no surprise in Israel’s act of piracy in attacking two civilian boats in international waters trying to sail to Gaza, imprisoning the passengers, and stealing the cargo and personal possessions. This is yet another example of Israeli defiance of International Law and basic human decency.

In my interactions with the IDF commandos and the Israeli government officials at the Port of Ashdod, in the prison and at the airport, I was struck by the desensitized, robotic, inhumane behavior they displayed consistently—and, again, I only experienced a small taste of what Palestinians routinely face.

“Freedom Waves” to Freedom Riders

There’s another dangerous passage – this time over land – that’s about to set forth: On Tuesday, November 15th, Palestinian activists plan to board settler-only public buses in the West Bank and attempt to sit down and ride the bus, in the great tradition of the Freedom Riders that challenged segregation in the American South. These brave change-makers have called on the international community to stand in solidarity, and many actions are planned around the US where activists will protest Veolia, the French company that runs many of the settler buses and is the subject of an international boycott campaign.  If the Palestinian Freedom Riders are arrested and detained, it will be important for us to speak up and take action as well.

US Congress should be Investigated for giving $3 Billion in Military Aid Annually to Israel instead of Demanding that the State Department Investigate Citizen Activists

Because of this experience in trying to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, I am more resolved than ever to work to stop the US government allocation of military aid to Israel and policies supporting the Israeli government’s apartheid treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

Some Congresspersons are now going after US citizens on the Gaza flotillas!

Who is part of a terrorist organization: International activists saying Israeli and U.S policies toward the Palestinians are unjust and illegal, or the US Congress?

I think the US Congress should be held accountable for the illegal and unlawful uses of the weaponry that the U.S. has provided to Israel – including the F-16s, Apache helicopters, white phosphorous and dense inert metal explosive bombs that killed 1,400 Palestinians, wounded 5,000 and left 50,000 homeless during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09.

Instead, 13 Congresspersons want those of us who have challenged Israeli and US policies on Palestine investigated for terrorist links and have introduced House Resolution 3131 toward that end.

The legislation introduced in the United States Congress in October, 2011, by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and Congressman Gus Bilirakis (R-FL), would require the State Department to “submit a report on whether any support organization that participated in the planning or execution of the recent Gaza flotilla attempt should be designated as a foreign terrorist organization and any actions taken by the Department of State to express gratitude to the government of Greece for preventing the Gaza flotilla from setting sail in contravention of Israel’s legal blockade of Gaza, and for other purposes.”  Twelve other strong supporters of the Israel Occupation have signed onto the bill: Engel, Ros-Lehtinen, Sarbanes, Carter, Frelinghuysen, Young, Grimm, Diaz-Balart, Rothman, Roskam and Sires.  Coincidentally, these representatives, especially Ros-Lehtinen, receive big contributions of campaign funding from the right-wing Israel lobby.

Please call these Congresspersons at (202) 225-3121 and give them an earful.

In response to major military and political losses as well as new opportunity, the White House is fashioning a new doctrine of imperial conquest based on intensified aerial warfare, greater extra-territorial intervention, and, when circumstances allow, alliances with collaborators.  This includes the arming and financial backing of retrograde despotic regimes in the Gulf city-states, fundamentalists, opportunist defectors, mercenaries , academic exiles gangsters and other rabble willing to serve the empire for a price.

Whether these ‘changes’ add up to a new post-colonial “Obama doctrine” or simply reflects a series of improvisations resulting from past losses (“making a virtue of necessity” remains to be seen.

We will proceed by outlining the strategic failures which set the context for the “rethinking” of the Bush-Obama policies in mid-2011. We will then point out the ‘reality principle’ – the deep crises and rising pressures – which forced the Obama regime to modify its methods of imperial warfare.  Obama’s changes are designed to retain levers of power under conditions of limited resources and with dubious allies.  The third section will describe these changes as they have occurred; emphasizing their reactive nature – improvised – as unfavorable circumstances evolve and favorable opportunities arose.

The final section will critically evaluate Obama’s new imperial policies, their impact on targeted countries and peoples as well as the consequences for the US.

The Bush-Obama Continuum 2009-2011

Obama took his lead from the Bush administration and ran with it.  He expanded war budgets to over $750 billion; increased ground troops by 30,000 in Afghanistan; expanded expenditures on base building and mercenary troop recruitment in Iraq; multiplied US air and ground incursions in Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya.  As a result the budget deficit reached $1.6 trillion; the trade deficit reached unsustainable levels and the recession deepened.  Public support for Obama and the Democrats plummeted. Parallel to Obama’s skyrocketing external imperial expenditures, he spent hundreds of billions of dollars in dozens of internal security agencies further depleting the treasury.  Greater debts abroad and deficits at home were accompanied by the trillion dollar bailout of Wall Street while 10 million homes were foreclosed and  unemployment reached double digits.

Obama retained and expanded the Bush era wars, bailouts, millionaire tax exemptions and proposed draconian cuts in social security, federal funded medical programs and education.  Despite massive military commitments, Obama could not secure a single major military victory.  By the beginning of the third year of his regime, it was abundantly clear that amidst the wreckage of the domestic economy and the demise of key overseas collaborator regimes, the US Empire was under siege.

The Reality Principle

The reality of massive expenditures in losing wars and faltering support at home and abroad, finally penetrated even the most dogmatic and intransigent militarist ideologues in the Obama regime.  Nationalist Islamists were a “shadow” government throughout Afghanistan, inflicting increasing casualties on US-NATO forces even in the capital, Kabul.  In Iraq even the puppet regime rejected a minimum US military presence, as warring factions sharpened their knives, preparing for a post-colonial showdown between willing colonial collaborators, resistance fighters, sects, tribes, death squads, ethnic separatists and mercenaries.  Despite US military threats and Zionist designed economic sanctions, Iran gained influence throughout the region, eroding US influence in Iraq, Syria, western Afghanistan, the Gulf, Lebanon and Palestine (especially Gaza).

The fall of major US client regimes in Egypt and Tunisia (Mubarak and Ali), and mass uprisings threatening other puppets in Yemen, Somalia, Bahrain finally forced the Obama regime to acknowledge that the Israeli ‘model’ of war, occupation and colonial rule via puppet regimes was not viable.  The reality principle finally penetrated even the densest fog surrounding imperial advisers and strategists:  the US empire was in retreat, Obama-Clinton were not custodians of an expanding empire, but the masters of imperial defeats. The  empire-building project of the post-Cold War period, premised on unilateral action and military supremacy launched by Bush senior, continued by Clinton, expanded by Bush junior and multiplied by Obama was a total and unmitigated failure by any imperial standards.

Prolonged losing wars were accompanied by a vast wave of pro-democracy uprisings dumping prized imperial clients. As colonial wars depleted the imperial treasury, impoverished citizens and undermined the “will to sacrifice” for the chimera of Global Greatness.  The national mood was deeply disturbed by the cost of empire but also by the loss of global markets to new Asian competitors in China, India and elsewhere.  Nowhere was the decline of the US more evident than in Latin America where new nationalist reform and developmental regimes, secured divergent policies on key foreign policy issues, generated high growth, collaborated with new trading partners, decisively rejected several US backed coups and repudiated Geithner’s recycled free market dogma. There was nowhere in the world where the Obama regime could claim military victory, economic success or greater political influence.

As the reality of the deficits, losses and discontent entered the consciousness of key policymakers, a new imperial policy agenda took shape, not fully elaborated but improvised as circumstances dictated.

The Making of the “Obama Doctrine”

The first and foremost “recognition of reality” among the Obamites was that in a world of sovereign states, colonial land wars based on territorial armies of occupation were not viable.  They led to prolonged resistance, extended budget over-runs, continuing casualties and were definitely not “self-financing” as the Zionist geniuses in the Pentagon once claimed.  New forms of imperial warfare were needed to sustain the empire and destroy adversaries.

The hard choice facing the Obama regime with regard to Iraq was whether to admit defeat and retreat (in the sense that the US can not retain a colonial presence and will leave behind an unreliable military and political configuration expanding tieswith Iran and hostile to Israel), or to claim “victory´ in the sense of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and weakening Iraq’s role in the Middle East.  The retreat and defeat reality is now rationalized as a “repositioning” of 20,000 troops in the tiny city states run by despotic Gulf monarchies and the posting of war vessels in the Persian Gulf.  Obama-Clinton claim the troops, warships and aircraft carriers would re-enter Iraq if the current regime falls and a new nationalist movement comes to power.  This is a doubtful proposition – as any “re-entry” would return the US to a prolonged, costly war.  The main purpose of the repositioning is to protect the Gulf client dictatorships from their internal pro-democracy movements and to launch a joint US-Israeli air and sea attack on Iran.  In other words, troop retrenchment (as an occupying colonial power) is replaced by a build-up and concentration of air and sea power for attack and destruction of military and economic bases of the Iranian state.

The US retreat is a product of defeat; a departure under duress.  The relocation of troops to petrol-despot mini-states is a downsizing of the US presence and a move to prop-up highly vulnerable corrupt clan-based despots.  The shift from Iraq to the Gulf states is a move to small, safe, sanctuaries from a highly volatile conflictual major state, with a history of resistance and independence.  Since the US can no longer afford an unending large troop presence and cannot secure a ‘residual force’ its retreat to the Gulf states is making a virtue of necessity, a fall-back position to retain a launch pad for the next aerial war.

The Libyan war marks the key imperial formula for retaining Obama’s imperial pretensions.  The pretext for the war was just as phony as the cause bellicose in Iraq: in place of weapons of mass destruction, in Libya charges of genocide and rape were fabricated.   A UN resolution claiming the right to militarily intervene to “protect civilians” was cooked up, and NATO launched an 8 month war based on nearly 30,000 air attacks, to overthrow the established government and destroy the economy.  Obama’s Libyan policy was based on air and naval bombardment and Special Forces advisers; the use of a mercenary army and client ex-pats as the ‘new leaders’; a multi-lateral coalition of European empire builders (NATO) and Gulf state petrol-oligarchs.  In contrast to Iraq and Afghanistan sustained massive air attacks took the place of a large invasion army.  Already Obama’s military strategists have embraced and promulgated the Libyan experience as a new “Obama doctrine” for successfully rolling back independent Arab regimes and movements.  Despite massive propaganda efforts to puff up the role of the mercenary ‘rebels’, the fact is that Gaddafi loyalists were only defeated by the combined air power of the NATO military command.

Obama-Clinton’s celebration of the Libyan victory is premature:  the means to victory involved the thorough destruction of the economy, from ports to irrigation systems, to roads and hospitals; the disarticulation of the labor force, with the forced flight of hundreds of thousands of sub-Sahara African workers and North African professionals.  In other words, it was a “pyrrhic victory”. Washington defeated an adversary it has not won a viable state.

Even more serious, Washington’s client mercenary ground forces include an amalgam of fundamentalist, tribal, gangster, opportunist clan and neo-liberal operators who have few interests in common. And all are armed and ready to carve up competing fiefdoms.  The parallel is with Afghanistan where the US armed and financed drug traffickers, clan chiefs, war lords and fundamentalists to fight the secular pro-Soviet regime.  Subsequent to destroying the regime, the same forces turned against the US and proceeded to spread a kind of pan-Islamic mobilization against pro-US client states and the US military presence throughout South-Central Asia, the Gulf states, the Middle East and North Africa.

