The Secretary of State has recommended that the application [for the pipeline] be denied…I agree…This announcement is not a judgment on the merits of the pipeline, but [on] the arbitrary nature of a deadline.

Obama even hinted at his future support of the pipeline: “[there may be] development of an oil pipeline from Cushing, Oklahoma to the Gulf of Mexico.” These deceptive words used by the President made me think:  Is the president heavily influenced by Big Oil or is the statement he made in the 2008 campaign, “I don’t take money from oil companies” true?

The election campaign of 2008 was a hard-fought campaign on all sides, mostly which involved lots of corporate sponsors since all the “frontrunners” were awash with money. Then-Senator Barack Obama raised $745 million dollars and spent $730 million dollars. $916,162 of those dollars came from the Oil and Gas industry according to OpenSecrets. A FactCheck.org post continued this message, nine months before the Presidential election was held, noting that Obama received over $66,000 dollars from employees at ExxonMobil, Hess, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and British Petroleum (BP). In addition, the post noted that “two oil industry executives…bundl[ed] money for Obama” one of which was a multi-billionaire. A Reuters article in May 2008 noted that BP contributed more to Obama’s campaign than it had contributed to federal candidates since the late 1980s. Even with these contributions, one may be unsure of Big Oil’s real impact on Barack Obama.

Steve Coll’s new book, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Empire, sheds light on part of that impact, especially on ExxonMobil’s role in the election. According to Coll, in the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama “spoke most pointedly about ExxonMobil…[and] offered none of the nuanced support he had voiced to Chad’s dictator Idriss Deby [in 2006]” about the inviolability of international oil contracts.  Even with this aggressive tact, he seemed to exploit the unpopularity of ExxonMobil for his own benefit. He pushed the idea of American ‘energy independence’ even though, according to Coll, it is “not achievable [or] desirable.” In addition, every time he used the word “ExxonMobil” it seemed to work in his favor. But, according to the Washington Independent, individual Exxon, Chevron and BP contributors preferred Barack Obama. At the same time, he boldly declared that “we must end the age of oil in our time.” Still, the Washington Post wrote in January 2008 that “one of Obama’s foreign policy advisers on the Middle East [Daniel Shapiro]… registered to lobby for several corporate clients…including…the American Petroleum Institute.” Also, three political aides on the Obama’s campaign payroll were lobbyists for corporations such as BP. Still, after his victory over John McCain in the Presidential election, ExxonMobil changed its approach to the political arena.

As Obama was entering the Presidency, Eric Foner, of The Nation Magazine, called him “Our Lincoln” and Time Magazine named him “Person of the Year.” Just like the online game, Oiligarchy, made by Mollenindustria, President Obama became “oiled,” and would work in the interest of Big Oil due to its campaign contributions to his presidential election campaign.

In May 2009, Obama appointed Steve Koonin, the former Chief Scientist of BP, to be second Undersecretary for Science in the Department of Energy (he was confirmed shortly after by the U.S. Senate). The next year, Koonin became a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.  Also, the former contact employee for Goldman Sachs, Rahm Emanuel, who was Obama’s Chief of Staff for 21 months, lived for five years in a “rent-free…D.C. apartment of…Rep. Rosa DeLauro…and her husband, Stanley Greenberg,” whose firm was the creator of “BP’s…green…slogan “Beyond Petroleum.”” At the same time, Goldman Sachs had a huge investment in BP, which it sold in early 2010 for an unknown reason, pocketing “slightly more than $266 million” according to Raw Story, an independent news site. Currently the company owns about 2% of BP’s stock.

This connection of Obama to Big Oil is not based around stocks, rather around policy that has been enacted or pushed. In the early days of his administration, a cap-and-trade bill failed in Congress. According to an online site about cap-and-trade this policy has its problems. Ralph Nader says it would cause a war “between interest groups seeking billions in carbon credit handouts and the regulator[s].” The Institute of Energy Research states it will hurt jobs, “make Canadian oil more expensive than oil from the Middle East…[and] create…incentives to import more oil from the Middle East.” The political magazine, Corporate Knights continues this criticism. They remark that “the President has not stood up to the climate-denial machine” and has been increasingly silent on the issue of a changing climate. At the same time, they wonder why Obama is not doing “far more to defend the science” of global warming.

In November 2009 the pro-Big Oil policy was evident once again. According to AlterNet, Obama and “his administration [were]…vocal and active proponents” of an Iraqi law that permitted new oil contracts in the country, which are also called protection sharing agreements (PSAs). The law offered oil companies “a 75 percent stake” in oil development, “reduced the amount the foreign companies pay in taxes…allow[ed]…them to use private security forces to protect their facilities” and let foreign companies to “hire and train [non]Iraqi workers and…transfer…needed technology.” At the same time, the law made companies pay “reimbursement fees for capital and operational expenses…[and] den[ied foreign] companies [from]…book[ing] reserves.”  Under this agreement, different corporations were given the ability to drill in Iraqi oil fields: BP, ExxonMobil and Shell Oil Company got sweet deals in Iraq, drilling in areas with 4-18 billion barrels of oil. Other foreign oil companies won out as well, but these American companies were some the big bread winners and the Obama Administration’s support of the law is no coincidence.

The next year, the international environmental NGO, the Bellona Foundation, noted a Presidential decision that missed the headlines. President Obama, one month before the explosion of the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon oil rig reversed a “20 year moratorium…open[ed much of]… the Atlantic coast line, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling…[and] at the same time [he] reject[ed]…some sites that had been propose[d in]…Alaska, California and Oregon.” Then less than thirty days later, the Deepwater Horizon Oil spill began. The aftermath showed the collusion of policy with Big Oil. Even, Sarah Palin, roundly denounced by “liberals” for her seemingly crazy statements told a Fox News show, “I don’t know why the question isn’t asked…if there’s any connection with the contributions made to President Obama and his administration and the support by the oil companies to the administration.” Recently, others have even suggested that “the Obama administration went easy on BP before the 2010 oil spill in return for a pledge to support cap-and-trade legislation.” Two years later, Black Agenda Report came out with an article attacking Obama’s inaction: “Barack Obama and his Democrats passed no new laws, promulgated no new executive decisions to regulate Big Oil…the damages recoverable from BP’s holdings [were restricted to]…its Gulf revenues [not revenues on other continents]… [which] ensur[ed]…BP’s reckless operations in the gulf of Mexico [would]…continue.”

After the spill occurred, President Obama and his administration quickly worked to clean up the oil in the Gulf of Mexico. In that process, a dispersant named Corexit was poured into Gulf, 2 million gallons by mid-June 2011, with the green light from Obama and his administration. But everyone didn’t follow the administration line. According to Democracy Now!, “many lawmakers and advocacy groups sa[id]…the Obama administration [was]…not being candid about the lethal effects of dispersants.” At the same time, residents on the Gulf Coast were outraged that Kenneth Feinburg’s “$20 billion government-administered claim fund [would]…subtract money cleanup workers earn by working for the cleanup effort.” Also this claim fund was seen as an “effort to limit the number of lawsuits against BP.” Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst of the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response at the time, boldly said the government was “sock puppets for BP in this cover-up…by hiding the amount of spill [which]…sav[ed] [BP] hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars in fines.” In addition to this corruption, many numbers of EPA and OSHA Administrators said the chemical was safe, but it was not. Kaufman went even further saying that the company, BlackRock is run by Larry Fink who has connections to “Mr. Geithner, Mr. Summers and others in the administration.” He concluded that the go ahead to disperse Corexit was part of a cover-up to hide BP’s use of “the volume of oil that has been released” into the Gulf from the American public.

The string of pro-Big Oil policy continued despite the “biggest investment in stimulating a green economy in history,” the creation of more green jobs, tax credits for wind energy, money for environmental maintenance, and greening federal buildings in the stimulus bill according to TreeHugger. For one, no one in BP has been criminally charged for the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010. A community fund to pay victims of the spill was set up, but there was no real damage to BP’s profits. Even a prosecution has started against BP but the trial was delayed by Judge Barbier until January 14, 2013, conveniently after the November presidential elections. In mid-2011, when the debt-ceiling crisis was occurring, the “Obama administration gave $12.4 million in research grants to oil and gas companies…to help the industry improve the way it drills for oil and gas” according to Daily Beast Contributor Daniel Stone. At the same time, Democrats in Congress were decrying a deal which would not cut subsidies for oil companies (about a year later, Obama would support gutting those subsidies). As the year continued, his policy was still deeply connected to Big Oil despite what was said in the articles of “clean capitalist” magazines like Corporate Knights.

Earlier that year in March 2011, President Obama began a war in Libya. Officially its purpose  was to “assist an international effort authorized by the United Nations…Security Council…to prevent a humanitarian catastrophe…[and stop] all attacks against civilians…[by] target[ing]…air defense systems, command and control structures…of Gaddafi’s armed forces.” As a result, this war was advertised by the Obama Administration as a humanitarian war. But the real reason for war was not humanitarian reasons, it was oil. Antiwar.com lays it out clearly. In 2008, Gaddafi threatened the oil companies in Libya and then made an agreement that promised billions of barrels of oil with tough conditions to American oil companies. At the same time, the U.S. government plotted to stop the Russian oil company Gazprom from gaining Libyan oil. When the Libyan revolution began, Gaddafi refused to step down.  The 2008 agreement and the plot to stop the Russian oil company, connected to Vladimir Putin, was threatened. In addition, University of London Professor Gilbert Achar noted that a huge massacre in Libya would cause an “embargo on Libyan oil” which would hurt the volatile oil markets. This revealed the real reason for entering a war into Libya: Oil. Representative Ed Markey at the time also said the war was because of oil.

The connections of the war to oil are different depending on what source the information comes from. Black Star News in an April 2011 post echoed the positions of antiwar.com and Gilbert Achar. They argued that the war occurred because “America wants to control Africa’s oil supply…[and protect] U.S. oil companies and others are presently invested in Libya; these companies include Marathon, Hess, Conoco, Gulf, Occidental, British Petroleum (BP).” The post finally gets to the punch: “This [war] is about oil and power, not saving people.  It’s about maximizing profits.” Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation had a different analysis. He noted that “Libya’s new leaders…plan to favor their NATO backers [one of which is the United States] when handing out access to Libya’s oil.” Peter Dale Scott goes even farther, saying that the war was about protecting the declining “global petrodollar economy” which Gaddafi threatened just like Saddam Hussein did before the Iraq invasion in 2003. Whatever the reason, it is clear that the war was about oil (it cost over $1.1 billion dollars, according to Politifact) and was in Big Oil’s interest.

In the month of the Libya war beginning, March 2011, President Obama made a speech at Georgetown University officially about “America’s energy security.” In the speech, Obama touted the use of alternative energy, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and oil all together, later called the “all-of-the above” strategy. More importantly, he announced a goal to cut America’s dependence on oil by one-third through his “all-of-the above” energy plan. However, he noted that to achieve this plan, America’s oil supply would have to be increased through expediting drilling permits for oil companies. Yet again, the President was on the side of Big Oil. He remarked casually that after new supposedly “higher standards” had been put in place, the government had “approved 39 new shallow-water permits…seven deepwater permits…two permits last year for every new well that the industry started to drill” offshore. The influence of Big Oil in government was apparent once again as the discussion switched back to the aftermath of the Gulf Oil Spill. In the speech, Obama revealed that Secretary of Energy Steven Chu was sent by him down to “the BP offices [where]…he essentially designed the cap” that supposedly stopped the oil from leaking into the Gulf. If this doesn’t sound like collusion between BP and the national government, I don’t know what is.

A few months later in June 2011, President Obama made a rash decision. He decided to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. One news outlet, the Cable News Network (CNN) considered this an “economic stimulus…[in a time of] a looming supply  shortage…a wake up call to OPEC…[or] a warning shot to speculators in the oil market.” Other times in his administration he has tapped the national reserve, especially in times of “crisis”. This reserve was about 695.9 million barrels as of February 2012, which is about 36 days of oil consumption. Even though this is true, the releasing of oil just keeps America’s addiction on oil, which doesn’t solve any problems. It just keeps things at the status quo.

In late 2011 the policy of helping Big Oil continued. The infamous Keystone XL pipeline was proposed by TransCanada. It would be a pipeline that would snake across the western United States and would consist of drilling in dirty tar sands and overtopping the largest aquifer in the world, the Ogallala Aquifer. Environmental activists and other politicians opposed the action while others stood their ground, saying the pipeline would create jobs. An opinion posted on the Qatari-based news service, Al Jaazera, by a Tar Sands activist Bill McKibben expresses his frustration with the Obama Administration four months before the project was rejected. In his opinion, there were numerous “indication[s] from this administration…that it is prepared to grant the necessary permission for [this] project…[even] the State Department, at the recommendation of Keystone XL pipeline builder TransCanada, hired a second company to carry out the environmental review [which]…considered itself a “major client” of TransCanada.” This collusion of business and government to McKibben was “simply corrupt [and] potentially the biggest scandal of the Obama years,” an ongoing crime that President Obama didn’t even try to stop.