Obama’s Libyan formula of using disparate mercenaries to achieve short term military success has boomeranged. Islamic fundamentalist militias and contrabandists are sending tons of ground to air missiles, machine guns and automatic rifles seized from Gaddafi’s arms depots to Egypt, Syria, Somalia, Sudan and all points east, west, south and north.

In a word, the volatile social and military conflicts among the collaborator “rulers” in Libya has all the markings of a failed regime. Neither NATO bases nor oil companies can pretend to establish firm bases of operation and exploitation.

The resort to missile warfare, especially the drone attacks on insurgents challenging US client regimes which figure so prominently in the “Obama doctrine” have succeeded in killing a few local commanders, but at a cost of alienating entire clans, villagers, townspeople and the general public in targeted countries.  Drones’ missiles are killing hundreds of civilians, causing relatives and ethnic kinspeople to join resistance groups. Up to the present, after three years of intensified “missile air warfare” the Obama regime has not secured a single major triumph over any of the targeted insurgencies.  The data available demonstrates the opposite.  In Pakistan not only has the entire northwest tribal areas embraced the Islamic resistance but the vast majority of Pakistanis (80%) resent US drone violations of national sovereignty, forcing even otherwise docile officials to call into question their military ties with Washington.  In Somalia and Yemen, drone and Special Forces’ operations have had no impact in weakening the mass opposition to incumbent client regimes.  Obama’s long distance, high tech warfare has been an ineffective substitute for failed large scale land wars.

The third dimension of the Obama doctrine, the heavy reliance on “third party” military intervention and/or multi-lateral armed interventions, was not successful in Afghanistan and Iraq and was of limited effectiveness in Libya.  The  European multi-lateral forces retired early on in Iraq, unwilling to continue to spend on a war with no end and with virtual no support on the home front.  The same process of short-term low level military multi-lateralism took place in Afghanistan. Most NATO soldiers will be out before the US withdraws.  The Libyan experience with “multi-lateral” air force collaboration in defeating Libya’s armed forces destroyed the country, undermining any post-war reconstruction for decades.  Moreover, “aerial multi-lateralism” followed the formula of “easy entry and fast exit” – leaving the mercenary predators in control on the ground with a documented record of excelling in rape, pillage, torture and summary executions.  Only a brainless and morally depraved Hilary Clinton could sing the praises and dance a jig celebrating the victory of a knife wielding sodomist, torturing a captured President as “a victory for democracy”.

The fourth dimension of the “Obama doctrine” the use of foreign mercenary armies has been tried and failed in a number of cases where incumbent client rulers are under siege from resistance forces.  The US financed the Ethiopian dictatorship’s armed invasion of Somalia to prop up a corrupt, isolated regime holed up in the capital.  After a prolonged futile effort to reverse the tide, the Ethiopian mercenary forces  performed no better. They were followed by the entry of the US-backed Kenyan armed forces which has only led to massacres and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalian refugees in Northern Kenya and Southern Somalia and deadly ambushes by the Islamic national resistance. These third party mercenary invasions have totally failed to secure the puppet regime; in fact, they have aroused greater nationalist opposition.

US backed “Third Party” mercenary armed interventions in Bahrain, where Saudi Arabian military forces put down a majoritarian uprising, has temporarily propped up the despotic monarchy but without dealing with the underlying demands of the pro-democracy mass movements.

The fifth dimension of the Obama doctrine is to use highly trained heavily armed “Special Forces” (SF) contingents of 500 more to assassinate insurgent leaders, to terrorize their rural supporters and to “give backbone” to the local military officials.  Obama’s dispatch of a brigade of SF to Uganda is a case in point.  Up to now there is no reports of any decisive victories, even in this tiny country.  The prospects for future use of this imperial tactic is probably limited to locales of limited geo-political and economic significance with weak resistance movements, and only as a “complement” to local standing armies.

The final and probably most important element in the Obama doctrine is the promotion of civil-military mass uprisings and the reshuffle of elite figures to ‘co-opt’ popular pro-democracy movements in order  to derail them from ending their countries’ client relationship to Washington.

Washington and the EU have incited and armed sectarian regional mass and armed movements aimed at overthrowing the authoritarian nationalist Assad regime in Syria.  Playing off of legitimate democratic demands and harnessing fundamentalist hostility to a secular state, the US and EU, with the collaboration of Turkey and the Gulf states, have engaged in a triple policy of external sanctions, mass uprisings and armed resistance against the secular civilian majority and nationalist armed forces backing Basher Assad.  Obama policy relies heavily on mass media propaganda and the exploitation of regional grievances to gain leverage for an eventual “regime change”.

Parallel to the “outsider” political strategy in Syria, the Obama doctrine has adopted an insider strategy in Egypt and Tunisia. Faced with a nationalist-pro-democracy-pro-workers social upheavals in Egypt, Washington financed and backed a military takeover and rule by an autocratic military junta which follows the basic foreign and domestic policies sustaining the economic structures under the Mubarak dictatorship.  While cynically evoking the “spirit” of the Arab spring, Obama and Clinton, have backed the military tribunals which prosecute, torture and jail thousands of pro-democracy activists.  A similar process of “internal subversion” financed by the EU has put in place a coalition of “Islamic free marketers” and pro-NATO politicos who have more in common with the White House then they have with the original pro-democracy mass movements.

In the immediate period the Obama doctrines’ use of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ civilian-military subversion has succeeded in derailing the promising anti-imperial movements that erupted in the early months of 2011.  However, the great gulf that has opened between the recycled new client rulers and the pro-democracy movements has already led to calls for a ‘second round’ of uprisings to oust the opportunists “who have stolen the revolt” and betrayed the democratic principles of those who sacrificed to oust the client dictators.  All the conditions which underlay the “Arab spring” are in place or have been exacerbated: unemployment, police repression, crony capitalism, inequalities and corruption.  The experience of successful rebellion is still fresh and alive among the increasingly disenchanted youth.  Like all of the new Obama imperial policies, the propping up of co-opted officials does not promise a reconsolidation of empire.

Conclusion:  The “Obama Doctrine”

Reactive, improvised policies, with no overarching strategic framework, the so-called “Obama doctrine” shows few signs of reversing the decline of the US Empire.  The deterioration of US “forward positions” in the Arab heartland is not linear nor without tactical advances, especially in light of the Obama regimes’ co-optation of several Islamic leaders in Libya, Syria and Tunisia and the recycling of Mubarak era generals in Egypt.

Under cover of political euphemisms the Obama regime understates the scale and significance of its political and diplomatic losses: the forced withdrawal from Iraq is presented as a “successful mission in regime change”, notwithstanding the burgeoning civil and regime violence between rival sectarian and secular factions.  The US “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, is, in reality, a military retreat as the Taliban and related forces form a shadow government throughout the country and the huge mercenary army funded by billions of Pentagon dollars is infiltrated by Islamic Nationalist militants.

The “drone attacks” presented as a successful new counter-terror weapon crossing frontiers is hyped as an effective cost-effective alternative to large scale ground invasions subject to prolonged armed resistance.  In fact, the “drones” and killings mainly provide sensational propaganda and public relations successes – having little impact revising the larger defeatist political reality.

On the diplomatic front US imperial decline is even more dramatic. The UN General Assembly votes against the US on Cuba, and the UNESCO vote on the admission of Palestine are overwhelmingly hostile to the Obama regime.  Totally isolated, Washington’s “retaliatory” posture of cutting off financial resources further reduces US institutional leverage.

As Obama submits to greater subservience to Israel’s political arm in the US, the 52 “Presidents of the Major American Jewish Organizations”, and prepares a joint military attack on Iran, even NATO refuses to follow suit.

The great danger of the “Obama doctrine” is that it looks at short term ‘local’ consequences. Air and sea power can successfully bomb Iranian nuclear and military facilities, please the head of the Israeli ruling junta and guarantee American Zionist financial backing for Obama’s re-election campaign.  What is overlooked is the military capacity of Iran to close the world’s most important waterway (the Strait of Hormuz) shipping oil to Europe, Asia and the US.

Obama’s air war successes in Iran would be overwhelmed by Iranian ground and missile attacks of US forces throughout the Gulf.  All US petrol allies in the region would be vulnerable to attack.  Long range Iranian missiles would send millions of Israeli’s scurrying for bomb shelters, even before Obama’s Zionist advisers uncork their champagne to celebrate their “air victory” over Teheran.

The ‘Obama doctrine’ of extra territorial air wars with impunity turned against Iran would provoke a catastrophic conflagration, which would far surpass the disastrous outcome of the land wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The “Obama doctrine” is, in reality, a set of improvised policies designed to deal with specific sets of circumstances based on a common overall problem:  how to retain imperial domination in the face of failed colonial-occupation policies.  The tactical success in the air war against Libya and the opportunities opened by a Muslim led uprising in Syria has given rise to the need to formulate a new overall strategy.  Local collaborators are central, especially those with an institutional power base (Egyptian military) or with levers of regional influence in civil society (Islamic movements in Syria).

The attempt to generalize these ‘tactical’ gains into a general offensive strategy, however, flounder on the fallacy of “misplaced concreteness”.  Iran is not Libya:  it has the military power, geographic proximity and economic resources to demolish the weak and vulnerable ‘peripheral’ US client states.  Israel can start a US war against the Islamic world – but it cannot win it. Netanyahu’s losses in the UN cannot be explained away as 193 “anti-semitic” countries.  The Zionist-US-Israeli troika are mutually masturbating in a closet.  They can rant and rave and even precipitate an apocalyptic war, but Obama and Netanyahu are increasingly on the margin of world changes. Their policies are impotent reactions to popular movements envisioning historical transformations, which have even began to enter into the center of empires: Wall Street and Tel Aviv. Ultimately the “Obama doctrine” is doomed to failure as it is incapable of recognizing that the problem of decline is not simply a problem of ‘tactics’ but a basic systemic breakdown of empire building: the cracks and fissures abroad have ignited revolts at home.

1. Thomas Shanker and Steven Lee Myers “US Planning Troop Buildup in Gulf After Exit from Iraq”, New York Times, October 29, 2011.

There was an act of aggression and the national leaders, including Gaddafi, were killed. He was not killed on a battlefield. NATO security services helped abduct the national leader. He was tortured and shot and treated worse than the Nazi did in their time. Libya was destroyed as a sovereign state.

The Belarusian president went on to denounce the role of the UN in tolerating what he described as NATO’s vandalism in Libya:

We can view the situation extremely negatively only. How can we evaluate NATO actions in Libya? As a violation of the mandate of the UN Security Council. I am not exaggerating this mindless and mad Security Council. I am not exaggerating their role and the role of the United Nations Organizations. The latter has evolved into some kind of cover-up. See or yourself: Iraq, Afghanistan, an entire Arabic curve. Why has UN failed to prevent all of it?

President Lukashenko, whose government has long been on the list of US regime change targets, also told reporters that preparations were underway to strengthen the country’s defense, through the creation of new territorial military units drawn from the civilian population.

We have created the territorial units. This is cheaper than having a professional army, and we will be training our people. In a year they will make perfect troops.They are ordinary people who have civil professions and jobs. These troops are deployed only in wartime. In peacetime, they train.

They must protect their own property, in addition to the family and land. These people are very well-trained, among them there are a lot of military people.