The Keystone XL pipeline’s rejection seemed a lapse in pro-Big Oil policy. But the pipeline was not delayed in January 2012 because of environmental considerations, but due to “the arbitrary nature of the deadline.” Even though there was a review done, it occurred with the help of one of TransCanada’s major clients. However, this was not a powerful pro-Big Oil development.  The powerful move was the renewed support of the “All of the Above” energy policy which was touted back in March 2011. In the 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama touted the same energy policy based in the nationalist idea of “energy independence.” In February 2012, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House Communications Director, justified such a policy by numerous statistics one would expect under a Republican administration:

Since 2008, U.S. oil and natural gases production has increased each year…[and] imports of foreign oil have decreased…[and] the Obama Administration put in place..new standards that ensured that [oil] drilling continued [after] the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

These were not the only justifications for this new energy policy. After the BP oil spill in the Gulf, hundreds of drilling permits for the region were approved by the Obama Administration. These numbers were higher than what Obama spoke of in March 2011. 308 permits were approved for “deep water drilling activities…and…113 permits for shallow water wells in the Gulf of Mexico.” More evidence of government collusion with Big Oil is the permitting of oil drilling “at levels seen before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill” on land and in the water. This resulted in “more oil produced [in 2011] in this country…since 2003.” This was conveniently made possible because America has more “oil…rigs at work in the field than the rest of the world.” While this seems like an overstatement, this phenomenon led the government to another conclusion. Obama allowed the “further exploration in the Arctic” and he established “an interagency Alaska working group…[to] review…Shells proposed exploration…in the Arctic.” For many environmentalists, this may be a betrayal of the initiatives in his administration that have helped the planet (pushing solar, wind, biofuels a little bit). Arctic exploration is not the only place the President pledges his support. Obama has allowed the building of dozens of pipelines in his term of office and has pledged to work with “TransCanada…to expedite the necessary federal permits” for the Keystone XL pipeline.

The next month, those permits were expedited. Obama signed an Executive Order on March 22nd, 2012 titled “Improving Performance of Federal Permitting and Review of Infrastructure Projects”. The Executive Order told all Federal Agencies and departments to “significantly reduce the…time required to make decisions [on]…permitting and review of [Federal government] infrastructure projects.” Also it mandated that all steps be taken “to execute Federal permitting and review processes with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, ensuring the health, safety, and security of communities and the environment while supporting vital economic growth.”  Even though there is talk of a safe community and the environment, this was meant to expedite the Keystone XL pipeline and future pipelines.

How can a full analysis occur if time is limited and “economic growth” is promoted? In the speeches he made the same day, March 22, his support of the pipeline is evident. He told a crowd, mostly of his supporters, in Maljamar, New Mexico that “we’ve announced our support for more [pipelines] including” the Keystone XL pipeline.  He repeated the same message at Ohio State University and in Cushing, Oklahoma. Cushing is where the President explained his justification for approving this leg of the pipeline, echoing the themes of his executive order:

There’s a bottleneck…here because we can’t get enough…oil to our refineries fast enough… TransCanada has applied to build a new pipeline to speed more oil from Cushing to…refineries down on the Gulf Coast.  And today, I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape…and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done…So the southern leg of it [is] a [government] priority…The northern portion…[is] going to…[be] review[ed] properly…if [the government approves this pipeline]…we going to see jobs and growth…all across the country.

The following month, after the pro-pipeline speeches, Obama tried to act all tough against the oil and gas industry. According to an April 18th CNN Article, he required “drillers to capture emissions of certain air pollutants from new wells.” But under his direction, the Environmental Protection Agency allowed companies to “burn the pollutants [in question]…until the start of 2015” in a “nod to industry concerns [that the]…rules were being enacted too quickly.” This is not only a pro-Big Oil move, but it shows he weighs the concerns of the common American lower than that of Big Oil.

This month, the Obama Administration made what the independent blog site, Firedoglake, called “a deeply corrupt move.” Companies that used hydraulic fracturing (fracking) only needed to “disclose what chemicals they use after the well has been drilled.” This was giving in to Big Oil, thanks to meetings at the White House after the original rule was proposed three months earlier. Lobbyists representing those interests helped change the rule to their liking. As Firedoglake put it, the decision “to side with big oil over the American people and basic common sense” is pathetic. This decision is a further sign that Obama is an “oiled” president.

This corrupted nature comes back again when you look at Obama’s stance on speculation. His response has been weak-handed. He has said that should be investigated by Attorney General Eric Holder, “but nothing [really] has happened [because]… he seems to kind of accept the logic [that] we need to produce more domestic oil…and alternative energy sources” according to Paul Jay of the Real News Network.  In addition, Jay notes that Obama “doesn’t…talk…about the issue of speculation, about position limits [or about] the financialization [of oil].” Fidelity Investments continues this idea saying that “Obama would like to crack down…but he doesn’t talk about it often…or have enough friends in Congress [and that]…Obama’s attack on oil speculators…[is] doomed to join his legislative Wish List to Nowhere.” But this is not an issue isolated to Obama. The lack of action on these issues goes from the President to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and lack of a meeting of the CFTC’s Energy and Environmental Markets Advisory Committee, created by the Dodd-Frank Act, since 2009. Then Fidelity gets to the punch: “Obama can’t keep his eye on the crude [oil] bubble for very long.”

As a result of all of these connections to Big Oil, it wouldn’t be a surprise that the President gets money from them. Even though this is true, Republicans receive most of the money from them resulting in ThinkProgress’s derogatory name: the “Grand Oil Party.” But, the facts are undeniable: Big Oil has given to the Obama reelection campaign. The ExxonMobil Corporation has already given Obama $14,914 and Chevron Corporation has given him $9,750; still both corporations favor Mitt Romney for President in terms of money. In addition, Koch Industries, which is usually considered a Tea Party financier, is also an oil refining company, has given Obama a measly $1,000. Not surprisingly, after the administration’s response to the Gulf Oil Spill, BP favors Obama’s reelection. More money was given to him than contributions to Eric Cantor and John Boehner combined. Overall, OpenSecrets details that President Obama is the 12th biggest recipient of money, out of the top 20 recipients in the oil and gas industry.  He has received $181,957 in his campaign coffers. This comes at a time after Obama supposedly led the effort to end Big Oil’s big tax breaks, which was defeated in the Senate due to their influence. In recent times, however, especially in the past year, it has become evident that Obama is on the side of Big Oil, more than ever.

Big Oil (the “supermajors”) is the world’s five or sometimes six biggest publicly-owned oil & gas companies including American-based Chevron, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips Company British-based Royal Dutch Shell and BP and French-based Total S.A. Of the American companies, Obama seems to be on their side completely and overall on Big Oil’s side. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s eight years in office was much more on the side of the oil companies, but Obama still has a significant stake. What benefits the powerful oil corporations in America will, in turn, benefit the other world players. If such companies have headquarters in the United States like BP and Royal Dutch Shell, this is firmly the case. President Obama is on the side of Big Oil and is subsequently an “oiled” President. Until the President admits that he is more on the side of the world’s large oil corporations than the middle class, he will continue rhetoric that seems to speak for all Americans.

“In recent days, Israel appears to have begun preparing for military deployments on its southern border,” Tarek Fahmi, head of the Israel desk at the Cairo-based National Centre for Middle East Studies, told IPS.

On April 22, Egypt unilaterally cancelled a 2005 export agreement for the sale of natural gas to Israel, which for the past five years had ensured a steady supply of Egyptian gas from the northern Sinai Peninsula to Israel. Egyptian energy officials attributed the move to Israel’s failure to meet payment deadlines, stressing that the decision was “not politically motivated.”

Israel, which is said to depend on Egyptian gas for some 40 percent of its electricity needs, was quick to register its opposition.

Several Israeli officials warned of the move’s dire implications for the Camp David peace agreement, signed between Egypt and Israel in 1979. Israeli opposition leader Shaul Mofaz called on his country’s chief patron, the United States, to intervene on Israel’s behalf.

The Israeli Finance Ministry went so far as to describe the move as “a dangerous precedent that casts clouds over the peace agreements and the atmosphere of peace between Egypt and Israel.”

While Israeli officials have vowed to take legal action to ensure the supply of Egyptian gas, local energy analysts say Egypt was well within its legal rights to opt out of the deal.

“The Israeli purchasers failed to pay their bills to the tune of some 100 million dollars,” Ibrahim Zahran, Egyptian petroleum expert, told IPS. “The contract clearly states that if either party fails to live up to its obligations, the other has the right to terminate the agreement.”

Egypt first began pumping natural gas to Israel in 2008, based on a deal hammered out three years earlier that allowed Egypt-Israel joint venture East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) to sell Egyptian natural gas to Israeli buyers, including the government-run Israel Electric Corporation.

Given Israel’s broad unpopularity on the Egyptian street, the gas-export deal has met with widespread public opposition since its inception. Critics note that, by providing Israel with Egyptian gas at far below international prices (while Egypt itself suffers from chronic energy shortages), the deal effectively supports — albeit indirectly — Israel’s ongoing occupation and annexation of Palestinian land.

Notably, the pipeline that carries the gas across the northern Sinai Peninsula to Israel has been subject to 14 attacks of varying severity — all by as-yet-unidentified culprits — since Egypt’s revolution early last year, often resulting in lengthy supply stoppages. As a result, electricity prices in Israel have reportedly increased by over 20 percent since the beginning of 2011.

Given the export deal’s broad unpopularity, the decision to scrap it was welcomed by Egyptian public figures and groups across the political spectrum.

Mahmoud Ghozlan, spokesman for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (which now controls almost half of the seats in parliament), called the decision “excellent,” noting that Egypt “badly needs all of its natural gas to meet its own domestic consumption needs.” The liberal Egyptian Social Democratic Party described the move as “the inevitable fruit of Egypt’s January 25 Revolution.”

Frontrunners in Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential polls, slated for May 23/24, likewise hailed the decision. “The move should come as no surprise given the information about the corruption that surrounded the deal,” former Arab League chief and presidential hopeful Amr Moussa told IPS.

Indeed, Sameh Fahmi, Mubarak’s last petroleum minister, is currently on trial — along with six other former officials — on charges of squandering public funds related to the gas-export agreement. According to prosecutors, the deal has so far resulted in over 714 million dollars in losses to the public purse.

While the decision to terminate the agreement was officially attributed to “commercial reasons,” Egyptian analysts believe it was prompted by political and strategic considerations.

“The move transcends mere commercial factors,” said analyst Fahmi. “A decision of this magnitude couldn’t have been taken without the approval of Egypt’s ruling military council.

“The decision has certainly bolstered the popularity of both the military council (which has governed the country since Mubarak’s ouster) and the military-appointed government, both of which had come under increasingly strident popular criticism in recent months.”

Fahmi does not rule out the possibility of military escalations should relations deteriorate further.

Only days before the termination of the gas-export deal, Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman reportedly described Egypt as a “greater threat than Iran,” calling for the deployment of additional divisions to Israel’s southern border. “We have to be prepared for all possibilities,” Lieberman was quoted as saying in the Hebrew press.

And one day after the deal’s termination, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, head of Egypt’s ruling military council, warned that Egypt’s border was “perpetually in danger.” In a speech before troops from the Egyptian Second Army — who were conducting exercises in Sinai at the time — Tantawi promised to “break the legs of anyone who dared encroach on our borders.”

According to Fahmi, Tantawi’s statement “sent a message to Israel that Egypt is ready to defend its territory from any aggression.” It was not insignificant, Fahmi went on to point out, that Tantawi’s comments “came as the Egyptian Second Army was holding its first live-fire military drills in Sinai since the signing of the peace agreement.”

In a further apparent escalation last week, reports emerged that Israel planned to deploy at least 22 reserve battalions to its borders with Syria and Egypt due to “growing instability” and possible “security threats” emanating from both countries. Israel’s military has reportedly already approved official requests for the call-up of reserve forces.

“Recent developments point to an Israeli military build-up on the border with Sinai, carried out in order to deal with Egypt from a position of strength,” said Fahmi. “In the absence of a diplomatic resolution of the current crisis in relations, it would be a mistake to dismiss the potential for eventual military conflict.”

It can be argued that the concessions to the extractive MNC and local ‘leading’ classes assures stability, steady revenues and finances the incremental social expenditures which permit the re-election of the center-left regimes. In other words a de facto alliance between the “top” and “bottom” of the class structure is the unstated bases for center-left electoral successes despite the growing political divergence between the regimes and sections of the social movements.

The Progressive Camp

There is a general consensus that regimes in seven countries in Latin America form what can be called the “progressive camp”: Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Peru and Venezuela.

The identifying features usually attributable to regimes in these countries include: (1) their past political trajectory: most are led by former leaders and activists from social movements, trade unions or guerrilla formations; (2) their relatively independent foreign policy pronouncements especially regarding US intervention and sanctions policies; (3) their ideological rhetoric rejecting US-led regional bodies and favoring Latin American centered organizations; (4) their populist electoral campaign programs regarding social equity, environmentalism, and human rights; (5) their vehement rejection of ‘neo-liberalism’ and traditional neo-liberal personalities, parties and privatizations; (6) their strategic perspective that envisions a prolonged process of social transformation that emphasizes an agenda featuring modernization, developementalist priorities, and high levels of investment oriented toward global markets; (7) their prolonged political incumbency based on constitutional reforms permitting re-election justified by the need for completing the transformative vision.

The progressive camp has a self-image, projected inward to its electorate as representing a rupture or ‘historical’ break with the past, first with regard to the traditional neo-liberal oligarchy and secondly with the ‘statist’ left. In the case of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela they frequently resort to rhetoric evoking “21st century socialism”. The potency of the appeal to radical novelty has a limited time span dependent on the degree to which the regimes pursue policies in variance with the preceding neo-liberal regime.

The ‘Left-Right Division’ as Represented by the Progressive Camp (PC)

The perceptions of the objective and subjective divergence between the progressive camp and the right vary according to whether they emanate from official sources or from a critical empirical investigation.

According to the ideologues of the “Progressive Camp” (PC) there are at least five major policy areas which reflect the radical rupture with the traditional neo-liberal right.

(1) Nationalism: (a) the PC through renegotiations of contracts with extractive MNC secures a higher rate of taxation, increasing revenues for the national treasury; (b) via increased state investment it converts wholly owned private firms into public-private joint ventures; (c) through increases in royalty payments it lessens ‘foreign exploitation’; (d) through the greater presence of ‘local technocrats’ it increases national oversight of strategic economic decisions.
(2) Foreign Policy: The progressive camp has pursued an independent, if not explicitly anti-imperialist foreign policy. The progressive camp has established several Latin American and Caribbean regional organizations which deliberately exclude the presence of North American and European imperial countries such as ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations). The PC has rejected sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Syria, and Gaza and opposed the US-backed NATO war against Libya. They criticized the US position at the Summit of the America’s meeting in April 2012 on at least three major issues – inclusion of Cuba, opposition to British colonial control of the Malvinas, and the de-penalization of drugs. The PC has expressed its opposition to US hegemony, to IMF “structural reforms” and Euro-US control over international lending institutions. With the exception of Venezuela, the PC has diversified its export markets. For example Brazil exports to the US only 12.5% of its goods and services, Argentina 6.9%, and Bolivia 8.2%.
(3) Social Policy: The PC has increased social expenditures, especially toward reducing rural poverty; increased the minimum wage; approved salary and wage increases. In a few countries they provide easy credit and financing to small and medium businesses, have given legal title to land squatters and distributed plots of uncultivated public lands as a kind of ‘agrarian reform’.
(4) Regulation: The PC has, with varying degree of consistency, imposed controls over the financial sector, regulating the flow of speculative capital and the volatility of financial markets. With regard to the extractive sector regulations have been relaxed to permit the large-scale inflow of capital and the pervasive use of toxic chemicals and genetically modified seeds by agro-business. They have permitted the expansion of mining, agriculture, and the timber industry into Indigenous people’s and natural reservations. They have financed large-scale infrastructure projects linking extractive enterprises to export outlets trespassing onto previously regulated, protected natural habitats. Regulatory norms have been harnessed to facilitate ‘productive’ extractive developmentalism and to limit the financialization of the economy.
(5) Labor Policy: has been based on a ‘corporatist model’ of business-state-trade union (tri partite) negotiations and conciliation to limit lockouts and strikes and maintain growth, exports and revenue flows. Labor policy has been conditioned by the policy of limiting budget deficits, fixing wage increases, to the rate of inflation. In line with orthodox fiscal policies, pensions for public sector workers have been frozen or reduced especially among the middle and high end functionaries. Traditional job security guarantees have been maintained not augmented and severance pay has not been raised. Strikes by public sector workers, especially among teachers, medical staff and social service workers have been frequent and have led to government mediation and marginal gains. Government policy has been oriented toward protecting managerial prerogatives, while respecting and upholding the legal status, collective bargaining rights of trade unions. Within nationalized firms, state-appointed directors rule; there is no move toward worker self-management or ‘co-management’-except in limited cases in Venezuela. The structure of labor relations follows the private corporate hierarchical model Labor has, at best, an advisory role regarding health and safety but no determining influences or investment within this corporate framework. Pressure via strikes and protest by trade unions have been necessary, frequently in alliance with community groups, to rectify the most egregious corporate violations of health and safety rules. While the progressive regimes publically eschew neo-liberal “labor flexibility” policies they have done little to expand and deepen labor prerogatives over the labor and productive process.

The principle difference in labor policy between the progressive regimes and the traditional right is the ‘open door’ to labor leaders, their willingness to mediate and grant incremental wage increases, especially of the minimum wage and generally, the reduction of harsh, violent repression.

Continuities and Similarities between Past Neoliberal and Contemporary Progressive Regimes

Writers, academics, and journalists on the Right and Center-left emphasize the difference between the progressive and the past neo-liberal regimes, overlooking the large-scale socio-economic and political structural continuities. A more nuanced, balanced, and objective analysis requires that these continuities be taken into account because they play a major role in discussing the limitations and emerging conflicts and crises facing the progressive regimes. Moreover, these limitations, based on the continuities, highlight the importance of alternative development models proposed by popular social movements.

The agro-mineral export model has demonstrated profound strategic deficiencies in its very structure and performance. The promotion of agro-mineral exports has been accompanied by the large-scale, long-term entrance of foreign capital which in turn determines the rates of investment, the sources for inputs of machinery, technology and ‘know-how’, as well as control over the marketing and processing of raw materials. The MNC “partners” of the progressive regimes have conditioned their involvement on the bases of (a) the de-regulation of environmental controls; (b) the termination of price controls and the introduction of “international prices” for sales to the domestic market; (c) freedom to control foreign exchange earnings and to remit profits overseas.

They also control decisions regarding the exploitation of mineral reserves. Expansion of production is dependent on their own global criteria rather on the needs of the ‘host’ country. As a result, despite the “re-negotiated” contracts, which the progressive regimes hail as a “giant advance” toward “nationalization”, the cumulative losses in revenues and in rebalancing the economy are substantial. If one looks beyond the agro-mineral enclave the negative impact to further development are substantial. The very limited impact that the agro-mineral model has on the economy as whole has led to occasional conflicts between the MNC and the progressive host governments. A case in point is the conflict between the nominally Spanish oil company Repsol and the Argentine government of Cristina Fernandez in April 2012. Repsol’s behavior illustrates all the pitfalls of collaboration with foreign overseas extractive corporations. Repsol refused to increase investments, claiming that local regulated prices reduced profit margins. As a result Argentina’s energy bill rose three-fold between 2010 and 2011 from $3 billion to $9 billion. Furthermore, Repsol repatriated its profits, paid high dividends to overseas stockholders and thus had little impact in creating domestic industries producing inputs or refineries to process petroleum. The attempt by the deceased President Kirchner to increase ‘national ownership’ by bringing in a local private capitalist, (the Peterson Group) had no positive impact, merely entrenching Repsol’s control. When Fernandez took majority shares in order establish public control and increase local production, the entire Eurozone leadership led by the Spanish government and the Western financial press launched a virulent campaign, threatened litigation and predicted economic disaster. The problem of ‘inviting’ foreign MNCs to invest is that it is hard to disinvite them. Once they enter a country no matter how unfavorable their performance, it is difficult to rectify or undo the damage and move onto a new public centered model of development.

All the progressive regimes with the possible exception of Venezuela have signed long-term large-scale contracts with major foreign extractive multi-nationals. Apart from the increase in royalties these agreements do not differ greatly from contracts signed by preceding right-wing neo-liberal regimes.

Evo Morales signed a large-scale exploitation contract with Jindal, an Indian multi-national to exploit the iron-mine Mutun with virtually all inputs — machinery, transport, etc. — imported and with very limited ‘industrializing’ of the raw iron ore, mostly simple iron ‘nuggets’. The bulk of Bolivia’s gas and oil is exploited by foreign MNC-public ‘joint ventures’ and is shipped abroad, leaving most of the 60% rural households without piped gas,and resulting in Bolivia’s importing most of its diesel.

Ecuador under President Correa, another leading progressive president, signed two big contracts with foreign oil groups in February 2012, despite the opposition of the majority of Indian organizations including CONAI. In Ecuador, as in Bolivia, big oil and gas companies, while raising objections to the re-negotiations of contracts leading to an increase in royalty payments and an increased presence of public officials, retain a privileged position in crucial decisions regarding management, marketing, technology and investment. Despite claims to the contrary, the leaders of the progressive regimes sign off on these strategic agreements without consulting the communities affected. Decisions are based exclusively on executive privilege. The style and substance of the distribution of the powers and privileges in the oil and gas agreements between the progressive governments and the multi-nationals are no different than what transpired under previous ‘neo-liberal’ regimes. Moreover, in both Ecuador and Bolivia many of the “technocrats” and administrators who worked under the previous neoliberal regimes play a prominent role in running the joint venture.

While progressive regimes have pursued anti-poverty programs and have registered some successes in reducing poverty levels, they do so as a result of the growth of the economy not via the redistribution of wealth. In fact, the progressive regimes have not pursued redistributive polices: income and land concentrations, including high levels of inequality remain intact. In fact the hierarchy of the class structure has not been altered and in most cases has been reinforced by the inclusion of new entrants into the upper and middle class. These include many former leaders and activists from the lower middle and working class who have entered the government as well as ‘new capitalists’ benefiting from state contract agreements with the progressive regime.

The financial system has remained intact and prospered under the progressive regimes, especially because of the regimes tight fiscal policies, build-up foreign reserves, control over government spending and low rates of inflation. Financial sector profits are especially high in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Brazil, in particular, has attracted large inflows of speculative capital from Wall Streets and the City of London because of its high interest rates relative to the rates in North America and Europe.

Alongside the concentration of ownership in the extractive and financial sector, the progressive regimes have not introduced progressive taxes to reduce the disparities of wealth. The income of the agro-business elites in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Ecuador are several hundred times that of the bulk of subsistence farmers, peasants and rural laborers. Many of latter remain subject to brutal working and living conditions. In many cases, the progressive regimes have done little to enforce the labor and health codes in the giant agro-business plantations while workers are subject to unregulated toxic chemical sprays.

If the configuration of ownership and wealth remains relatively unchanged from the neo-liberal past, the progressive governments have accentuated the tendencies toward export specialization. Under the progressive governments the economies have become less diversified and more dependent on agro-mineral and energy exports, and more dependent on large-scale long-term foreign investments for growth. State revenue and growth are more dependent on primary product exports.

The free market policies of the progressive agro-mineral export regimes have stimulated the growth of large-scale commercial activity. The commercial sector is increasingly influenced by the large-scale entrance of foreign owned multi-nationals, like Wal-Mart, who source their products overseas, undermining local-small scale producers and retailers.

The appreciation of the currency has adversely affected traditional manufacturers and the transport industry causing significant job losses especially in textiles, footwear and automobiles in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. Moreover, favorable polices promoting large-scale agro-mineral exporters has been accompanied by a credit squeeze on local small business people, especially, producers for local markets who have been bit hard by the import of cheap consumer goods (from Asia). Farmers producing food for local markets have been downgraded in the drive to expand cultivation of export crops like soya.

In summary, the progressive regimes have pursued a multi-faceted double discourse: an anti-imperialist, nationalist and populist rhetoric for domestic consumption while putting into practice a policy of fomenting and expanding the role of foreign extractive capital in joint ventures with the state and a rising new national bourgeoisie. The progressive regimes articulate a narrative of socialism and participatory democracy but in practice pursue policies linking development with the concentration and centralization of capital and executive power.