The Belarusian government has announced the creation of a new citizen army of up to 120 thousand people. President Lukashenko told reporters in Grodno: “If we ever have to be at war, we are men, we have to protect our homes, families, our land. It is our duty.”

This is the first time since the Second World War that the people of Belarus have experienced a threat to their security and the threat is coming once again from the West.

Belarus is perhaps more qualified than any other country to make allusions to Nazism. The worst atrocities of the Second World War were carried out in Belarus by the German Wehrmacht. In fact, the resistance of the Belarusian people against their Nazi hoards was so heroic, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR voted in favour of a proposal to include the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic as a separate seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations after the Second World War.

The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic became the showpiece of the USSR, becoming the strongest and most prosperous of all the socialist republics in the Soviet Union.

The country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko, has been described by some as a typical ‘Homo sovieticus.’ A former state farm director, Lukashenko was the only member of the BBSR to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lukashenko came to power in 1994 after gaining the people’s trust through his performance at the head of a national anti-corruption committee.

The past 16 years of Lukashenko’s presidency have seen steady economic growth, rising wages and full employment. The socially-oriented economy of Belarus maintains close links with other countries resisting the dictates of the New World Order such as Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and, until recently, Libya.

Belarus has one of the lowest rates of inequality in the world, spends up to 6 percent of GDP on education and scientific research. Education and health care are free.

Needless to say, Lukashenko’s determination to serve the interests of his own people over the interests of Western finance capitalists has resulted in a sustained and unrelenting campaign of lies, calumny and defamation from the global corporate media empires.

The United States, Belarus and “human rights”

Lukashenko’s popularity in Belarus has long been the target of a heavily funded opposition from within the country, composed of so-called ‘civil society’ activists and ‘journalists’ funded by the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States, an organisation which works closely with the CIA to overthrow foreign governments who are not subservient to US interests.

The United States and the European Union have spent millions of tax-payer’s money on installing a subservient leader in Minsk compliant with their economic interests in the country. As a European official was once reported to have said, “Belarus is the one country left where there is still something to grab.”

After the Al Qaeda attacks in New York 2001, the meaning of those events quickly became apparent to the government of Belarus. At a conference entitled ‘Axis of Evil: Belarus-the missing link’ November 2002 Senator John McCain, referring to Belarusian trade agreements with Iraq, declared: “Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus cannot long survive in a world where the United States and Russia enjoy a strategic partnership and the United States is serious about its commitment to end outlaw regimes whose conduct threatens us.” McCain went on to say, “September 11th opened our eyes to the status of Belarus as a national security threat.”

In 2004 the United States passed the Belarus Democracy Act which mandated direct US interference in the internal affairs of Belarus in order to promote ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. This imperialist legislation was followed by a resolution presented to the UN condemning Belarus for ‘human rights’ violations.

However, the Belarusian government responded promptly through the United Nations. In the 59th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Belarusian permanent representative to the UN Andre Dapkiunas presented a resolution entitled: ‘Situation of Democracy and Human Rights in the United States of America.’ The Belarusian draft resolution condemned the fraudulent US elections of 2000, the fact that residents of Washington cannot elect representatives to the US congress, the death penalty for juveniles and the mentally ill, unlawful detention of terrorism suspects and widespread torture.

This resolution by Belarus was particularly embarrassing for the US government as it forced the world’s leaders to face up to US hypocrisy concerning crimes against humanity. The United States passed legislation one year later, finally putting an end to the death penalty for teenagers under 18. The other human rights violations documented in the Belarusian UN draft resolution continue to be committed by the United States.¹

The Great Conspiracy against the Republic of Belarus

On December 19th 2010, youth groups trained and funded by the US, Germany and Poland attempted to enter parliament buildings in Minsk, after Western backed candidates failed to make any significant impact among Belarusian voters.

In January 2011 the Belarusian state security agency( KGB), released documents seized from the protestors, which revealed the extent wholescale interference by German and Polish intelligence officials in the internal affairs of Belarus. The report ‘Background of a Conspiracy’ published in the Minsk Times, proved that many of the youths used by Western intelligence in the riots had been trained in far-right training camps in the Ukraine.

Others youths had been brought across the border from Russia. The declassified documents showed how Western intelligence agents, working through various NGOS, smuggled money in suitcases across the Belarus border to opposition activists.

Western intelligence agencies had two strategic plans to overthrow the Belarusian government.

1) Get as many as 100,000 people out on to the streets of Minsk in a mass rally and storm the parliament.
2) If they failed to get the desired numbers to join the rally, the parliament buildings would be attacked with iron bars in order to provoke the police. The media would then blame the police for the ‘violent crackdown’ and the EU would be given an excuse to condemn the ‘rigged elections’ and impose sanctions.

The report points out that the international press reporters at the December riots did not make any attempt to cover the elections. They simply arrived to join the pre-planned rally in October Square.

The Western backed putschists were to give their backing to the poet Vladimir Nekliaev. The declassified KGB documents reveals the reasons behind the West’s endorsement of Nekliaev:

V.Nekliaev is a representative of the so-called intelligensia. He possesses a certain charisma, has not been participating in the domestic political affairs for a long time. The public does not associate him with the image of a radical opposition member, he is better known as a poet.

His weaknesses can also be of use to us. In his past he was virtually an alcoholic (the illness of many artists). Our experts conclude that it creates conditions for forming a super idea in him of being superior, of being destined for a higher mission. We also possess essential incriminatory evidence against him, which enables us to give him additional stimulation at any stage of the project.

We believe it expedient to use the proposed candidature as the major one to represent the campaign. The earlier proposed candidate can be promoted along as a backup plan.

This document gives us a unique insight into the operational methodologies of Western intelligence agencies. Nekliaev was to become a Belarusian Vaclav Havel or Boris Yeltsin. His weaknesses as a leader would be useful to the West as it would be far easier to control him. Nekliaev was to be the Belararusian version of Mahmoud Jabril, a weak and feckless puppet of Western interests.

Nekliaev’s Western puppet masters also had ‘incriminatory evidence’ against him, which would enable them to blackmail him should he decide to favour the interests of his country over those of Western capital.

The declassified documents also reveal a sophisticated campaign of defamation and lies against the president of Belarus. Rumours and outrageous lies were to be spread and leaked to the Western press. Lies concerning the health of the president, lies about his private life, lies about foreign bank accounts, lies about the imminent resignation of the president, etc.

The section concerning the rumour campaign against the Belarusian president makes for interesting reading and is worth reproducing in full as it reveals the highly co-ordinated activities of Western intelligence-funded colour revolutionaries:

One of the components of the support campaign for the candidate of national confidence should be deliberate production of stimuli for the dissemination of rumours. Rumours are to be regarded as information passed on by means of informal communication and having a virus-like dissemination pattern. The ideal platform for such campaign is the Internet, especially various social networks, blogs, Twitter (Internet social network).

A well-run rumour campaign forces the authorities to continually look for excuses, which helps create the so-called presumption of guilt and evokes greater mistrust towards the government in the general public.

One of the basic rumours to be supported throughout the campaign should be the rumour of Lukashenko’s possible resignation. Its purpose to assure the general public and the elite of the very possibility of such resignation.

Suggested rumour cycles:

The personality of Lukashenko and his family, the rumors about the president undermine his personal position and destroy the image of a strong, brave and resolute man.

Here are the main directions and goals of the “background campaign”:

- The poor health of Lukashenko and members of his family.
- Lukashenko gets treatment abroad and spends a lot of money on it.
- Lukashenko’s money is deposited in foreign banks. This fact should be emphasised, and sums should be constantly increased.
Economy. Rumors of economic problems must countervail the information that the country has been barely affected by the crisis.

The following rumors are also effective:

- Every day brings more and more unemployed, new unemployed people are expected.
- The country is being sold out on the cheap, clandestine privatization of enterprises is going on at full speed. Officials sell state property to the Arabs and the Chinese for bribes.
- The government has not fulfilled the IMF requirements, and credits should be repaid ahead of schedule.
The safety of large public projects is questioned.
- The nuclear power plant to be constructed will use a Chinese reactor that can be prone to explosion.
- The nuclear reactor at the nuclear power plant is, in fact, future missiles, and a platform for nuclear blackmail …

The rumour mongering about Libya perpetrated by the corporate media shows striking similiarities to colour revolution methodologies used against Belarus. After the outbreak of violence in Bengazi, we were told by the mass media that Gadhafi had left Libya for Venezuela. To quote again from the document seized from the Belarusian opposition.

One of the basic rumours to be supported throughout the campaign should be the rumour of Lukashenko’s possible resignation. Its purpose to assure the general public and the elite of the very possibility of such resignation.

The false reports of Gaddafi’s resignation in Libya were intended to encourage the uprising by making the protestors believe that they had already won the battle for power. These lies were soon followed by reports that Gadhafi had given orders to bomb protestors. However, the Russian military, who were monitoring Libya from space, subsequently confirmed that no bombing of civilians took place.

In the lead up to the Libyan war the Associated press spread more rumours and lies about Belarus.

Hugh Griffiths of the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute has claimed, “An Ilyushin Il-76 (plane) flew to Libya on February 15 from Baranovichi, a huge former Soviet weapon storage (area) now controlled by the Belarus government.”

The accusations were vehemently denied by the Belarusian government. Speaking to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency. Belarusian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Savinykh told reporters:

It has been established that the UN official [Jose del Prado] told the American journalist that he had no information and therefore could not confirm the presence of any Belarusian mercenaries in Libya. The fact can be deemed proof that The Associated Press is a hired propaganda outlet and tool.

Savinykh politely noted the propensity of Western journalists to “effortlessly step over the conventional democratic standards when it is convenient to them and in line with the interests of their sponsors.”

Given the fact that Belarus is a target of US-sponsored regime change, one can only suspect that the media rumours were intended to serve as a warning to Minsk of what it will face if it refuses to bow down before the empire.

Libya, Belarus and the mindless and mad Security Council

In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 2009 Muammar Al Gadhafi pointed out that the Security Council of the United Nations is in violation of article 2 of the United Nations Charter. Article 2 of the UN charter states that all states are equal, yet how can that be the case when a hand full of the world’s powers can decide the fate of all the other nations through the UN Security Council?

Gaddafi went on to claim that the Security Council should only be empowered to implement decisions taken by the General Assembly.

Colonel Gaddafi also criticised the Iraq war, which was in flagrant violation of the UN charter. The Libyan leader reminded all present that the United Nations was supposed “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” yet there have been over 65 wars since the UN’s inception in 1945s, wars waged by the few member states of the Security Council.

Furthermore, Colonel Gaddafi pointed out that the UN charter stipulates that all members of the United Nations are obligated to come to the aid of any state that finds itself under attack.

The leaders of British and the United States left the UN chamber before Gaddafi’s speech.

Today, Libya lies in ruins. What was once a peaceful and prosperous country, the only economic, social and political success story in Africa, has been bombed into the stone age, thanks to NATO and , in particular, the phony leftists who supported the racist and fascist hoards from Benghazi as they slaughtered every man, woman and child in their midst.

Belarus knows that the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation and the whores of the military industrial media complex will do their utmost to inflict the same punishment on their beloved country. A founding member of the United Nations, Belarus is keenly aware of the danger posed to humanity by the corruption of the United Nations organizations by Euro-Atlantic war-mongering criminals.