The progressive regimes preach a doctrine of social justice and equity and a practice of co-optation of social leaders and clientalism via poverty programs for the poorest sectors of society.

The progressive regimes have combined incremented income policies with large-scale structural changes, benefiting the extractive-primary sector. Stability of the PC is utterly dependent on the increasing demand for raw materials, high commodity prices, and open markets. The progressive regimes have successfully linked trade union and sectors of the peasant movement to the state and have undermined or weakened independent class organizations and replaced them with corporate tri-partite structures.

The progressives have successfully ‘reformed’ or replaced the chaotic, de-regulated, conflictual, racialist policies of their predecessors and institutionalized “normal capitalism.” They have introduced rules and procedures favorable to institutional stability, fiscal discipline, and incremental but unequal gains. In other words, the “parameters of neo-liberalism” are now effectively administered and legitimated by faux nationalism based on greater political autonomy and market diversification. Centralized executive decision making based on agreements which require extractive MNC to invest and develop the forces of production is legitimated by an electoral framework and a multi-class political coalition.

The domestic and foreign policies of the progressive extractive regimes reflect two contradictory experiences: their radical origins in the lead-up to taking power and their subsequent adoption of an agro-mineral developementalist export strategy, favored by neo-liberal technocrats. The “synthesis” of these two apparently “contradictory” experiences finds expression in the adoption of an independent, critical political position toward imperialist militarism and interventionism and economic collaboration with the agencies of economic imperialism, namely the signing of long-term and large-scale contracts with US-EU-Canadian agro-mining and energy multi-nationals. In other words, the progressive extractive regimes have ‘redefined’ or reduced imperialism to mean its state structures and policies rather than its economic components (MNC) which are engaged in the extraction of raw materials and exploitation of labor. In the same fashion, they redefine ‘anti-imperialism’ to mean opposition to political-military interventions and a ‘fair distribution’ of profits between the regime and its MNC “partner”. This redefinition allows the progressive regimes to claim popular legitimacy on the bases of periodical criticisms of the policies and practices of the imperial state while collaboration and agreements with the MNC allow the progressive regimes to retain support from domestic and overseas business interests. When a progressive regime, as is the case of Argentina ruled by Cristina Fernandez, decides to “nationalize” or more correctly secure the majority shares in Repsol, the nominally Spanish oil multi-national, the entire financial press, the European Union, and Washington denounce the move and threaten reprisals. In other words, the unstated pact between the progressive camp and the imperial regimes is that political differences are tolerable but nationalist economic measures are not acceptable. Renegotiations of contracts to increase state revenues may cause a temporary suspension of new investments but not a political confrontation. However, the public takeover of a foreign extractive firm evokes predictable hostility and retaliation from the imperial states. The Argentine progressive regime’s embrace of a policy of economic nationalism was, however, enterprise and sector specific. The Fernandez regime did not, and has no future plans, to expropriate other extractive firms, nor was the measure part of a general nationalist strategy to shift toward greater public ownership. Rather Repsol’s refusal to increase investments and production was increasing Argentina’s dependence on imported oil, which was deteriorating its balance of payments and foreign currency reserves. Repsol’s refusal to comply with Argentina’s developementalist agenda was based on the Fernandez policy of maintaining the retail price of oil for the domestic market below the international price. Repsol’s decline in production was a way of leveraging the regime to lift price controls. However, a higher petrol price would have a negative impact on industrial and private consumers, raising costs and reducing the competitiveness of the Argentine exporters and domestic producers. In effect, Repsol’s intransigence threatened to undermine the social and political balance of forces between labor and capital and between extractive exporters and popular consumers, which sustained the regimes majoritarian coalition. In brief, the measure was nationalist in form but capitalist developementalist in content.

Even so the measure polarized the global economy between the imperial west and the Latin American left, with the usual imperial satraps in Latin America (Mexico’s Calderon and Colombia’s Santos) backing Repsol.

Divisions between the Progressive Regimes and the Social Movements

Prior to coming to power via electoral processes, the progressive leaders maintained close ties and actively supported and participated in the ‘street action’ and mass struggle of the social movements. They embraced the banners of economic nationalism, ecological conservation and respect for the natural reserves of the Indigenous communities, social equality, and reconsideration of the foreign debt including the repudiation of ‘illegal debts’.

The social movements played a major role in politicizing and mobilizing the working and peasant classes to elect the progressive presidents. This convergence was short-lived. Once in power, the progressive regime appointed orthodox economic ministers to run the economy. They adopted the extractive strategy, shifted from a nationalist public sector economy, designed to diversify the economy, to a ‘mixed economy’ based on joint ventures with overseas extractive capital. First, the Indigenous communities of Peru, Ecuador, and some sectors in Bolivia went into opposition, on the bases that their interests were neglected and they were not consulted. Second, sectors of the working class and public employees struck demanding higher salaries, an increase in public spending. Small farmers and manufacturers demanded economic stimulus for family farms and local industry rather than subsidies for agro-mineral MNC, fiscal orthodoxy, and export strategies based on lower labor costs and neglect of the domestic market.

Radical trade union peasant and Indigenous leaders of the social movements called into question the entire agro-mineral extractive strategy, the distribution and administration of state revenues and expenditures. They reasserted their support for a social program embracing agrarian reform, including the expropriation of large plantations and the redistribution of land to landless peasants. Workers’ leaders called for an industrial policy to process ‘raw materials’ in order to create manufacturing jobs. Some trade unionists called for the nationalization of strategic industries and banks. However, despite some major protests, the bulk of the followers of the social movements and the majority of their leaders soon shifted from radical rejection of the extractive model to demands for a bigger share of the revenues. The progressive regimes attracted the bulk of the social leaders to tri-partite councils of conciliation to negotiate and secure incremental changes. The progressive regimes highlighted their opposition to “neo-liberalism.” They redefined it as unregulated capitalism based on low royalties and underfunding of social programs. The progressive regimes successfully divided the social movements between “utopian” radical opponents and progressive reformists. In time of social strife, the progressive regimes evoked a “left-right alliance,” charging their social critics of acting on behalf of imperialism, impervious to their own collaboration with imperial based multi-nationals. Presidential appeals, a nationalist populist discourse, and increased revenues which funded increased social expenditures weakened the left opposition. Moderate but sustained increases in anti-poverty programs and minimum wages neutralized the appeal of the radical leaders in the social movements. Despite the progressive regime’s break with its ‘radical egalitarian roots,’ it was more than able to secure large-scale mass-electoral support, based on the overall dynamic growth of the economy and steady growth of income. Both were underpinned by long-term high commodity prices.

Popular extractivist presidents repeatedly won elections by substantial majorities and were able to mobilize sectors of the moderate social movements to counter anti-extractivist social movements. The high prices of commodities and multiple opportunities for exploitation of resources attracted foreign investors despite higher royalty payments. Foreign investors were attracted by the social stability ensured by the progressive regimes in contrast to the instability of the previous neo-liberal regimes. The progressive regimes thrived on economic ties with the MNC and an electoral alliance with the lower classes.

Case Studies of Extractive Capitalism and the Progressive Camp

While the seven regimes which form the ‘progressive camp’ share a common development strategy based on the export of primary commodities there are significant differences in the levels of diversity of their economies, the nature and character of the commodities which they export, the degrees of social polarization and social cohesion and the size and scope of the opposition. In line with these differences there are also substantial differences in the degree to which the “progressive and extractive model” is sustainable or subject to upheaval or reversal.

The progressive camp can be divided in many ways: between those regimes based on charismatic leaders and extreme dependence on primary exports (Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Venezuela) and those with developed industrial sectors and ‘institutionalized political leadership (Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay). There are also significant differences in the degree of class and ethnic conflict: Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are experiencing significant mass resistance from substantial Indigenous communities, while in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, where the Indigenous population is sparse, there is only isolated opposition. In terms of class struggles, Bolivia, has experienced widespread protests by health, education, mining, and factory workers. Venezuela has faced lockouts and boycotts organized by the economic elite (“class struggle from above”). Ecuador faced widespread protests from the police. Most of the rest of the countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay) faced limited strikes largely on wage issues. With the exception of Bolivia, the major trade union confederations work closely and collaborate with the progressive regimes; in contrast, the peasant and rural workers movements in Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru have retained a greater degree of independence and militancy largely because they have been the most prejudiced by the agro-mineral export strategies. In Venezuela and Brazil, landlord’s private armies have played a major role in combatting land reform beneficiaries with relative impunity.

The most pervasive and environmental degradation has occurred in Brazil, where millions of acres of rainforest have been “cleared” during the decade of Workers Party rule. Chemical exploitation of agriculture is strong in most countries especially in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay where soya production has become a dominant crop. All the major agro-industrial exporters (Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) rely on toxic chemicals and GM seeds with numerous cases of toxic consequences for indigenous residents and their natural habitat. The issue of toxicity and environmental degradation resulting from the giant mining and timber companies has been well documented in Peru, Ecuador, and Uruguay. Overall, the greater the urban population and the more dispersed the rural communities adversely, affected, the smaller the environmental protest and the likelihood that NGO ecologists play a leading role in protest.

Since the extractive industries are outside of the major urban centers, since most of the major trade union confederations collaborate with the progressive regimes and secure incremental wage increases, and since the overall economy has been growing and unemployment has declined, macro-economic imbalances, commodity dependency and related structural vulnerabilities have not resulted in major confrontations between labor and capital. The most contentious conflicts which have occurred have been between the orthodox neoliberal elites backed by US and European powers and the progressive regimes. Several cases come to mind.

On April 12, 2002 and in December 2002-February 2003 the Venezuelan capitalist class backed by the US and Spain organized an abortive coup which was reversed and a petrol industry lockout that was defeated. An uprising in 2011 led by the police in Ecuador and an abortive coup in Bolivia were put down successfully, before they gained traction. A large-scale agro business protest in Argentina in 2008 which paralyzed the agro-export sector against an export tax ended with regime concessions.

In large part, these “class struggles from above” worked in favor of the progressive regimes because it allowed them to pose the issue as one between a popular democratic regime and a retrograde authoritarian oligarchy. As a result the progressive regimes were able to neutralize, at least temporarily, internal critics from the left. The defeat of “the Right” burnished the credentials of the progressive camp and raised their popularity.

While popular support was important in sustaining the progressive regimes against US and EU backed rightest destabilization campaigns, of equal or greater importance was the backing of the military, sectors of the business elite and extractive capitalists. The progressives by adopting “moderate policies” – including business subsidies and generous pay hikes to the military – were able to divide the elite, retain support of the military and isolate the right-wing opposition. The right-wing has remained electorally marginal and provide very limited leverage for US-EU interference and influence over the progressive agenda.

The degree of “progressiveness” within the progressive extractive capitalist camp varies substantially.

The Chavez government has advanced an anti-imperialist and socialist agenda involving the rejection of US coups, wars and blockade of independent states; it has supported the re-renationalization of oil, aluminum, and other raw material, mining, and energy sources. Its extensive agrarian reform benefiting 300,000 families is aimed at food self-sufficiency. Universal free public health and higher education and subsidized basic food prices via publicly owned supermarkets; and large-scale low-cost public housing for the poor along with literacy campaigns and the formation of thousands of neighborhood councils to adjudicate and resolve local issues have deepened and extended the socialization process

On a far lesser scale, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina have pursued independent foreign policies. Their partial and selective nationalizations are designed to increase revenues rather than as part of a long-term, large-scale strategy of transformation. They have not followed Chavez’s lead on agrarian reform and on greater enhancement of social spending on health, housing, and higher education. They offer remote, public lands of dubious quality as “land reform.” They have been advocates of incremental changes involving wage and social benefits commensurate with the rise in revenues from commodity exports and in line with the rate of inflation, Bolivia and Ecuador have dislodged land squatters and defended the major agro-business land holdings. The least ‘reformist’ regimes with the most dubious ‘progressive’ credentials are Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru (under Ollanta Humala) which have adopted a free-market agenda; they actively promote large inflows of unregulated foreign investments, degrade millions of acres of the rain forests (Brazil especially), promote agro-business and oppose agrarian reform in all of its forms, relying on the dispersion of peasants and landless to the cities, towns where they serve as a labor reserve for capital or join the low paying informal sector. These “moderate” progressive regimes have signed military accords with the US, and adopt a low profile in opposition to US imperial policies in the Middle East. Their “progressiveness” is found in their support of regional integration, their opposition to US hemispheric hegemonism (opposing the US coup in Honduras, blockade of Cuba and interference in Venezuela), and the diversification of overseas markets. Brazil leads the way in catering to Wall Street speculators and in government anti-poverty spending on minimum food baskets. Poverty reduction is matched by the spectacular growth of millionaires linked to the finance and agro-mineral export sector. The “moderate” progressives have the most egregious (and well-documented) record of ongoing environmental degradation. In Peru, Humala has given the green light to mining exploitation threatening the livelihood of thousands of peasants and local business in Cajamarca; Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, of the Workers Party, promoted the destruction of millions of acres of the Amazon rain forest and displacement of scores of Indian communities in a decade. In Uruguay, the Broad Front Presidents Tabaré Vasquez and Mujica promoted the highly polluting Botina cellulose factory contaminating the Parana River despite mass protests.

In summary, it is difficult to generalize about the performance of the progressive camp given the divergences in social and economic policies. But a “report card” of sorts can be drawn up.

All regimes have lowered poverty levels and increased dependence on agro-mineral exports and investments. All have signed and/or renegotiated contracts with extractive MNC’ few have diversified their economies. Those with a substantial industrial base (Argentina, Brazil, Peru) have suffered a severe decline in the manufacturing sector because of appreciating currencies and loss of competitiveness resulting from high prices for commodity exports. Incremental wage agreements have led to low level social conflicts in the cities (except in Bolivia), but displacement of peasants and degradation have intensified conflicts in the interior between rural communities and the MNC leading to state repression (Peru).

The social impact of the progressive regimes has the widest variation, with Venezuela registering the most far-reaching structural changes and the rest lacking any vision or project for redistributing wealth, income, or land. Their common support for regional integration is matched by important divergences in accommodation to US military policy. Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, the members of ALBA, reject military treaties, while Brazil, Uruguay, and Peru have signed military agreements with the Pentagon.

The overall economic performance is mixed. Brazil’s economy, especially its manufacturing sector, is stagnating with zero or negative growth in 2011-2012, Venezuela is recovering, but with over a 20% rate of inflation while the rest of the PC is experiencing steady growth, but increasing dependence on commodity exports to the Asian (China) market.

Alternatives to the status quo extractive economies vary enormously. In Venezuela, the regime has made diversification a high priority; the Brazilian and Argentine regimes are taking protectionist measures to promote industry with limited success especially as their policies are countermanded by the real expansion of acreage for soya production and exports. Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia talk of diversification but have avoided taking measures to shift to food production and family farming and have yet to take concrete measures to stimulate local industry via a publicly funded industrialization policy.

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

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

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

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

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

1. Russia: beginning with Vyborg and Beregvya.

2. Annexed to Russia: Turkmenistan.

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

4. Captured from Russia: Georgia.

5. Eastern Mediterranean: Syria and Lebanon.

6. Qatar and Egypt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of the Game

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

Gazprom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nabucco in a tight spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

China’s Participation

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

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

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

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

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

The Gas of Syria

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

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

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

An all out war against newly independent South Sudan might not be in Sudan’s best interest. South Sudan’s saber-rattling is not an entirely independent initiative; its most recent territorial transgressions – which saw the occupation of Sudan’s largest oil field in Heglig on April 10, followed by a hasty retreat ten days later – might have been a calculated move aimed at drawing Sudan into a larger conflict.

Stunted by the capture of Heglig, which, according to some estimates, provides nearly half of the country’s oil production, Bashir promised victory over Juba. Speaking to large crowd in the capital of North Kordofan, El-Obeid, Bashir affectively declared war. “Heglig isn’t the end, it is the beginning,” he said, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Bashir also declared a desire to ‘liberate’ the people of South Sudan from a government composed of ‘insects.’ Even when Heglig was declared a liberated region by Sudan’s defence minister, the humiliation of defeat was simply replaced by the fervor of victory. “They started the fighting and we will announce when it will end, and our advance will never stop,” Bashir announced on April 20.

Statements issued by the government of South Sudan are clearly more measured, with an international target audience in mind. Salva Kiir, President of South Sudan, simply said that his forces departed the region following appeals made by the international community. This includes a statement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which described the attack on Heglig as “an infringement on the sovereignty of Sudan and a clearly illegal act” (Reuters, April 19). A day before the hasty withdrawal, South Sudan government spokesman Barnaba Marial Benjamin claimed there had been no conflict in the first place. His statement was both bewildering and patronizing. He considered Sudan, which was then rallying for war to recapture its oil-rich area, a neighbor and “friendly nation”, and claimed that “up to now we have not crossed even an inch into Sudan” (Associated Press, April 19).

The fact remains, however, that wherever there is oil political narratives cannot possibly be so simple. Sudan is caught in a multidimensional conflict involving weapons trade, internal instabilities, multiple civil wars and the reality of outside players with their own interests. None of this is enough to excuse the readiness for war on behalf of Khartoum and Juba, but it certainly presents serious obstacles to any attempt aimed at rectifying the situation.

With a single act of aggression, a whole set of conflicts are prone to flaring up. It is the nature of proxy politics, as many armed groups seek opportunities for territorial advances and financial gains. News reports already speak of a possible involvement of Uganda should the fledging war between Khartoum and Juba cross conventional boundaries. “As the possibility of a full-fledged war became unnervingly higher, General Aronda Nyakairima, chief of Uganda’s defense forces, said that his army might be compelled to intervene if Bashir did overthrow South Sudan’s regime,” reported Alexis Okeowo in the New Yorker website (April 20). Both Sudans are fighting their own war against various rebel groups. Despite the lack of basic food in parts of the region, plenty of weapons effortlessly find inroads to wherever there is potential strife.

In a statement published last July, Amnesty International called on UN member states to control arm shipments to both Sudan and South Sudan. It accused the US, Russia and China of fueling violations in the Sudan conflict through the arms trade.

US support of South Sudan is already well known. “The US reportedly provided $100 million-a-year in military assistance to the SPLA (Sudan People’s Liberation Army),” according to Russia Today on April 19, citing a December 2009 diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks.

According to political author and columnist Reason Wafawarova, US interest in South Sudan is neither accidental nor motivated by humanitarian issues. He told RT, “It would not be surprising if the US is trying to capitalize on the vulnerability of South Sudan in its efforts to establish the AFRICOM base somewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.” RT goes on to reference Sudan’s Al-Intibaha newspaper for its reports on Israeli weapon supplies to Juba.

US and Israeli military support of Juba is not a new phenomenon. Sudan’s civil war (1983-2005), which cost an estimated 2.5 million lives, could not have lasted as long as it did without steady sources of military funding. And while the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the January 9-15, 2011 referendum, and finally the independence of South Sudan in July were all meant to usher in a new era of peace and cooperation, none actualized. Sudan’s territorial concessions proved most costly, and South Sudan, destroyed and landlocked, was ripe for outside exploitation.

Both countries are now caught in a deadly embrace. They can neither part ways completely, nor cooperate successfully without a risk of war at every turn. Bashir also knows he is running out of options. While Khartoum has already “lost three-quarters of its oil revenue after the secession,” according Egypt’s Al Ahram Weekly, “now it is poised to lose the rest.”

Naturally, a conflict of this magnitude cannot be resolved by empty gestures and reassuring statements. The conflict has been festering for decades, and war has been the only common language. Powerful countries, including the US, Russia, China, but also Israel and regional Arab and Africa players exploited the conflict to their advantage whenever possible. In a recent analysis, the International Crisis Group in Brussels advised that a “new strategy is needed to avert an even bigger crisis.” The crisis group recommends that the “UN Security Council must reassert itself to preserve international peace and security, including the implementation of border monitoring tasks as outlined by UN Interim Security Force in Abyei.”

Expecting the Security Council to act in political tandem seems a bit too optimistic, however. Considering that the US is arming and supporting South Sudan, and that Russia and China continue to support Khartoum, the rivalry in fact exists within the UN itself.

For a sustainable future peace arrangement, Sudan’s territorial integrity must be respected, and South Sudan must not be pushed to the brink of desperation. Rivalries between the US, China and Russia cannot continue at the expense of nations that teeter between starvation and civil wars. And whatever hidden hands that continue to exploit Sudan’s woes now need to be exposed and isolated.

“People should be aware that the oil is still there,” says Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination.

Subra says that the reality she is seeing on the ground contrasts sharply with the image painted by BP. “I’m extremely concerned on the impact it’s having on all these sick individuals,” she says. Subra believes we may be just at the beginning of this disaster. In every community she visits, fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells. She says tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region.

While it's too early to assess the long-term environmental impact, a host of recent studies published by the National Academy of Sciences and other respected institutions have shown troubling results. They describe mass deaths of deepwater coral, dolphins, and killifish, a small animal at the base of the Gulf food chain. "If you add them all up, it’s clear the oil is still in the ecosystem, it’s still having an effect,” says Aaron Viles, deputy director of Gulf Restoration Network, an environmental organization active in the region.

The major class action lawsuit on behalf of communities affected by the spill has reached a proposed 7.8 billion dollar settlement, subject to approval by a judge. While this seems to have brought a certain amount of closure to the saga, environmentalists worry that any settlement is premature, saying they fear that the worst is yet to come. Pointing to the 1989 Exxon spill off the coast of Alaska, previously the largest oil spill in US waters, Viles said that it was several years before the full affect of that disaster was felt. “Four seasons after Exxon Valdez is when the herring fisheries collapsed,” says Viles. “The Gulf has been a neglected ecosystem for decades – we need to be monitoring it closely.”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

It is widely agreed that environmental problems on the coast date back to long before the well blew open. The massive catastrophe brought into focus problems that have existed for a generation. Land loss caused by oil company drilling has already displaced many who lived by the coast, and the pollution from treatment plants has poisoned communities across the state – especially in "cancer alley," the corridor of industrial facilities along the Mississippi River south of Baton Rouge. “The Gulf is a robust ecosystem and it's been dying the death of a thousand cuts for a long time,” says Viles. “BP is legally obligated to fix what they screwed up. But if you’re only obligated to put the ecosystem back to where it was April 19, 2010, why would we?”

In the aftermath of the spill, BP flooded the Gulf with nearly 2 million gallons of chemical dispersants. While BP says these chemicals broke up the oil, some scientists have said this just made it less visible, and sent the poisons deeper into the food chain.

Fishing is a huge part of the economy for the Gulf Coast. Around 40% of the seafood caught in the continental US comes from here. Many area fishermen were still recovering from Hurricane Katrina when the spill closed a third of Gulf waters to fishing for months. George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fisherman’s Association, a group that supports Gulf Coast fishers, says many fishers still had not recovered from Hurricane Katrina when the oil started flowing from the BP spill.  Now, he says, many are facing losing their homes. “Production is down at least 70 percent,” compared to the year before the spill, he says. “And prices are still depressed thirty, forty, sixty percent.”

In a video statement on BP’s website, Geir Robinson, Vice President of Economic Restoration for BP’s Gulf Coast Restoration Organization, says that the company believes the legal settlement will resolve most legitimate economic claims. “We do have critics,” adds Robinson. “And we’re working hard every day to show them that we will meet our responsibilities.”

Environmentalists and scientists also complain that Obama administration has let down the Gulf Coast. Viles is critical of the role the US government has played, saying that by inaction they seemed to protect BP more than coastal communities or the environment. “The coast guard seems to empower the worst instincts of BP,” Viles says. “I don’t know if it’s Stockholm Syndrome or what.”

International environmental groups have also joined in the criticism. Oceana, a conservation group with offices in Europe and the Americas, released a report on Tuesday criticizing the US government’s reforms as being either ineffective or nonexistent, saying “offshore drilling remains as risky and dangerous as it was two years ago, and that the risk of a major spill has not been effectively reduced.”

Theresa Dardar lives in Bayou Pointe-au-Chien, a Native American fishing community on Louisiana's Gulf Coast. Dardar and her neighbors have seen their land vanish from under their feet within their lifetimes due to canals built by the oil companies to access wells. The canals brought salt water into freshwater marshes, helping cause the coastal erosion that sees Louisiana lose a football field of land every 45 minutes. The main street that runs through the community now disappears into the swamps, with telephone poles sticking out of the water.

Now, in addition to worries about disappearing land and increasing risk of hurricanes, she fears that her family’s livelihood is gone for good.“It’s not going to be over for years,” she says, expressing a widely held concern among fishers here. “We’re just a small Native American fishing community. That’s all they’ve done their whole lives. Some of them are over 60. What are they going to do? If BP gives them money for the rest of their lives, that’s one thing. But if not, then what can they do?"

Not from his high school where he dropped out after his freshman year.

Not from his job, where he worked as an auto body technician for more than 35 years.

Both of his marriages ended in divorce, but did produce two children, a 31-year-old son and a 28-year-old daughter.