Former SS Oberstgrupperfuhrer Paul Hauser once revealed that the foreign units of the Nazi SS were the precursors of NATO.² NATO’s Bliztkrieg on Libya has certainly proved him right. Now a peaceful, prosperous and highly civilized nation in the East of Europe prepares to defend itself against whatever terrorism NATO has in store for it. A nation to whom we all owe a debt for its heroic defeat of Nazism during World War Two now faces its contemporary heirs. As in the past, the defense of Belarus will be the ultimate defense of all free citizens of the world.

1. Parker, Stewart (2007) The Last Soviet Republic, Trafford Publishing, p 141.
2. Barker, A.J (1982) Waffen SS at War Ian Allen Ltd, 24-25.

Speaking at the Security Innovation Network (SINET) “Showcase 2011″ shindig at the National Press Club in Washington, Alexander told security grifters eager to gouge taxpayers for another piece of lucrative “cybersecurity” pie: “What I’m concerned about are the destructive attacks. Those are the things yet to come that cause us a lot of concern.”

That’s rather rich coming from the head of a secretive Pentagon satrapy suspected of designing and launching the destructive Stuxnet virus which targeted Iran’s civilian nuclear program.

According to fresh evidence provided by IT security experts it now appears that the same constellation of shadowy forces which unleashed Stuxnet are at it again with the newly discovered Duqu spy Trojan.

In a follow-up analysis, Kaspersky Lab researcher Alex Gostev wrote that “the highest number of Duqu incidents have been recorded in Iran. This fact brings us back to the Stuxnet story and raises a number of issues.”

Not least of which is the continuing demonization of the Islamic Republic by an unholy alliance of U.S. militarists, their Israeli pit bulls and congressional shills hyping the “Iran threat.”

War Drums Beating

With the United States and the other capitalist powers incapable of digging the world economy out from under the slow-motion meltdown sparked by 2008′s market collapse, and with tens of millions of enraged citizens rejecting austerity measures that will further enrich financial elites at their expense, will the Obama administration “go for broke” and set-off a new conflagration in the Middle East?

Ratcheting up bellicose rhetoric, John Keane, a retired four-star general, former Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army now currently perched on the board of General Dynamics, a major purveyor of cyber attack tools for the government, told the House Homeland Security Committee October 26, “We’ve got to put our hand around their throat now. Why don’t we kill them? We kill other people who are running terrorist operations against the United States.”

AFP reported that “Iran made a formal protest” over Keane’s remarks which urged “the targeted assassination of members of its elite Quds Force military special operations unit,” over a fairy-tale plot allegedly cooked-up by Tehran, which employed a failed used-car salesman, a DEA snitch and members of the Zetas drug gang in a scheme to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

While the plot lines are as preposterous as allegations prior to the 2003 Iraq invasion that Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the 9/11 attacks, one cannot so easily dismiss the propaganda value of such reports by administration “information warriors.” The same can be said of the series of controlled leaks emanating from London, Tel Aviv and Washington urging immediate air strikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

The Guardian reported that “Britain’s armed forces are stepping up their contingency planning for potential military action against Iran amid mounting concern about Tehran’s nuclear enrichment programme.”

Chillingly, the “Ministry of Defence believes the US may decide to fast-forward plans for targeted missile strikes at some key Iranian facilities. British officials say that if Washington presses ahead it will seek, and receive, UK military help for any mission, despite some deep reservations within the coalition government.”

On the same day that MoD’s sanctioned leak appeared in the British press, Haaretz disclosed that “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak are trying to muster a majority in the cabinet in favor of military action against Iran, a senior Israeli official has said. According to the official, there is a ‘small advantage’ in the cabinet for the opponents of such an attack.”

“Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Ya’alon said he preferred an American military attack on Iran to an Israeli one. ‘A military move is the last resort,’ he said.”

The Associated Press reported that as Netanyahu moved to persuade his cabinet to “authorize a military strike against Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program,” Israel successfully test-fired “a missile believed capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to Iran.”

Adding to the disinformational witch’s brew, The Washington Post reported that “a new spike in anti-Iran rhetoric and military threats by Western powers is being fueled by fears that Iran is edging closer to the nuclear ‘breakout’ point, when it acquires all the skills and parts needed to quickly build an atomic bomb if it chooses to,” anonymous “Western diplomats and nuclear experts said Friday.”

Post stenographer Joby Warrick informed us that a “Western diplomat who had seen drafts of the report” told him “it will elaborate on secret intelligence collected since 2004 showing Iranian scientists struggling to overcome technical hurdles in designing and building nuclear warheads.”

And late last week Reuters disclosed that “a senior U.S. military official said on Friday Iran had become the biggest threat to the United States and Israel’s president said the military option to stop the Islamic republic from obtaining nuclear weapons was nearer.”

“‘The biggest threat to the United States and to our interests and to our friends … has come into focus and it’s Iran,’ said the U.S. military official, addressing a forum in Washington.” Conveniently, “reporters were allowed to cover the event on condition the official not be identified.”

While some critics argue that Israel does not presently have the capacity to launch such an attack, and that “the volume of the war hysteria is being turned up with one purpose in mind: the Israelis want the US to do their dirty work for them,” such reasoning is hardly reassuring.

Indeed, as the World Socialist Web Site points out, “the Israeli government has already made advanced preparations for an attack on Iran.”

“On the military front,” analyst Peter Symonds warned that “Israeli warplanes last week conducted a long-range exercise–of the type required to reach Iran–using a NATO airbase on the Italian island of Sardinia.” In other words, the IDF drill was not a “rogue” exercise unilaterally conducted by Israel, but further evidence of Washington’s “desperate bid to offset its economic decline by securing its hegemony over the energy-rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia.”

In the context of escalating tensions over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, seeded by manufactured “terror” plots, the imperialist powers may choose the “cyber” route prior to launching devastating missile and bomber strikes against Iranian military installations and civilian infrastructure.

Pentagon planners now believe that attack tools have reached the point where blinding Iran’s air defenses while sowing chaos across population centers with power outages and the shutdown of financial services may now be a viable option.

This is not idle speculation. During the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, the National Journal disclosed that Central Command “considered a computerized attack to disable the networks that controlled Iraq’s banking system, but they backed off when they realized that those networks were global and connected to banks in France.”

Facing growing opposition at home and abroad to endless wars and imperial adventures, would the Obama administration have such qualms today?

Attack Tools Already in Play

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, when the Duqu virus was discovered last month, analysts at Symantec believed that the remote access Trojan (RAT) “is essentially the precursor to a future Stuxnet-like attack.”

“The threat was written by the same authors (or those who have access to the Stuxnet source code) and appears to have been created since the last Stuxnet file was recovered,” researchers averred.

Since their initial reporting, Symantec, drawing on research from CrySyS lab at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary, the organization which discovered the malware, reported they located an installer file in the form of a Microsoft Word document which exploits a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability.

Like Stuxnet, Duqu’s stealthiness is directly proportional to its uncanny ability to capitalize on what are called zero-day exploits hardwired into it’s digital DNA; security holes that are unknown to everyone until the instant they’re used in an attack.

Similar to other dubious commodities traded on our dystopian “free markets,” zero-days are bits of tainted code sought by criminal hackers, financial and industrial spies and enterprising security agencies that can sell for up to $250,000 a pop on the black market.

When Stuxnet appeared in dozens of countries last year, targeting what are called programmable logic controllers (PLCs) on industrial computers manufactured by Siemens that control everything from water purification and food processing to oil refining and potentially deadly chemical processes, researchers found it was designed to harm only one specific target: PLCs processing uranium fuel at a nuclear facility in Iran.

As Wired Magazine reported, when Symantec analysts who had been picking Stuxnet apart convinced internet service providers who controlled “servers in Malaysia and Denmark” where the virus “phoned home” each time it infected a new machine, to reroute the virus to a secure “sinkhole,” they were in for a shock.

“Out of the initial 38,000 infections,” journalist Kim Zetter wrote, “about 22,000 were in Iran. Indonesia was a distant second, with about 6,700 infections, followed by India with about 3,700 infections. The United States had fewer than 400. Only a small number of machines had Siemens Step 7 software installed–just 217 machines reporting in from Iran and 16 in the United States.”

“The sophistication of the code,” Wired averred, “plus the fraudulent certificates, and now Iran at the center of the fallout made it look like Stuxnet could be the work of a government cyberarmy–maybe even a United States cyberarmy.

“This made Symantec’s sinkhole an audacious move,” Zetter wrote. “In intercepting data the attackers were expecting to receive, the researchers risked tampering with a covert U.S. government operation.”

Writing in the Journal of Strategic Studies, Thomas Rid, a former RAND Corporation employee and “Reader in War Studies at Kings College in London,” who has close ties to the Western military establishment, observed in relation to Stuxnet that network “sabotage, first, is a deliberate attempt to weaken or destroy an economic or military system. All sabotage is predominantly technical in nature, but of course may use social enablers.”

“The resources and investment that went into Stuxnet could only be mustered by a ‘cyber superpower’, argued Ralph Langner, a German control system security consultant who first extracted and decompiled the attack code.”

In an interview with National Public Radio, Langer said that the “level of expertise” behind Stuxnet “seemed almost alien. But that would be science fiction, and Stuxnet was a reality.”

“Thinking about it for another minute, if it’s not aliens, it’s got to be the United States.”

“For the time being it remains unclear how successful the Stuxnet attack against Iran’s nuclear program actually was” Rid noted. “But it is clear that the operation has taken computer sabotage to an entirely new level.”

Researcher Vikram Thakur, commenting on the latest Duqu discoveries reported: “The Word document was crafted in such a way as to definitively target the intended receiving organization.” And whom, pray tell, was being targeted by Duqu? Why Iran, of course.

“Once Duqu is able to get a foothold in an organization through the zero-day exploit, the attackers can command it to spread to other computers.”

Thakur wrote, “the Duqu configuration files on these computers,” which did not have the ability to connect to the internet and the author’s command and control (C&C) server, “were instead configured not to communicate directly with the C&C server, but to use a file-sharing C&C protocol with another compromised computer that had the ability to connect to the C&C server.”

“Consequently,” Thakur concluded, “Duqu creates a bridge between the network’s internal servers and the C&C server. This allowed the attackers to access Duqu infections in secure zones with the help of computers outside the secure zone being used as proxies.”

As Kaspersky Lab researchers pointed out, “in each of the four instances of Duqu infection a unique modification of the driver necessary for infection was used.”

“More importantly,” analysts averred, “regarding one of the Iranian infections there were also found to have been two network attack attempts exploiting the MS08-067 [MS Word] vulnerability. This vulnerability was used by Stuxnet too.”

“If there had been just one such attempt, it could have been written off as typical Kido activity–but there were two consecutive attack attempts: this detail would suggest a targeted attack on an object in Iran.” (emphasis added)

Simply put, before the Pentagon decides to “kill them” as Gen. Keane indelicately put it, battlefield preparations via directed cyber attacks and other forms of sabotage may be part of a preemptive strategy to decapitate Iranian defenses prior to more “kinetic” attacks.

‘Boutique Arms Dealers’

Despite media hype about future cuts in the so-called “defense” budget, Defense Industry Daily disclosed that “the US military has announced plans to spend billions on technology to secure its networks.”