June readily admits that for most of his life, beginning about 14 when he began drinking heavily, he was a drunk. Always beer. Almost always to excess. But, he will quickly tell you how many weeks he has been sober. It’s now 56, he says proudly.

In October 2008 he was in an auto accident, when he swerved to miss a deer and hit an oak tree head on. That’s when he learned MRIs showed he had been suffering from degenerative arthritis. Between the accident and the arthritis, he was off work for three months. Then, in May 2009, he was laid off when the company moved.

The pain is now so severe that after about 10 minutes, he has to sit.

Unable to work, surviving on disability income that brings him $1,300 a month, just $392.50 above the poverty line, he lives in the 12-acre Riverdale Mobile Home Village, along the Susquehanna River near Jersey Shore north-central Pennsylvania. The village has a large green area where families can picnic, relax, or play games, sharing the space with geese and all kinds of animals.

For most of the six years June lived in the village, he kept to himself—chatting with neighbors now and then, but nothing that would ever suggest he’d be a leader. The last time he led anything was almost two decades earlier when he was president of a 4-wheel club.

On Feb. 18, the residents found out their landlord had sold the park, only after reading a story in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. The landlord, who the residents say did what he could to make their village safe and attractive, later came to each of the 37 families. He told the families he sold the park and they would have two months to leave. It was abrupt. Business-like. “We knew he was planning to sell,” says June, “but we all thought it would be to someone who would allow us to stay.”

Four days after the residents were ordered to move, certified letters made it official. The owner sold the park to Aqua PVR, a division of Aqua America, headquartered in Bryn Mawr. Sale price was $550,000. It may have been a bargain—land and industrial parks that have been vacant for years are going for premium sales prices as the natural gas boom in the Marcellus Shale consumes a large part of Pennsylvania and four surrounding states.

Aqua had received permission from the Susquehanna River Basin Commission (SRBC) to withdraw three million gallons of water a day from the Susquehanna; the 37 families of the mobile home village would just be in the way. The company intends to build a pump station and create a pipe system to provide water to natural gas companies that use hydraulic fracturing, the preferred method to extract natural gas from as deep as 10,000 feet beneath the earth. The process, known as fracking, requires a mixture of sand, chemicals, many of them toxins, and anywhere from one to nine million gallons of water per well, injected into the earth at high pressure. Jersey Shore sits in a northeastern part of the Marcellus Shale, which is believed to hold about 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Aqua isn’t the only company planning to take water in the area. Anadarko E & P Co. and Range Resources-Appalachia have each applied to withdraw up to three million gallons a day from the Susquehanna. While the Delaware River Basic Commission, and the states of New York and Maryland, have imposed moratoriums upon the use of fracking until full health and environmental impacts can be assessed, Pennsylvania and the SRBC have been handing out permits by the gross.

Most residents had only a vague knowledge of fracking and what it is doing to the earth. “They have a lot more knowledge now,” says June, as politically aware as any environmentalist.

Aqua had originally ordered the residents to leave by May 1, but then extended it to the end of the month. It dangled a $2,500 relocation allowance in its eviction.

However, the cost to move a trailer to another park is $6,000–$11,000, plus extra for skirting, sheds, and any handicap-accessible external ramps. But, most trailers can’t be moved. “These are older trailers,” says June. His is a 12-by-70, built in 1974, with a tin roof and tin siding (“tin-on-tin”); like others, it isn’t sturdy enough to survive a move. But even if it did, there would be no place to put it. The parks want the newer trailers, but most parks are full.

So, the residents began looking in the classified ads for rentals. Because the natural gas companies are bringing in thousands of employees to frack the land, there is a shortage of apartments, most with inflated prices to take advantage of the well-paid roustabouts, drivers, and technicians who moved into the area, and spend their money on local businesses eager to improve their own profits. During the past two years, rents have doubled and tripled. “None of us can pay a thousand or more a month,” says June. The current mobile home owners paid $200 a month for their lot.

Not long after he was served his own eviction notice, June had a dream. Some might call it a nightmare; some might see it as he did, a religious experience. “It was Jesus coming to me, telling me I had to do something,” he says.

June is constantly on the move, going from trailer to trailer to help the families who were abruptly evicted. Whatever their needs, Kevin June tries to provide it, constantly on the phone, running up phone bills he knows he can’t afford but does so anyhow because the lives of his neighbors matter.

There’s Betty and William Whyne. Betty, 82, began working as a waitress at the age of 13 and now, in retirement, makes artificial Christmas trees. She has a cancerous tumor in the same place where a breast was removed in 1991. William, 72, who was an electrician, carpenter, and plumber before he retired after a heart attack, goes to a dialysis center three times a week, four hours each time. They brought their 12-wide 1965 Fleetwoood trailer to the village shortly after the 1972 flood. Like the other residents, they can’t afford to move; they can’t find adequate housing. “We’ve looked at everything in about a 30 mile radius,” they say. They earn $1,478 a month from retirement, only $252.17 above the federal poverty line. One son is in New Jersey; one is in Texas, and the Whynes don’t want to leave the area; they shouldn’t have to.

There’s April and Eric Daniels. She’s a stay-at-home mom for their two children; he’s a truck driver whose hours have been reduced. Their 14-by-70 trailer is valued at $13,200; she and her husband were in the process of remodeling it, had already paid $5,000 for improvements, and were about to start building a second bathroom. April Daniels had grown up living in a series of foster houses, “so I know what it’s like to move around, but this was my first home, and it’s harder for me to leave.” Their trailer provides a good home, but can’t be moved. “We’re pretty much on the verge of just tearing down the trailer and living in a camper,” she says. They don’t know what will happen. They do know that because of what they see as Aqua’s insensitivity, they will lose a lot of money no matter what they do.

Doris Fravel, 82, a widow on a fixed income of $1,326 a month, has lived in the village 38 years. She’s proud of her 1974 12-wide trailer with the tin roof. “I painted it every year,” she says. In June, she paid $3,580 for a new air conditioner; she recently paid $3,000 for new insulated skirting. The trailer has new carpeting. Unlike most of the residents, she found housing—a $450 a month efficiency. But it’s far smaller than her current home. So she’s sold or given away most of what she owns. She may have a buyer for the trailer, and will take $2,500 for it, considerably less than it’s worth. “I can’t do anything else,” she says. “I just can’t move my furnishings into the new apartment,” she says. Like the other residents, she has family who are helping, but there’s only so much help any family can provide. “I never knew I would ever have to leave,” she says, but she does want to “see one of those gas men come to my door—and I’d like to punch him in the shoulder.”

Not only are there few lots available and apartments are too expensive, but most residents don’t qualify for a house mortgage; and there are waiting lists for senior citizen and low-income housing. The stories are the same.

No one from Aqua has been in touch with any resident. But, the company did hire a local real estate agency. The agency claims it has made extraordinary efforts to help the residents find other housing. The residents disagree. April Daniels says “some of the Realtors have gotten real nasty with the people in the park—they just don’t understand that we are all in a hardship, so we get mad and frustrated and take it out on them.” But there really isn’t much anyone can do. The natural gas boom has made affordable housing as obsolete as the anthracite coal that once drove the region’s energy economy.

The residents, with limited incomes, have lived good lives; they are good people. They paid their rents and fees on time; they kept up the appearances of their trailers and the land around it. They worked their jobs; they survived. Until they were evicted

And now it’s up to the residents to try to survive. They have become closer; they listen to each other; they hug each other; and, the tough men aren’t afraid to let others see them cry. “The pain in this park is almost too much at times,” says June.

If something goes wrong, the residents have to fix it; Kevin June is the one they call. If he can’t fix a problem, he finds someone who can. In this trailer park, as in most communities, there is a lot of talent—“we help each other,” says June. His job is to make sure the residents survive until they can move. I’ve had the Holy Spirit running through my veins a long time, but it’s running real deep right now,” he says.

A half-dozen families have already moved, but most say they will stay and fight what they see as a politically-based corporate takeover.

During the week Aqua PVR issued eviction notices, its parent company issued a news release, boasting that its revenue for 2011 was $712 million, a 4.2 percent increase from the year before; its net income was $143.1 million, up 15.4 percent from the previous year. But, for some reason, the company just couldn’t find enough money to give the residents a fair moving settlement. “They just expect us to throw our homes into the street and live in tents,” says June.

“I went to see a state representative to ask what he could do to help,” he says, “but his secretary just coldly told me there was nothing that could be done because whoever owns a property can do with it what he wants to do.” He never saw the state representative.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania—armed with an industry-favorable law recently rammed through by the Republican-controlled legislature and eagerly signed by a first-term Republican governor who received more than $1,6 million in campaign contributions from the energy industry—has decided that fracking the earth, threatening health and the environment, is far better for business than taking care of the people.

Kevin June and 36 families are just collateral damage.

The US propaganda war operates along two tracks: (1) the dominant message emphasizes the proximity of war and the willingness of the US to use force and violence. This message is directed at Iran and coincides with Israeli announcements of war preparations. (2) The second track targets the ‘liberal public’ with a handful of marginal ‘knowledgeable academics’ (or State Department progressives) playing down the war threat and arguing that reasonable policy makers in Tel Aviv and Washington are aware that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons or any capacity to produce them now or in the near future. The purpose of this liberal backpedaling is to confuse and undermine the majority public opinion, which is clearly opposed to more war preparations, and to derail the burgeoning anti-war movement.

Needless to say the pronouncements of the ‘rational’ warmongers use a ‘double discourse’ based on the facile dismissal of all the historical and empirical evidence to the contrary. When the US and Israel talk of war, prepare for war and engage in pre-war provocations – they intend to go to war – just as they did against Iraq in 2003. Under present international political and military conditions an attack on Iran, initially by Israel with US support, is extremely likely, even as world economic conditions should dictate otherwise and even as the negative strategic consequences will most likely reverberate throughout the world for decades to come.

US and Israeli Military Calculations on Iran’s Capability

American and Israeli strategic policy makers do not agree on the consequences of Iran’s retaliation against an attack. For their part, the Israeli leaders minimize Iran’s military capacity to attack and damage the Jewish state, which is their only consideration. They count on their distance, their anti-missile shield and protection from US air and naval forces in the Gulf to cover their sneak attack. On the other hand, US military strategists know the Iranians are capable of inflicting substantial casualties on US warships, which would have to attack Iranian coastal installations in order to support or protect the Israelis.

Israel intelligence is best known for its capacity to organize the assassination of individuals around the world: Mossad has organized successful overseas terrorists acts against Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese leaders. On the other hand Israeli intelligence has a very poor track record with regard to its estimates of major military and political undertakings. They seriously underestimated the popular support, military strength, and organizational capacity of Hezbollah during the 2006 war in Lebanon. Likewise, Israel intelligence misunderstood the strength and capacity of the Egyptian popular democratic movement as it rose up and overthrew Tel Aviv’s strategic regional ally, the Mubarak dictatorship. While Israeli leaders ‘feign paranoia’ – tossing clichés about ‘existential threats’ – they are blinded by their narcissistic arrogance and racism, repeatedly underestimating the technical expertise and political sophistication of their Arab and regional Islamic foes. This is undoubtedly true in their facile dismissal of Iran’s capacity to retaliate against a planned Israeli air assault.

The US government has now overtly committed itself to supporting an Israeli assault on Iran when it is launched. More specifically, Washington claims it will come to Israel’s defense ‘unconditionally’ if it is ‘attacked’. How can Israel avoid being ‘attacked’ when its planes are raining bombs and missiles on Iranian installations, military defenses and support systems, not to mention Iranian cities, ports and strategic infrastructure? Moreover, given the Pentagon’s collaboration and coordinated intelligence systems with the Israel Defense Forces, its role in identifying targets, routes and incoming missiles, as well as integrated weapons and ordinance supply chains will be critical to an IDF attack. There is no way that the US can dissociate itself from the Jewish State’s war on Iran, once the attack has begun.

The Myths of ‘Limited War’: Geography

Washington and Tel Aviv claim and appear to believe that their planned assault on Iran will be a ‘limited war,’ targeting limited objectives and lasting a few days or weeks – with no serious consequences.

We are told Israel’s brilliant generals have identified all the critical nuclear research facilities, which their surgical air strikes will eliminate without horrific collateral damage to the surrounding population. Once the alleged ‘nuclear weapons’ program is destroyed, all Israelis can resume their lives in full security knowing that another ‘existential’ threat has been eliminated. The Israeli notion of a war, limited in ‘time and space,’ is absurd and dangerous – and underlines the arrogance, stupidity and racism of its authors.

To approach Iran’s nuclear facilities Israeli and US forces will confront well-equipped and defended bases, missile installations, maritime defenses and large-scale fortifications directed by the Revolutionary Guards and the Iranian Armed Forces. Moreover, the defense systems protecting the nuclear facilities are linked by civilian highways, airfields, ports, and backed by a dual purpose (civilian-military) infrastructure, which includes oil refineries and a huge network of administrative offices. To ‘knock out’ the alleged nuclear sites will require expanding the geographic scope of the war. The scientific-technological capacity of the Iranian civilian nuclear program involves a wide swath of its research facilities, including universities, laboratories, manufacturing sites, and design centers. To destroy Iran’s civilian nuclear program would require Israel (and thus the US) to attack much more than research facilities or laboratories hidden under a remote mountain. It would require multiple, widespread assaults on targets throughout the country, in other words, a generalized war.

Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has stated that Iran will retaliate with a war of equivalence. Iran will match the breadth and scope of any attack with a corresponding counter-attack: ‘We will attack them at the same level as they attack us’. That means Iran will not confine its retaliation to merely trying to shoot down US and Israeli bombers in its airspace or launch missiles at offshore US warships in its waters but will take the war to equivalent targets in Israel and in US-occupied countries in and around the Gulf. Israel’s ‘limited war’ will become a generalized war extending throughout the Middle East and beyond.

Israel’s current delusional fetish about its elaborate missile defense system will be exposed as hundreds of high-powered missiles are launched from Teheran, Southern Lebanon, and just beyond the Golan Heights.

The Myth of Limited War: Time Frame

Israeli military experts confidently expect to polish off their Iranian targets in a few days – some might think a mere weekend – and perhaps without the loss of even a single pilot. They expect the Jewish state will celebrate its brilliant victory in the streets of Tel Aviv and Washington. They are deluded by their own sense of superiority. Iran did not fight a brutal, decade-long war against the US-supplied Iraqi invaders and its western/Israeli military advisers, to just turn over and passively submit to a limited number of air and missile attacks by Israel. Iran is a young, educated, mobilized society, which can draw on millions of reservists from across the political, ethnic, gender, religious spectrum, galvanized in support of their nation under attack. In a war to defend the homeland, all internal differences disappear to confront the unprovoked Israeli-US attack threatening their entire civilization – its 5000-year culture and traditions, as well as its modern scientific advances and institutions. The first wave of US-Israeli attacks will lead to ferocious retaliation, which will not be confined to the original areas of conflict, nor are will any such act of Israeli aggression end when and if Iran’s nuclear research facilities are destroyed and some of its scientists, technicians and skilled workers killed. The war will continue in time and extend geographically.

Multiple Points of Conflict

Just as any US-Israeli attack on Iran will involve multiple targets, the Iranian military will also have a plethora of easily accessible strategic targets. Though it is difficult to predict exactly where and how Iran will retaliate, one thing is clear: The initial US-Israeli strike will not go unanswered.

Given Israeli-US supremacy in long and medium range sea and air power, Iran will probably rely on short-range objectives. These would include the highly valued US military facilities and supply routes in adjoining terrain (Iraq, Kuwait, and Afghanistan) and Israeli targets with missiles launched from Southern Lebanon and possibly Syria. If a few Iranian long-range missiles escape the Jewish State’s much vaunted ‘anti-missile dome,’ Israeli population centers may pay a heavy price for their leaders’ recklessness and arrogance.

The Iranian counter-strike will lead to an escalation by US-Israeli forces, extending and deepening their air and sea war to the entire Iranian national security system – military bases, ports, communication systems, command posts and government administrative centers – many in densely populated cities. Iran will counter by launching its greatest strategic asset: a coordinated ground attack involving the Revolutionary Guards together with their allies among the Iraqi Shia troops, against US forces in Iraq. It will coordinate attacks against US facilities in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the growing nationalist-Islamic armed resistance.

The initial conflict, centered on so-called military objectives (scientific research facilities), will spread rapidly to economic targets, or what US and Israeli military strategists refer to as ‘dual civilian-military’ targets. This would include oil fields, highways, factories, communications networks, television stations, water treatment facilities, reservoirs, power stations and administrative offices, such as the Defense Ministry and headquarters of the Republican Guard. Iran, faced with imminent destruction of its entire economy and infrastructure (which occurred in neighboring Iraq with the unprovoked US invasion of 2003), would retaliate by blocking the Straits of Hormuz and sending short range missiles in the direction of the principle oil fields and refineries of the Gulf States including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, a mere 10 minute distance, crippling the flow of oil to Europe, Asia, and the United States — plunging the world economy into deep depression.

It should not be forgotten that the Iranians are probably more aware than anyone in the region of the total devastation suffered by Iraqis after the US invasion, which plunged that nation into total chaos and devastated its advanced infrastructure and civilian administrative apparatus, not to mention the systematic obliteration of its highly educated scientific and technical elite. The waves of Mossad-sponsored assassinations of Iranian scientists, academics and engineers are just a foretaste of what the Israelis have in mind for Iran’s outstanding scientists, intellectuals, and highly skilled technical workers. Iranians should have no illusions about the Americans and Israelis who seek to thrust Iran into the brutal dark ages of Afghanistan and Iraq. They will have no more role in a devastated Iran than their counterparts had in post-Saddam Iraq.

According to US General Mathis, who commands all US forces in the Middle East, Persian Gulf and Southwest Asia, ‘an Israeli first strike would be likely to have dire consequences across the region and for the United States there’ (NY Times, 3/19/12). General Mathis “dire cost” estimate only takes account of the US military losses, likely several hundred sailors on warships within missile distance of Iranian gunners.

However the most delusional and self-serving assessment of the outcome and consequences of an Israeli air attack on Iran, emanates from top Israeli leaders, academics and intelligence experts, who claim superior intelligence, superior defenses and supreme (if also racist) insight into the ‘Iranian mind.’ Typical is Israeli Defense Minister Barak who boasts that any Iranian retaliation will at worst inflict minimal casualties on the Israeli population.

The ‘Judeo-centric’ view of re-ordering the balance of power in the region, which is prevalent in leading Israeli war circles, overlooks the likelihood that war will not be decided by Israeli air strikes and anti-missile defenses. Iran’s missiles cannot be easily contained, especially if they arrive several hundred a minute from three directions, Iran, Lebanon, Syria and possibly from Iranian submarines. Secondly, the collapse of its oil imports will devastate Israel’s highly energy dependent economy. Thirdly, Israel’s principle allies, especially the US and the EU, will be severely strained as they are dragged into Israel’s war and find themselves defending the straits of Hormuz, their army garrisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their oil fields and military bases in the Gulf. Such a conflict could ignite the Shia majorities in Bahrain and in the strategic oil-rich provinces of Saudi Arabia. The generalized war will have a devastating effect on the price of oil and the world economy. It will provoke the fury of consumers and workers rage everywhere as factories close and powerful shocks throughout the fragile financial system result in a world depression.

Israel’s pathological ‘superiority complex’ results in its racist leaders consistently overestimating their own intellectual, technical and military capabilities, while underestimating the knowledge, capacity and courage of their regional, Islamic (in this case Iranian) adversaries. They ignore Iran’s proven capacity to sustain a prolonged, complex multi-front defensive war and to recover from an initial assault and develop appropriate modern weaponry to inflict severe damage on its attackers. And Iran will have the unconditional and active support of the world’s Muslim population, and perhaps the diplomatic backing of Russia and China, who will obviously view an attack on Iran as another dress rehearsal to contain their growing power.

Conclusion

War, especially an Israeli-US war against Iran is indissolubly linked to the asymmetrical US-Israeli relationship, which sidelines and censors any critical US military and political analysis. Because Israel’s Zionist power configuration in the US can now harness US military power in support of Israel’s drive for regional dominance, Israeli leaders and most of their military feel free to engage in the most outrageous military and destructive adventures, knowing full well that in the first and last instance they can rely on the US to support them with American blood and treasure. But after all of this grotesque servitude to a racist, isolated country, who will rescue the United States? Who will prevent the sinking of its ships in the Gulf and the death and maiming of hundreds of its sailors and thousands of its soldiers? And where will the Israelis and US Zionists be when Iraq is overrun by elite Iranian troops and their Iraqi Shia allies and a generalized uprising occurs in Afghanistan?

The self-centered Israeli policy-makers overlook the likely collapse of the world oil supply as a result of their planned war against Iran. Do their Zionist agents in the US realize that as a result of dragging the US into Israel’s war, that the Iranian nation will be forced to set the Persian Gulf oilfields ablaze?

How cheap has it become to ‘buy a war’ in the US? For a mere few million dollars in campaign contributions to corrupt politicians, and through the deliberate penetration of Israel-First agents, academics and politicians into the war-making machinery of the US government, and through the moral cowardice and self-censorship of leading critics, writers and journalists who refuse to name Israel and its agents as the key decision makers in our country’s Mid East policy, we head directly toward a war far beyond any regional military conflagration and toward the collapse of the world economy and the brutal impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people North and South, East and West.

On the one side are TransCanada Corp. and its numerous oil, gas and water affiliates in North America, joined by their allied politicians in Congress, both Republican and Democrat. They promise more jobs and more non-foreign oil. On the other side are opponents of the pipeline who have sounded the alarm that mining tar sands oil, transporting it, and burning it is dangerous business.

Keystone destruction

The Keystone XL pipeline is a $7 billion scheme to bring tar sands oil, one of the world’s dirtiest fuels, from Canada to Texas refineries. Tar sands crude oil is particularly dangerous to transport because it’s very corrosive and piped at high pressure. In Canada, where tar sands oil is mined, 50 square miles of toxic waste ponds have developed since its production in 2008.

The U.S. extension, known as Keystone XL pipeline, would run through the Ogallala Aquifer, a fresh-water, underground water table covering 174,000 miles in portions of eight states. This is the agriculture heartland of the U.S. A spill of tar sands oil would potentially destroy the drinking water of two million Midwesterners.

One of the biggest lies being spread is that Pipeline XL will create 20,000 jobs. In fact, a Cornell Global Labor Institute study estimates only 2,500 to 4,650 union jobs. And that’s doubtful. Just 11 percent of the construction jobs for Keystone I Pipeline were filled by South Dakotans. Most were for temporary, low paid manual labor.

Fightback fires up

The August 2011 sit-in at the White House, during which a thousand environmental activists were arrested and jailed, was the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years. Then in November, 10,000 encircled the White House, five people deep. The movement finally tasted victory on January 18, 2012, when Obama postponed the construction permit. Hopes were even raised that the Democrats would do something for our environment. But six weeks later Obama, on the campaign trail, announced his approval of a southern piece of the pipeline, from Oklahoma to the Gulf Coast.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans had lodged a bill amendment that permitted the whole Pipeline XL project to go ahead. In one day, 800,000 messages to the Senate exclaimed, “Hell no!” When the vote took place on March 8, the protesters could once again celebrate a victory.

Environmental author and journalist Bill McKidden called attention to the date of this recent win on March 8, International Women’s Day. “Appropriate,” he wrote, “because many of the very strongest fighters against this project right from the beginning were women of unusual distinction.” He noted in particular Lakota warrior Debra White Plume. She was arrested the day before, along with other tribal members, for blocking massive trucks headed through Indian land. She’s “an eloquent fighter, part of the large crew of indigenous leaders who were the first to sound the alarm about the tar sands and have been at the center of the battle ever since.”

Who backs lethal energy?

The struggle against Keystone is but one front of the larger environmental fight against the destructive forces of Big Oil. Lobbyists for major energy corporations and their Democrat and Republican politician buddies try to talk a good “green” line, because the U.S. public has become savvy and angry about environmental decline. Energy moguls tout false alternatives such as coal, fracking, and nuclear power. All of this is done under the nationalistic guise of reducing dependence on “foreign oil” and restoring American greatness.

Take coal, for example. In an attempt to skirt the Clean Air Act, the U.S. Department of Energy, in cahoots with the coal industry, advances the idea of “clean” coal, or storing carbon dioxide and other gases emitted from burning coal underground. But these by-products of coal are notoriously harmful to the environment, and isolating carbon dioxide could contaminate drinking water and leach gases above ground. Environmental scientists warn that clean coal is a myth, citing the natural resource damage that coal extraction causes, and the ineffective technology for storing carbon dioxide.

Fracking is another scary process being posed as a solution. A haphazard technique of using high-pressure injections of water, sand and chemicals to extract natural gas and petroleum, fracking began in Dimock, Penn. in 2010. The town was left with 13 methane-contaminated water wells, one of which exploded. Cabot Oil & Gas shamelessly denies the poisoned water was due to fracking.