According to the Defense Department’s FY 2012 budget proposal, “the Pentagon said it plans to spend $2.3 billion on cybersecurity capabilities.”

However, when NextGov “questioned why the Air Force’s $4.6 billion 2012 budget request for cybersecurity was $2.3 billion more than Defense’s servicewide spending proposal, Pentagon officials upped their total figure from $2.3 billion to $3.2 billion.”

Why the discrepancy? A “Pentagon spokesperson explained that the service’s estimate differed dramatically because the Air Force included ‘things’ that are not typically considered information assurance or cybersecurity.”

What kind of “things” are we talking about here?

As BusinessWeek reported in July, firms such as Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics, “the stalwarts of the traditional defense industry,” are “helping the U.S. government develop a capacity to snoop on or disable other countries’ computer networks.”

Capitalizing on the Defense Department’s desire to develop “hacker tools specifically as a means of conducting warfare,” this “shift in defense policy gave rise to a flood of boutique arms dealers that trade in offensive cyber weapons.”

Investigative journalists Mike Riley and Ashlee Vance averred that “most of these are ‘black’ companies that camouflage their government funding and work on classified projects.”

As last winter’s hack of HBGary Federal by Anonymous revealed, “black” firms, including those like Palantir which received millions of dollars in start-up funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, hacker tools, such as sophisticated Trojans and stealthy rootkits, believed to be the route used to introduce the Stuxnet virus, have also been used to target political activists and journalists in the United States at the behest of financial institutions such as the Bank of America and the right-wing U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

As researcher Barrett Brown revealed, “Team Themis was a consortium made up of HBGary, Palantir, and Berico (with Endgame Systems serving as a ‘silent partner’ and providing assistance from the sidelines) that was set up in order to provide offensive intelligence capabilities to private clients.”

Although Endgame Systems “went dark” after Anonymous released thousands of HBGary files, The Register disclosed that the firm “helps US intelligence identify and hack into vulnerable networks, and is targeting a similar role in Britain’s nascent national cyber security operations.”

The Register noted that the “limited publicly information currently available on the firm hints at its further role assisting clandestine government cyber operations by identifying targets and developing exploits.”

As BusinessWeek revealed, the firm is “a major supplier of digital weaponry for the Pentagon. It offers a smorgasbord of wares, from vulnerability assessments to customized attack technology, for a dizzying array of targets in any region of the world.”

Unsurprisingly, this was a major draw for venture capital firms “Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers,” who collectively fronted Endgame some $30 million. According to Riley and Vance, “what really whet the VCs’ appetites, though, according to people close to the investors, is Endgame’s shot at becoming the premier cyber-arms dealer.”

While a client list has yet to emerge, it’s safe to assume that secret state agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are lining up to purchase Endgame’s toxic products.

Although no definitive answer has emerged as to whom might targeting Iran with Duqu, as BusinessWeek revealed Endgame “deals in zero-day exploits. Some of Endgame’s technology is developed in-house; some of it is acquired from the hacker underground. Either way, these zero days are militarized–they’ve undergone extensive testing and are nearly fail-safe.”

“People who have seen the company pitch its technology–and who asked not to be named because the presentations were private–say Endgame executives will bring up maps of airports, parliament buildings, and corporate offices.”

According to Riley and Vance, “the executives then create a list of the computers running inside the facilities, including what software the computers run, and a menu of attacks that could work against those particular systems.”

Indeed, “Endgame weaponry comes customized by region–the Middle East, Russia, Latin America, and China–with manuals, testing software, and ‘demo instructions.’ There are even target packs for democratic countries in Europe and other U.S. allies.”

“The quest in Washington, Silicon Valley, and around the globe is to develop digital tools both for spying and destroying,” BusinessWeek observed. “The most enticing targets in this war are civilian–electrical grids, food distribution systems, any essential infrastructure that runs on computers.”

“This stuff is more kinetic than nuclear weapons,” Dave Aitel, the founder of a computer security company in Miami Beach called Immunity told Riley and Vance. “Nothing says you’ve lost like a starving city.”

While Aitel and a host of other “little Eichmanns” who enrich themselves servicing the American secret state refused to discuss his firm’s work for the government, a source told the publication that Immunity “makes weaponized ‘rootkits’: military-grade hacking systems used to bore into other countries’ networks,” and that Aitel’s clients “include the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.”

We do not know if, or when, the United States, NATO and Israel will opt for a military “solution” to the so-called “Iranian problem.”

We do know however, as the World Socialist Web Site warned, “as global capitalism lurches from one economic and political crisis to the next, rivalry between the major powers for markets, resources and strategic advantage is plunging humanity towards a catastrophic conflict that would devastate the planet.”

The title of an article in the Sun declared: ‘Dead dog.’ (October 24, 2011)

The Daily Star reported that Gaddafi’s son Mutassim had been filmed smoking a cigarette and drinking water shortly after being captured. The paper took up the story:

But in graphic images that have baffled UN investigators, he is then shown dead, lying next to Mad Dog, with bullet holes in his neck and stomach.

In his report, “Mad Dog” “was the name journalist Gary Nicks used to refer to the executed Libyan leader. Nicks continued: ‘New footage emerged yesterday of Mad Dog’s dying words to a baying mob.’

Gaddafi and his son were not the only victims of the mob. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported that between six and ten people appeared to have been executed at the scene of the Libyan leader’s capture. Around 95 bodies were found in the immediate vicinity, many of them victims of Nato air strikes. In fact, it is clear that NATO, with the assistance of special forces (although ground troops were strictly forbidden by UN resolution 1973), had maintained a no-drive zone around Sirte: a crucial factor facilitating the murder of Gaddafi.

CBS reported 572 bodies ‘and counting’ in Sirte, including 300, ‘many of them with their hands tied behind their backs and shot in the head’, collected and buried in a mass grave.

HRW reported the massacre of 53 people by anti-Gaddafi fighters at the Mahara hotel in Sirte. Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director at HRW, commented on the atrocity:

This latest massacre seems part of a trend of killings, looting, and other abuses committed by armed anti-Gaddafi fighters who consider themselves above the law.

The BBC covered the massacre on its News at Ten (October 24). Wyre Davies reported:

Some say Gaddafi’s home town is where transitional government forces took their revenge; collective punishment for Gaddafi’s own crimes. A vivid and graphic example of that in Sirte today. The bodies of 53 Gaddafi supporters, discovered shot with their hands tied.

The segment lasted 20 seconds, with commentary on the massacre and footage of the bodies lasting 10 seconds. As one surviving resident of Sirte asked:  “What would people in Europe and America say if Gaddafi was doing this?”

The answer is hardly in doubt — wall-to-wall coverage and volcanic outrage. Gaddafi was certainly a vicious tyrant responsible for gross human rights abuses. But callous indifference to human suffering was supposed to be the reason he was so beyond the pale, so unlike “us”.

Channel 4 anchor Matt Frei responded to the massacre in a style familiar from his years as the BBC’s Washington correspondent:

You could say even about this regime, this government, that they don’t have a second chance to make a first impression. So just how worried are they?

When “our side” is responsible, even a massacre becomes, first and foremost, a PR problem.

The response from Ian Black, the liberal Guardian’s Middle East correspondent, to the torture and extrajudicial killing of Gaddafi was a stark:  “good riddance”.

Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, giggled with CBS journalists as she joked about Gaddafi’s murder:  “We came, we saw, he died.”

Incongruous laughter appears to be a trait.

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there’s a little resonance in what I’m saying tonight.¹

One of our regular message board posters, Chris Shaw, expressed his “despair and horror at the footage of a 69 year old man being beaten, tortured and murdered by a mob”.² The natural response of a feeling human being, one might think.

By contrast, Andrew Gilligan wrote in the Telegraph: “the one thing Gaddafi retained to the very end was his ability to put on a show… [His] demise was as box-office as his 42-year rule”.

We suspect that most journalists are not actually unfeeling brutes. They are conformists wary of the high price they can be made to pay for even the suspicion that they might be ’apologists’ for an official enemy. A risk that has increased markedly in our age of ‘political convergence’, deprived as it is of any established mainstream political dissent.

Cameron’s First Military Victory

As ever, the broadcast media rushed to vindicate their warrior-leaders. Indeed, on August 22, the BBC’s deputy political editor, James Landale, was a month early in describing Downing Street’s satisfaction “that all David Cameron’s critics, who said that this couldn’t be done – that aerial bombardment would not work – have been proved wrong”.³

Last week, Landale’s senior colleague, Nick Robinson, brought viewers up to date, assuring them that Downing Street “will see this, I’m sure, as a triumphant end”. (News at Six, October 20, 2011) Robinson added:

Libya was David Cameron’s first war. Colonel Gaddafi his first foe. Today, his first real taste of military victory.

We are living in strange times when a senior BBC journalist can portray the fighting of endless wars as the normal way of things, as though Cameron had taken some kind of prime ministerial rite of initiation.

In an interview with new UK defence secretary, Philip Hammond, BBC ‘rottweiler’ John Humphrys asked:

What apart from a sort of moral glow – and there’s nothing wrong with that – have we got out of it?⁴

The BBC’s chief political correspondent, Norman Smith, commented:

I imagine, privately, David Cameron must surely feel vindicated because the Libyan enterprise was a big political risk.⁵

As ever, an ostensibly neutral BBC reporter endorsed what he was supposed only to be reporting: Cameron “must surely feel vindicated”. How could he possibly feel otherwise?⁶

In Washington, the BBC’s Ian Pannell thought hard and joined the mainstream herd:

I think President Obama is feeling that his foreign policy strategy has been vindicated – that his critics have been proven wrong.

An editorial in the Telegraph agreed:

His death vindicates the swift action of David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy in halting the attack on Benghazi and supporting the rebellion.

A Tweet from someone called Micah Zenko made more sense to us: “Qaddafi summarily executed is apt conclusion to false narrative of Libya intervention. No arms embargo, selective NFZ, boots on the ground.”

Zenco might also have mentioned the unnoticed irony that UN resolution 1973, which authorised the misnamed ‘no-fly zone’, was among other things: ‘Condemning…torture and summary executions.’

As though concluding a bed-time story, the Guardian’s Simon Tisdall commented: “The Arab spring had claimed another infamous scalp. The risky western intervention had worked. And Libya was liberated at last.”

Andrew Grice, political editor of the Independent, applauded: “Mr Cameron took risks on Libya – but they paid off… Mr Cameron proved the doubters wrong… By calling Libya right, Mr Cameron invites a neat contrast with Tony Blair.”

Murdoch’s Times observed that only the ‘political courage’ of Sarkozy and Cameron had prevented disaster at ‘the beginning of another genocide’.⁷

In Murdoch’s grim fantasy world, any nation obstructing Western corporate control is, by happy coincidence, either perpetrating or planning ‘genocide’.

Jesus And Buddha – Hang Your Heads In Shame!

The comparative mythologist, Joseph Campbell, once commented on a striking feature of modern propaganda:

It’s been largely based on denigrating somebody over there and saying we’ve got to go in and knock them out. The main awakening of the human spirit is in compassion and the main function of propaganda is to suppress compassion, knock it out. Well, it’s in public journalism all the time now, too.⁸

Compassion is a threat because it is politically incorrect, resistant to robotic demonising by the cheerleaders of hate. Compassion is a spontaneous trembling of the heart based on an awareness of shared humanity, shared suffering, shared Being. And yet, even the normally insightful Glenn Greenwald, clearly appalled by the murders in Libya, reminded readers of something he had previously written:

No decent human being would possibly harbor any sympathy for Gadaffi, just as none harbored any for Saddam.

We Tweeted him: “Jesus and Buddha hang your heads in shame!”

Greenwald replied:

I had this debate when I first wrote that – it doesn’t mean you don’t object to what’s done to them: they’re just not sympathetic.

How easily we forget that compassion - even for a vicious, hated enemy -has long been recognised as one of the highest, most precious achievements of human civilisation.

As the Buddhist sage Je Gampopa commented:

Those who are hurt by others in return for the goodness they show them, yet, despite this, still act beneficially towards them, are the finest humans in the world: people who can return good for bad.⁹

Does anyone doubt that a Jesus or a Buddha would not merely have harboured sympathy for Gaddafi but would have intervened to save his life? And who would dare claim that doing so would make them ‘apologists’ for tyranny?

Philosopher A.C. Grayling sounded a rare note of dissent:

In accepting the pragmatic case for shooting malefactors, just as we shoot mad dogs, we state that we do not wish to pay the high cost of living according to law and civil liberties. We champion our Western principles about the rule of law and the rights of individuals, we thus say, only until they become a burden and an inconvenience; and, when they do, we summarily shoot people in the head instead.

The “inconvenience” requires explanation. In truth, if they are to survive, ‘Third World’ leaders are most often obliged to prioritise Western corporate interests over the needs of local people (see our discussion of John Perkins’ book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man). This rankles with the victims, of course, and so Western clients typically have numerous skeletons in their human rights cupboard – hidden with Western military, financial and diplomatic help. These skeletons can be brought to light in a moment, if the client strays. A compliant media is always on hand to declare the crimes “Hitlerian”, “genocidal”, “exceptional”, and surely justifying whatever violent measures Western governments deem fit for the preservation of civilisation: in reality, the preservation of their control of the target nation.

In the rush to celebrate Cameron’s ‘first taste of military victory,’ the UK media ignored or downplayed a whole host of problems with the war, including:

– The fact that even establishment think tanks like the International Crisis Group reported that NATO and the ‘rebel’ Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC), rather than the Gaddafi regime, had rejected all peace initiatives out of hand:

UNSC resolution 1973 emphatically called for a ceasefire, yet every proposal for a ceasefire put forward by the Qaddafi regime or by third parties so far has been rejected by the TNC as well as by the Western governments most closely associated with the NATO military campaign… neither the TNC nor NATO has made a ceasefire proposal of its own and there has yet to be a meaningful attempt to test Qaddafi’s seriousness or pose conditions on acceptance that would subject a putative ceasefire to effective independent supervision.¹⁰

– The fact that there was no UN mandate for regime change, even though this was very obviously NATO’s illegal aim.

– The striking lack of evidence - not least from other towns recaptured by pro-government forces - that Gaddafi planned to commit a massacre in Benghazi.

– “Rebel” estimates of 50,000 dead as a result of the war as far back as the end of August. The Guardian’s Seumas Milne is a rare, honest voice in noting that “while the death toll in Libya when NATO intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it is probably more than ten times that figure.” Milne added:

If the purpose of western intervention in Libya’s civil war was to “protect civilians” and save lives, it has been a catastrophic failure.

– The bombing of Libyan state TV by British aircraft in July, which reportedly killed a number of journalists and was condemned as a war crime by Reporters Without Borders, UNESCO and the International Federation of Journalists.

– The reduction of Sirte, previously a city of 100,000 people, to a smoking ruin as a result of several weeks of siege. The assault included daily indiscriminate bombing, the cutting off of water, food, medicine and electricity supplies, the shelling of a hospital, widespread looting and massacres. Aid agencies described how the attack had created a humanitarian crisis.

– The widespread racist persecution of black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans by anti-Gaddafi forces. Amnesty International reported that ‘black Libyans and sub-Saharan Africans are at high risk of abuse by anti-Gaddafi forces’. (Many thanks to Peter, for providing much of this list on the Media Lens message board. A longer list is archived here)

Any horrors to come are likely to be reported in brief as the media eye swivels inexorably towards the next target of “humanitarian intervention”.

1. BBC News at Ten, October 20, 2011
2. Media Lens message board, October 24, 2011
3. Landale, BBC News at Six, August 22, 2011
4. Humphrys to Hammond, BBC Radio 4 Today, October 21, 2011; go to 3:13
5. BBC News Online, 16:34, October 21, 2011
6. Ibid.
7. Campbell, The Hero’s Journey, HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p.220
8. Leading article, Death of a Dictator, The Times, October 21, 2011
9. Gampopa, Gems of Dharma, Jewels of Freedom, Altea, 1994, p.155
10. ICG, Popular Protest In North Africa and the Middle East, (V): Making Sense of Libya, Middle East/North Africa Report N°107 – 6 June 2011, pp.28-29

As usual, we swim in a pile of dishonorable politicians. An Arab poem describes how the rotten rubbish floats to the top of the water while all the gems – corals and precious fish – stay at the bottom.

— An Arab friend

If events of the past few days are anything to go by, the UN-NATO insurgent allies are set to bring a grim, lawless, murderous and fundamentalist future to the “New Libya.”

Polygamy is set to return as the disenfranchisement of women, the West’s new friend and interim leader, Mr Jalil, has declared. (He didn’t put it quite like that, but the particular interpretation of Sharia Law he espouses does.)

A country which had health, education and welfare services of which most could only dream is also set to instantly revert fifty years. Flying King Idris’ flag, Libya is being plunged seamlessly back to his era of illiteracy and neglect.

It will not get better. Britain is already demanding that bombarded, bereaved, largely broken Libya pay compensation for its “liberation.” No, not satire!

Libya also has its very own Falluja, in the fled, dead and now destroyed city of Sirte, flooded, ruined and heartrending. It also has its own Basra Roads. See the melted, bombed vehicles leaving Sirte and across Libya. Those inside them also melted or vaporized, a mirror image of that 1991 US massacre of the fleeing in Iraq..

Soon Libya will also have its own living memorials to their release from free health care, gasoline too cheap to meter and the highest living standard in Africa: deformed babies from the radioactive and chemically toxic depleted uranium weapons which rained down on them. Another mirror image of Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans where these weapons were also used.

The events, though, of the last days, have shone a light on the grim reality of the future for the population. The shocking spectacle of Colonel Gaddafi and his son’s bodies, displayed to the public in a meat cooler in a mall until decomposition forced a furtive body snatch and night time burial in an undisclosed location, hardly bodes well for the “human rights” to come.

Neither does the breaking of the commitment to return the bodies to the remaining, so far, un-murdered family.

Their “corpses should be dumped in the desert to be eaten by foxes”, stated one “liberator”, claiming that at the deaths: “we all took turns to stamp on” the former Leader’s face, some hitting it “with shoes.”

When Aisha Gaddafi called her father, minutes after his death, reports state that one of the thugs answered the call telling her: “Fuzzy head is dead.”

Aisha lost her husband and baby in a NATO bombing in July. She is an internationally respected lawyer, whose cases have included being part of Saddam Hussein’s defence team and who also defended Muntader Al Saidi, the journalist who threw his shoes at George W. Bush in Baghdad, for: “the widows, the orphans ..” the former President had created in Iraq, on his declared “Crusade.”

She is also a former Good Will Ambassador for the United Nations. One can only speculate how much good will she feels  towards a UN which has endorsed the murder and plunder of family, people and land now. She had lost her father, four brothers, her baby daughter, with her two little cousins, within little over three months.

One (of many) questions which should be answered over the shoddy, surreptitious disposal of the bodies of Libya’s rightful leader, his son and his Defence Minister, Abu Bakr Younis, is, if the stated reason is because the insurgents did not want his last resting place to “become a shrine”, was he really the monster Washington and Whitehall have trumpeted? Or did the “coalition” just have an eye on the resources he stubbornly kept, largely for the benefit of his people?

America’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureate “first black” President,  has declared the death of Muammar Gaddafi: “A momentous day in the history of Libya.”

This, as rebel forces going by the name of “The Brigade for Purging Slaves (of) Black Skin” have reportedly detained and displaced hundreds, while  the people of Tawergha, a town of 20,000, have disappeared without a trace.

Numerous reports record that there are those avowed to ethnically cleanse Libya of dark and black skins. There are two million black Libyans, nearly one third of the population of little over six million.

Moreover, for all the horrific rhetoric over the deaths on 20th October, there are serious questions as to who really carried them out. “Our armed forces have been in action”, said Prime Minister Cameron. (Yes, the same Cameron who said there will never be “British boots on the ground …”)

Further: “British Special Forces are engaged in a frantic desert manhunt for Colonel Gaddafi’s son Saif .”

Heaven forbid that this sophisticated man should survive to tell the stories of socializing with Tony Blair, Lord Peter Mandelson and Prince Andrew. Or of Blair’s alleged six visits to his father, twice courtesy of the hospitality of Colonel Gaddafi’s private plane.

Gaddafi, in the flowery language which is Arabic, had called the insurgents “rats”, as Saddam Hussein had referred to them as “carion”  and “crows.”  So the Colonel is “found” in a sewer pipe. Get the connection? Few with a functioning brain would not wonder if this sewer rat image was not thought up by “intelligence” in Washington or Whitehall.

As the great “democracies” plunder and assassinate, do cast a passing thought to the (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights which celebrated its sixtieth anniversary on 10th December 2008, with great fan-fare.

Article 10: Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Sabah Al Mukhtar, President of the London based Arab Lawyers Association, is incandescent. “The US, UN, France and the UK should be seriously concerned regarding what has befallen Gaddafi. The serious legal implications of a killing with no trial, after an eight month bombardment. We have treated the law with contempt – and trampled on it for two decades.”

That the murderers are to investigate the murders renders Orwell redundant.

So far, of course, it seems we only have the perpetrators word that there was even a burial, somewhere near the port city of Misrata, disgraceful as it was. Perhaps, as with bin Laden, a precedent was set and the victims were simply fed to the fishes. Erase the evidence?

The burials – or disposals – were on two less than auspicious anniversaries. The British military disaster which was the Charge of the Light Brigade, in 1854, and the more recent, cravenly cowardly invasion of the tiny island of Grenada in 1983.

As ever, ignorance rules. After the disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, with top military brass now admitting that they had no idea of the complexity of the societies, (US) Colonel Cedric Leighton writes that in spite of the “celebrations” in Libya: “ … it is easy to think our job in the Middle East is over.”  Buy a map, Colonel. Wrong continent.

“After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over,” he said.

Providing some context to Obama’s announcement, a CBSNews.com report published on the same day stated, “The war in Iraq has meant the death of more than 4,400 U.S. troops and come at a cost of more than $700 billion.”

The US media is now failing to process any facts aside from the losses suffered by the US, who wrought war and destruction on a country in urgent need of peace and humanitarian assistance. For over a decade prior to the war, Iraq was reeling under US-led UN sanctions, which left the country’s infrastructure in a state of near collapse.

In her introduction to Ramsey Clark’s important book, The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq: The Children Are Dying, Sara Flounders wrote, “Sanctions are a weapon of mass destruction. Since sanctions were imposed on Iraq, half a million children under the age of five have died of malnutrition and preventable diseases. Sanctions impose artificial famine. A third of Iraq’s surviving children today have stunted growth and nutritional deficiencies that will deform their shortened lives.”

In 1999, I was one of those who directly witnessed the impact of the sanctions on Iraqi children. I came back from the country with heaps of photos and memories that haunt me to this day. Oddly, enough, it was not sanctions as “a weapon of mass destruction” that inspired action to end the siege, but alleged Iraqi WMDs that invited another disaster to an already devastated nation.

It might take us years to truly understand the magnitude of what has since transpired in Iraq. Death and destruction have hovered over the country, killing and wounding hundreds of thousands, sending millions into exile and millions more have been classified by UN agencies as Internally Displaced Persons (IDP). It was a horror show that cannot be captured with the language of reason, but every moment of it was experienced by millions of ordinary people, punished severely for a crime they never committed.

The last US forces will depart the country by January 1 “with their heads held high, proud of their success,” according to Obama. This is the very president who, in a speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009, stated that “unlike Afghanistan, Iraq was a war of choice.” What is there to be proud of in a devastating war of choice, Mr. President?

Before the U.S. House of Representatives on January 18, 2007, now Republican candidate for president, Ron Paul fittingly remarked, “Clichés about supporting the troops are designed to distract us from failed policies, policies promoted by powerful special interests that benefit from war. Anything to steer the discussion away from the real reasons (for) the war in Iraq will not end anytime soon.”

But it is ending, simply because it was militarily unwinnable, financially unsustainable and politically indefensible. “Supporting the troops,” however, will continue to serve as an escape route for those who still refuse to discuss the Iraq war from a moral and legal viewpoint. For them, it is essential that the cover-up persists, so as not to deny the US the opportunity to instigate other wars of choice whenever suitable.

In a press briefing shortly following Obama’s end of war announcement, Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, remarked on whether the war was worth it. He answered, “history is going to have to judge.”

But Iraqis don’t need to wait for US history books to demonstrate to them the depth of their tragedy. The Lancet survey had already determined that between March 2003 and June 2006, 601,027 Iraqis died violent deaths. Opinion Research Business survey said that 1,033,000 died as a result of the conflict from March 2003 to August 2007. In one single revelation, WikiLeaks stated that “its release of nearly 400,000 classified U.S. files on the Iraq war showed 15,000 more Iraqi civilians died than previously thought” (Reuters, October 24, 2010).

Equally important is the fact that the violent mentality that insists on war – as opposed to diplomacy – to further US interests is still deeply rooted among US elites. Reporting from Washington, Jim Lobe wrote, “Key neo-conservatives and other right-wing hawks who championed the 2003 United States invasion of Iraq are calling for military strikes against Iran in retaliation for its purported murder-for-hire plot against the Saudi ambassador here” (Asia Times, October 19).

Blogging for Foreign Policy website on October 21, Dalia Dassa Kaye wrote, “The martial rhetoric from inveterate hawks was predictable. But even President Obama suggested that the United States would not take any ‘options off the table,’ a phrase that is understood to leave open military options.”

The rhetoric buildup for another conflict received a big boost during US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta’s first visit to Iraq since taking office on July 1. He said then that his country “will act ‘unilaterally’ to confront what he said were Iranian threats to US interests in Iraq.” The US was “very concerned about Iran and the weapons they are providing to extremists here in Iraq,” he said, as reported by Al Jazeera (July 11).

It will not be easy to reconcile Panetta’s comments with Obama’s end of war announcement which states that “Iraqis have taken full responsibility for their country’s security” and that the relationship between the US and Iraq will be that “between sovereign nations, an equal partnership based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”

There are no signs of the neoconservatives altering their views. The appetite for conflict also seems well and alive among Washington’s influential elites, who still brazenly propagate that the US war brought good to Iraqi society, despite all evidence to the contrary.

The official website for the US Forces in Iraq, USF-Iraq.com, is adorned by the following statement under the banner, The New Face of Iraq: “The nation of Iraq has undergone sweeping political, economical and social changes since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Elected officials are now in power, overseeing the continued development of security, infrastructure, education, security and finance.”

With that apparent ‘success’ in mind, the neocons can always advocate another military intervention or full scale invasion, whenever possible and affordable.

“The tide of war is receding,” said Obama. One has serious doubts.

The Afghan war is expanding even further, not only with increasing drone attacks in neighboring Pakistani territory but because of U.S. threats to take far greater unilateral military action within Pakistan unless the Islamabad government roots out “extremists” and cracks down harder on cross-border fighters.

Washington’s tone was so threatening that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to assure the Pakistani press October 21 that the U.S. did not plan a ground offensive against Pakistan. The next day, Afghan President Hamid Karzai shocked Washington by declaring “God forbid, If ever there is a war between Pakistan and America, Afghanistan will side with Pakistan…. If Pakistan is attacked and if the people of Pakistan needs Afghanistan’s help, Afghanistan will be there with you.”

At the same time, Washington has just suffered a spectacular setback in Iraq, where the Obama Administration has been applying extraordinary pressure on the Baghdad government for over a year to permit many thousands of U.S. troops to remain indefinitely after all American forces are supposed to withdraw at the end of this year.

President Obama received the Iraqi government’s rejection from Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki October 21, and promptly issued a public statement intended to completely conceal the fact that a long-sought U.S. goal has just been obliterated, causing considerable disruption to U.S. plans. Obama made a virtue of necessity by stressing that “Today, I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year.”

This article will first discuss the situation in Afghanistan after 10 years, then take up the Iraq question and what the U.S. may do to compensate for a humiliating and disruptive rebuff.

The United States is well aware it will never win a decisive victory in Afghanistan. At this point, the Obama Administration is anxious to convert the military stalemate into a form of permanent truce, if only the Taliban were willing to accept what amounts to a power sharing deal that would allow Washington to claim the semblance of success after a decade of war.

In addition, President Obama seeks to retain a large post-”withdrawal” military presence throughout the country mainly for these reasons:

• To protect its client regime in Kabul led by Karzai, as well as Washington’s other political and commercial interests in the country, and to maintain a menacing military presence on Iran’s eastern border, especially if U.S. troops cannot now remain in Iraq.

• To retain territory in Central Asia for U.S. and NATO military forces positioned close to what Washington perceives to be its two main (though never publicly identified) enemies — China and Russia — at a time when the American government is increasing its political pressure on both countries. Obama is intent upon transforming NATO from a regional into a global adjunct to Washington’s quest for retaining and extending world hegemony. NATO’s recent victory in Libya is a big advance for U.S. ambitions in Africa, even if the bulk of commercial spoils go to France and England. A permanent NATO presence in Central Asia is a logical next step. In essence, Washington’s geopolitical focus is expanding from the Middle East to Central Asia and Africa in the quest for resources, military expansion and unassailable hegemony, especially from the political and economic challenge of rising nations of the global south, led China.

There has been an element of public deception about withdrawing U.S. “combat troops” from Iraq and Afghanistan dating from the first Obama election campaign in 2007-8. Combat troops belong to combat brigades. In a variant of bait-and-switch trickery, the White House reported that all combat brigades departed Iraq in August 2010. Technically this is true, because those that did not depart were simply renamed “advise and assist brigades.” According to a 2009 Army field manual such brigades are entirely capable, “if necessary,” of shifting from “security force assistance” back to combat duties.

In Afghanistan, after the theoretical pull-out date, it is probable that many ”advise and assist brigades” will remain along with a large complement of elite Joint Special Operations Forces strike teams (SEALs, Green Berets, etc.) and other officially “non-combat” units — from the CIA, drone operators, fighter pilots, government security employees plus “contractor security” personnel, including mercenaries. Thousands of other “non-combat” American soldiers will remain to train the Afghan army.

According to an October 8 Associated Press dispatch, “Senior U.S. officials have spoken of keeping a mix of 10,000 such [special operations-type] forces in Afghanistan, and drawing down to between 20,000 and 30,000 conventional forces to provide logistics and support. But at this point, the figures are as fuzzy as the future strategy.”

Estimates of how long the Pentagon will remain in Afghanistan range from 2017 to 2024 to “indefinitely.”

Obama marked the 10th anniversary with a public statement alleging that  “Thanks to the extraordinary service of these [military] Americans, our citizens are safer and our nation is more secure”— the most recent of the continuous praise of war-fighters and the conduct of these wars of choice from the White House since the 2001 bombing, invasion and occupation.

Just two days earlier a surprising Pew Social Trend poll of post-9/11 veterans was made public casting doubt about such a characterization. Half the vets said the Afghanistan war wasn’t worth fighting in terms of benefits and costs to the U.S. Only 44% thought the Iraq war was worth fighting. One-third opined that both wars were not worth waging. Opposition to the wars has been higher among the U.S. civilian population. But it’s unusual in a non-conscript army for its veterans to emerge with such views about the wars they volunteered to fight.

The U.S. and its NATO allies issued an unusually optimistic assessment of the Afghan war on October 15, but it immediately drew widespread skepticism. According to the New York Times the next day, “Despite a sharp increase in assassinations and a continuing flood of civilian casualties, NATO officials said that they had reversed the momentum of the Taliban insurgency as enemy attacks were falling for the first time in years…. [This verdict] runs counter to dimmer appraisals from some Afghan officials and other international agencies, including the United Nations. With the United States preparing to withdraw 10,000 troops by the end of this year and 23,000 more by next October, it raises questions about whether NATO’s claims of success can be sustained.”

Less than two weeks earlier German Gen. Harald Kujat, who planned his country’s military support mission in Afghanistan, declared that “the mission fulfilled the political aim of showing solidarity with the United States. But if you measure progress against the goal of stabilizing a country and a region, then the mission has failed.”

According to Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. presence in Afghanistan is a critically important “long term commitment” and “we’re going to be there longer than 2014.” He made the disclosure to the Senate Armed Services Committee September 22, a week before he retired. In a statement October 3, the Pentagon’s new NATO commander in Afghanistan, Marine Gen. John Allen, declared: “The plan is to win. The plan is to be successful. And so, while some folks might hear that we’re departing in 2014… we’re actually going to be here for a long time.”

Lt. Gen. John Mulholland, departing head of U.S. Army Special Operations Command, told the AP October 8:  “We’re moving toward an increased special operations role…,whether it’s counterterrorism-centric, or counterterrorism blended with counterinsurgency.” White House National Security Advisor Tom Donilon said in mid-September that by 2014  “the U.S. remaining force will be basically an enduring presence force focused on counterterrorism.” Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta strongly supports President Obama’s call for an “enduring presence” in Afghanistan beyond 2014.

Former U.S. Afghan commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who was fired last year for his unflattering remarks about Obama Administration officials, said in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations October 6 that after a decade of fighting in Afghanistan the U.S. was only “50% of the way” toward attaining its goals. “We didn’t know enough and we still don’t know enough,” he said. “Most of us — me included — had a very superficial understanding of the situation and history, and we had a frighteningly simplistic view of recent history, the last 50 years.”

Washington evidently had no idea that one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world — a society of 30 million people where the literacy rate is 28% and life expectancy is just 44 years — would fiercely fight to retain national sovereignty. The Bush Administration, which launched the Afghan war a few weeks after 9/11, evidently ignored the fact that the people of Afghanistan ousted every occupying army from that of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn to the British Empire and the USSR.

The U.S. spends on average in excess of $2 billion a week in Afghanistan, not to mention the combined spending of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, but the critical needs of the Afghan people in terms of health, education, welfare and social services after a full decade of military involvement by the world’s richest countries remain essentially untended.

For example, 220,000 Afghan children under five — one in five — die every year due to pneumonia, poor nutrition, diarrhea and other preventable diseases, according to the State of the World’s Children report released by the UN Children’s Fund. UNICEF also reports the maternal mortality rate with about 1,600 deaths per every 100,000 live births. Save the Children says this amounts to over 18,000 women a year. It is also reported by the UN that 70% of school-age girls do not attend school for various reasons — conservative parents, lack of security, or fear for their lives. All told, about 92% of the Afghan population does not have access to proper sanitation.

Even after a decade of U.S. combat, the overwhelming majority of the Afghan people still have no clear idea why Washington launched the war. According to the UK’s Daily Mail September 9, a new survey by the International Council on Security and Development showed that 92% of 1,000 Afghan men polled had never even heard of the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — the U.S. pretext for the invasion — and did not know why foreign troops were in the country. (Only men were queried in the poll because many more of them are literate, 43.1% compared to 12.6% of women.)

In another survey, conducted by Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and released October 18, 56% of Afghans view U.S./NATO troops as an occupying force, not allies as Washington prefers. The survey results show that “there appears to be an increasing amount of anxiety and fear rather than hope.”

Perhaps the most positive news about Afghanistan — and it is a thunderously mixed “blessing” — is that the agricultural economy boomed last year. But, reports the October 11 Business Insider, it’s because “rising opium prices have upped the ante in Afghanistan, and farmers have responded by posting a 61% increase in opium production.” Afghani farmers produce 90% of the world’s opium, the main ingredient in heroin. Half-hearted U.S.-NATO eradication efforts failed because insufficient attention was devoted to providing economic and agricultural substitutes for the cultivation of opium.

Another outcome of foreign intervention and U.S. training is the boundless brutality and corruption of the Afghan police toward civilians and especially Taliban “suspects.” Writing in Antiwar.com John Glaser reported:

“Detainees in Afghan prisons are hung from the ceilings by their wrists, severely beaten with cables and wooden sticks, have their toenails torn off, are treated with electric shock, and even have their genitals twisted until they lose consciousness, according to a study released October 10 by the United Nations. The study, which covered 47 facilities sites in 22 provinces, found ‘a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment’ during interrogation by U.S.-supported Afghan authorities. Both U.S. and NATO military trainers and counterparts have been working closely with these authorities, consistently supervising the detention facilities and funding their operations.”

In mid-September Human Rights Watch documented that U.S.-supported anti-Taliban militias are responsible for many human rights abuses that are overlooked by their American overseers. At around the same time the American Open Society Foundations revealed that the Obama Administration has tripled the number of night time military raids on civilian homes, which terrorize many families. The report noted that “An estimated 12 to 20 raids now occur per night, resulting in thousands of detentions per year, many of whom are non-combatants.” The U.S. military admits that half the arrests are “mistakes.”

Meanwhile, it was reported in October that in the first nine months this year U.S.-NATO drones conducted nearly 23,000 surveillance missions in the Afghanistan sky. With nearly 85 flights a day, the Obama Administration has almost doubled the daily amount in the last two years. Hundreds of civilians, including nearly 170 children, have been killed in the Afghan-Pakistan border areas from drone attacks. Miniature killer/surveillance drones — small enough to be carried in backpacks— are soon expected to be distributed to U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

So far the Afghanistan war has taken the lives of some 1,730 American troops and about a thousand from NATO. There are no reliable figures on the number of Afghan civilians killed since the beginning of the war. The UN’s Assistance Mission to Afghanistan did not start to count such casualties until 2007. According to the Voice of America October 7, “Each year, the civilian death toll has risen, from more than 1,500 dead in 2007 to more than 2,700 in 2010. And in the first half of this year, the UN office reported there were 2,400 civilians killed in war-related incidents.”

At minimum the war has cost American taxpayers about a half-trillion dollars since 2001. The U.S. will continue to spend billions in the country for many years to come and the final cost — including interest on war debts that will be carried for scores more years — will mount to multi-trillions that future generations will have to pay. At present there are 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan plus about 37,000 NATO troops. Another 45,000 well paid “contractors” perform military duties, and many are outright mercenaries.

Washington is presently organizing, arming, training and financing hundreds of thousands of Afghan troops and police forces, and is expected to continue paying some $5 billion a year for this purpose at least until 2025.

The U.S. government has articulated various different objectives for its engagement in Afghanistan over the years. Crushing al-Qaeda and defeating the Taliban have been most often mentioned, but as an October 7 article from the Council on Foreign Relations points out: “The main U.S. goals in Afghanistan remain uncertain. They have meandered from marginalizing the Taliban to state-building, to counterinsurgency, to counterterrorism, to — most recently — reconciliation and negotiation with the Taliban. But the peace talks remain nascent and riddled with setbacks. Karzai suspended the talks after the assassination of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the government’s chief negotiator, which the Afghan officials blamed on the Pakistan-based Haqqani network. The group denies it.”

There is another incentive for the U.S. to continue fighting in Afghanistan — to eventually convey the impression of victory, an absolute domestic political necessity.

The most compelling reason for the Afghan war is geopolitical, as noted above — finally obtaining a secure military foothold for the U.S. and its NATO accessory in the Central Asian backyards of China and Russia . In addition, a presence in Afghanistan places the U.S. in close military proximity to two volatile nuclear powers backed by the U.S. but not completely under its control by any means (Pakistan, India). Also, this fortuitous geography is flanking the extraordinary oil and natural gas wealth of the Caspian Basin and energy-endowed former Soviet Muslim republics such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

In Iraq, the Obama Administration’s justification for retaining troops after the end of this year was ostensibly to train the Iraqi military and police forces, but there were other reasons:

• Washington seeks to remain in Iraq to keep an eye on Baghdad because it fears a mutually beneficial alliance may develop between Iraq and neighboring Iran, two Shi’ite societies in an occasionally hostile Sunni Muslim world, weakening American hegemony in the strategically important oil-rich Persian Gulf region and ultimately throughout the Middle East/North Africa.

• The U.S. also seeks to safeguard lucrative economic investments in Iraq, and the huge future profits expected by American corporations, especially in the denationalized petroleum sector. Further, Pentagon and CIA forces were stationed — until now, it seems — in close proximity to Iran’s western border, a strategic position to invade or bring about regime change.

Under other conditions, the U.S. may simply have insisted on retaining its troops regardless of Iraqi misgivings, but the Status of Forces compact governing this matter can only be changed legally by mutual agreement between Washington and Baghdad. The concord was arranged in December 2008 between Prime Minister Maliki and President George W. Bush — not Obama, who now takes credit for ending the Iraq war despite attempting to extend the mission of a large number of U.S. troops.

At first Washington wanted to retain more than 30,000 troops plus a huge diplomatic and contractor presence in Iraq after “complete” withdrawal. Maliki — pushed by many of the country’s political factions, including some influenced by Iran’s opposition to long-term U.S. occupation — held out for a much smaller number.

Early in October Baghdad decided that 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. troops in a training-only capacity was the most that could be accommodated. In addition, the Iraqis in effect declared a degree of independence from Washington by insisting that remaining American soldiers must be kept on military bases and not be granted legal immunity when in the larger society. Washington, which has troops stationed in countries throughout the world, routinely insists upon legal exemption for its foreign legions as a matter of imperial hubris, and would not compromise.

The White House has indicated that an arrangement may yet be worked out to permit some American trainers and experts to remain, perhaps as civilians or contractors. Shi’ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, a staunch opponent of the U.S. occupation, has suggested Iraq should employ trainers for its armed forces from other countries, but this is impractical for a country using American arms and planes.

Regardless, the White House is increasing the number of State Department employees in Iraq from 8,000 to an almost unbelievable 16,000, mostly stationed at the elephantine new embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone quasi-military enclave, in new American consulates in other cities, and in top “advisory” positions in many of the of the regime’s ministries, particularly the oil ministry. Half the State Department personnel, 8,000 people, will handle “security” duties, joined by some 5,000 new private “security contractors.”

Thus, at minimum the U.S. will possess 13,000 of its own armed “security” forces, and there’s still a possibility Baghdad and Washington will work out an arrangement for adding a limited number of “non-combat” military trainers, openly or by other means.

In his October 21 remarks, Obama sought to transform the total withdrawal he sought to avoid into a simulacrum of triumph for the troops and himself: “The last American soldier will cross the border out of Iraq with their heads held high, proud of their success, and knowing that the American people stand united in our support for our troops…. That is how America’s military efforts in Iraq will end.”

Heads held high, proud of success — for an unjust, illegal war based on lies that is said to have cost over a million Iraqi lives and created four million refugees! It has been estimated that the final U.S. costs of the Iraq war will be over $5 trillion when the debt and interest are finally paid off decades from now.

If President Obama is reelected— even should the Iraq war actually end — he will be coordinating U.S. involvement in wars and occupations in Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and now Uganda (where American 100 combat troops have just been inserted). Add to this various expanding drone campaigns, and such adventures as Washington’s support for Israel against the Palestinians and for the Egyptian military regime against popular aspirations for full democracy, followed by the backing of dictatorial regimes in a half-dozen countries, and continual threats against Iran.

Washington’s $1.4 trillion annual military and national security expenditures are a major factor behind America’s monumental national debt and the cutbacks in social services for the people, but aside from White House rhetoric about reducing redundant Pentagon expenditures, overall war/security budgets are expected to increase over the next several years.

The Bush and Obama Administrations have manipulated reality to convince American public opinion that the Iraq and Afghan wars are ending in U.S. successes. Washington fears the resurrection of the “Vietnam Syndrome” that resulted after the April 1975 U.S. defeat in Indochina. The “syndrome” led to a 15-year disinclination by the American people to support aggressive, large-scale U.S. wars against small, poor countries in the developing third world until the January 1991 Gulf War, part one of the two-part Iraq war that continued in March 2003.

According to an article in the October 9 New York Times titled “The Other War Haunting Obama,” author, journalist and Harvard emeritus professor Marvin Kalb wrote: “Ten years after the start of the war in Afghanistan, an odd specter haunts the Obama White House — the specter of Vietnam, a war lost decades before. Like Banquo’s ghost, it hovers over the White House still, an unwelcome memory of where America went wrong, a warning of what may yet go wrong.”

This fear of losing another war to a much smaller adversary — and perhaps suffering the one-term fate of President Lyndon Johnson who presided over the Vietnam debacle — evidently was a factor behind President Obama’s decision to vastly expand the size of the U.S. military commitment to Afghanistan and why the White House is now planning a long-term troop presence beyond the original pullout date.

Today’s combat directly touches the lives of only a small minority of Americans — military members and families — and much of the majority remains uninformed or misinformed about many of the causes and effects of the Iraq/Afghan adventures. Obama may thus eventually be able to convey the illusion of military success, which will help pave the way for future imperial violence unless the people of the United States wise up and act en masse to prevent future aggressive wars.