On January 18, 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency called for urgent action to safeguard public health in Dimock. The agency at last acknowledged what residents already knew — their contaminated water resulted from induced hydraulic fracturing. Despite this, Obama championed fracking in his State of the Union Address.

And then there’s nuclear energy. Although the Obama Administration banned the reprocessing of nuclear waste, the federal government is a longtime pursuer of nuclear power. Fully 19 percent of U.S. electricity already derives from nuclear energy. With one breath, our government and energy businesses present this as a “renewable” resource. With their next breath, they cover up evidence of health risks from radioactive waste. Compounding its pollution of soil and ground water in the United States, U.S. production of nuclear energy enhances global nuclear proliferation.

Green capitalism is a lie

Obama’s January postponement of Keystone XL was an early round of the battle, part of the Democrat Party’s attempt to co-opt the green movement. Despite mock battles between congressional Republicans and Democrats, both preach that all this lethal energy is “green” and that capitalism is ecologically friendly.

But capitalism is not now, and never will be, friendly because the profit system trumps human need. Green capitalism is as big a myth as clean coal and safe nukes.

As it exposes the big lies, the environmental movement is expanding in every way. Its bold militancy and increasing grass-roots organizing is a beacon to activists everywhere. The energy war is one the global the 99 percent are determined to win!

• This article first appeared in http://dissidentvoice.org/?p=43614 “Familiarity,” wrote St. Augustine, citing a common saying of his time, “breeds contempt.” This is not always the case of course; sometimes familiarity brings admiration, even affection. But when two very different parties are forced upon one another — especially if one is occupier and the other occupied — the contempt can grow so deep as to prompt murder.

As time passed, Karzai’s weakness and corruption became apparent. Gradually feelings soured, as warlords reestablished control over their former fiefs; as the national police acquired a reputation for abuses including the kidnapping and sexual abuse of children; as  the Taliban and aligned movements resurged and capitalized on the dissatisfaction; as the bombings and drone strikes and night time raids on homes produced such anger that Karzai and the parliament began insisting they must stop — feelings soured. And U.S. public opinion soured on the Afghan War, validating the objections some of us had expressed at the outset.

The behavior of some foreign troops over the last year (collecting body parts as trophies, urinating on dead militants’ bodies, burning Qur’ans, the March 11 massacre of 16 Afghan civilians in Kandahar) may have brought us to the tipping-point.

The “Red Team” Study

The U.S. Army has long been concerned about the fact that its soldiers fighting to support the Karzai regime and contain the resurgent Taliban have a terrible relationship with the Afghan soldiers and police they’re obliged to work with and train. A “red team” headed by Jeffrey Bordin, a political and behavioral scientist, was dispatched to Afghanistan last year to investigate. (In the Army, a “red team” is supposed to “provide commanders an independent capability to continuously challenge plans, operations, concepts, organizations and capabilities in the context of the operational environment and from our partners’ and adversaries’ perspectives.” It’s supposed, in other words, to help commanders think outside the box.)

Bordin’s study, completed last May, is entitled “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility: A Red Team Study of Mutual Perceptions of Afghan National Security Force Personnel and U.S. Soldiers in Understanding and Mitigating the Phenomena of ANSF-Committed Fratricide-Murders.” It’s available online.

In the report, Bordin noted that there had been since September. 2009 at least 21 instances of  “fratricide-murder incidents” in which Afghan National Security Force (ANSF) members killed 51 foreign troops, mostly U.S. forces, who had been sent to train them. (The toll has risen to over 80 since. About a quarter of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan this year — including three more on Monday, March 26 — have been killed by Afghan security forces.) He declared that the magnitude of the killings (referred to in U.S. military parlance as “green-on-blue” incidents) “may be unprecedented between ‘allies’ in modern history.” But why is there so much hostility between U.S. forces (and other foreign forces) in Afghanistan and the soldiers they’re supposed to train.

Bordin explained:

 “Factors that fueled the most animosity included U.S. convoys not allowing traffic to pass, reportedly indiscriminant return U.S. fire that causes civilian casualties, naively using flawed intelligence sources, U.S. Forces conducting night raids/home searches, violating female privacy during searches, U.S. road blocks, publicly searching/disarming ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] members as an SOP [standard operating procedure] when they enter bases, and past massacres of civilians by U.S. Forces (i.e., the Wedding Party Massacre, the Shinwar Massacre, etc.). Other issues that led to altercations or near-altercations (including many self-reported near-fratricide incidents) included [U.S. soldiers] urinating in public, their cursing at, insulting and being rude and vulgar to ANSF members, and unnecessarily shooting animals. They found many U.S. Soldiers to be extremely arrogant, bullying, unwilling to listen to their advice, and were often seen as lacking concern for civilian and ANSF safety during combat.”

(The “Wedding Party Massacre” refers to the incident in Nuristan Province in July 2008, when 47 people including 39 women and children were killed by a missile. The deputy speaker of the Afghan parliament stated that none of them had had any connection with either al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The U.S. initially denied that there had been any civilian deaths. The “Shinwar Massacre” refers to the March 2007 incident in which a U.S. convoy in Nangarhar Province killed 19 and injured up to 50 as they fired indiscriminately after a humvee was struck by a minivan laden with explosives that injured one Marine.)

According to the study, U.S. forces for their part held “extremely negative” views of the ANSF, finding among them “pervasive illicit drug use, massive thievery, personal instability, dishonesty, no integrity, incompetence, unsafe weapons handling, corrupt officers, no real NCO corps, covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents, high AWOL rates, bad morale, laziness, repulsive hygiene and the torture of dogs. Perceptions of civilians were also negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies and cruelty towards women and children.”

Notice that both sides complain of the other’s treatment of women and children. But while the Afghans interviewed complained of specifics — foreigners observing women in a yard from a roof; breaking down a door to enter a female’s room; taking photos of women; searching them without reason; giving children candy even though their proximity can lead to them dying in attacks — the U.S. soldiers’ complaints were more vaguely expressed. “How they treat their women and children is disgusting,” said one GI. “They are just chattel to them.”

Both complain of the other’s treatment of dogs. But the Afghans complain that the U.S. soldiers kill dogs who belong to people — dogs on leashes outside people’s homes. They do it for sport, or to shut them up if they bark, even in the presence of their owners — one of whom according to this report joined the Taliban after his dog was shot to death. The GIs kill cattle and donkeys as well, say the Afghans. The U.S. troops for their part complain that the Afghans kill stray dogs. (Of course, there’s never any excuse to torture an animal, but isn’t it possible that Afghan society has traditionally controlled the population of feral dogs? Neighboring India has a huge population of pariah dogs, who are often rabid — over 70,000 in Mumbai alone. In that city they bite 25,000 people per year. They’re a real management problem most people in this country can hardly imagine. Perhaps this issue of feral dog killing can be seen as a “cultural” issue between the Afghans and the occupiers.)

According to Bordin’s report, U.S. troops in Afghanistan not only dislike and mistrust ANSF — for reasons that seem related to the Afghans’ habits and customs, poverty, and illiteracy (90% among the Afghan troops) — but also have “negative” views of Afghan civilians in general. This, he posits, is due to civilians’ sympathy with the insurgents and because of the “cruelty towards women and children” that occurs in Afghan society.

While the relationship between the occupiers and the people was beyond the scope of Bordin’s assignment, this observation is obviously significant. If the GIs see the Afghans in general –  not just the insurgents, but ANSF (who allegedly form “covert alliances/informal treaties with insurgents”), and even the bulk of the population — so negatively, how can they ever mould ANSF into a viable military and police force, meeting their own expectations? How can they ever crush the Taliban and its allies, and win over the masses?

The Main Problem is Not a Culture Clash

“A Crisis in Trust” is a statistical study that tries to examine the recognized “green-on-blue” problem. But it misses the forest for the trees. The “factors fueling most animosity” are factors generic to invasions and occupations: the arrogance and condescension of the invaders; the insistence on regulating movement of people in the invaded country; the response to (real or imagined) attacks with overwhelming firepower that inevitably kills civilians; the need to recruit local, often unreliable snitches; night raids, etc. These have nothing to do with “cultural incompatibility” but with the arrogance of power bound to produce indignation. How ought Afghans to respond to such national humiliation? Should anyone be surprised that their indignation has mounted over ten-and-a-half years?

In what Bordin calls the “first tier” of Afghan complaints about U.S. troops is the charge that they are “extremely arrogant.” This is related to other “first tier” issues, specifically: night raids, disrespect for Afghan women, roadblocks, refusal to allow Afghan troops to pass U.S. convoys, indiscriminate shooting of Afghans following attacks, killing of many civilians, constant cursing (including calling Afghan troops “motherfuckers”—which is deeply resented), and publicly searching any Afghan soldier entering a U.S. base.

But how can the U.S. troops not be arrogant? Their basic training is designed to inculcate a sense of righteousness about their role. They’re conditioned to believe that they’re on a heroes’ mission to defend family and friends at home, and keep the U.S. safe from another 9/11 type attack. They need to do this by containing the Taliban resistance, which they’re encouraged to associate with al-Qaeda. (They’re also encouraged to associate the Taliban with Iraq and any “bad guy” Muslim force they might read about, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami forces, Iran, Hizbollah, Hamas, Somali pirates, Gaddafi, etc. While they’re routinely told “We respect Islam” they’re also encouraged to see the world in simple “us vs. them” terms, and it just happens that all the enemies are Muslims.)

This simplistic “war on terror” mentality, pitting the “good” warrior against a vague, omnipresent Evil is a key aspect of the problem, for both them and the Afghans. The invaded population may be tradition-bound, largely illiterate, religious fundamentalists. But the invaders are fundamentally deluded about their mission. This is by design, part of the boot camp experience.

Things the Invaders Aren’t Supposed to Know

The troops aren’t briefed about the fact that the Taliban regime — bad as it was – had, and has, a considerable social base. It was preferred by many Afghans to the warlords of the Northern Alliance who are now back in power in much of the country. They’re not told that the Taliban is rooted in the anti-Soviet Mujahadeen of the 1980s which the U.S. eagerly supported, deliberately pitting Islamic fundamentalism against the pro-Soviet regime and its secularist policies. They don’t necessarily realize that U.S. policy helped generate the enemy they now face.

They’re not told that the Taliban took power in most of the country in 1996 with help from Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence, which had worked intimately with the CIA throughout the 1980s. (As the late president Benazir Bhutto once noted in an interview, longtime U.S. ally Pakistan supported the Taliban because it seemed most likely to insure the stability of Central Asian trade routes.)

The troops aren’t told that the Taliban never invited bin Laden into their country. They’re not told that the U.S. agreed in 1996 to allow bin Laden to fly out of Sudan in a C-130 transport plane with 150 men, women and children on board, to refuel in pro-western Qatar (where he was greeted warmly by government officials) and to relocate to Afghanistan where he was welcomed and hosted by anti-Taliban chiefs. (He settled in Qandahar in May 1996. The Taliban only acquired control over Kabul that September.)

They’re not told that the Taliban once in power tolerated bin Laden’s presence and let him maintain his training camps (initially established with CIA help) out of appreciation for his assistance in the war against the Soviets when he was working with the U.S. (They also appreciated his financial assistance to them, at a time when only Saudi Arabia and Pakistan recognized their regime and provided aid, and felt obliged to observe the Pashtunwali code requiring hospitality for strangers.) But they never embraced his program for a global jihad. Indeed they claim that after the USS Cole incident off Yemen in 2000 they placed him under detention and cut off his communications.

U.S. troops aren’t told that Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan-American special envoy to Afghanistan in 2002, and later the ambassador to Afghanistan, then Iraq, then the UN — the man who arranged for Karzai to become president –had six years earlier actually written an op-ed supporting U.S. engagement with the Taliban!

“The Taliban does not practice the anti-U.S. style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran,” the former State Department official declared in the Washington Post in October 1996. “It is closer to the Saudi model.” He later, as a Unocal executive, hosted Taliban leaders at his Texas ranch to discuss a gas pipeline deal in the late 90s.

They’re not told that after the Taliban successfully banned opium cultivation in 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell praised their effort and delivered $43 billion in aid to them. They’re not told that the Taliban not only sought good relations with the U.S. before 9/11, but even (as reported on Counterpunch) agreed to turn bin Laden over to the U.S. as early as November 2000. It was willing to do so unconditionally after the 9/11 attacks, but the U.S. government never accepted the offer.

(The Taliban issued a statement on September 12, 2001:  “We do not allow Osama bin Laden to use Afghanistan’s territory to launch attacks on any country in the world… We denounce this terrorist attack, whoever is behind it.”)

The troops aren’t told that the current U.S.-backed president Karzai was briefly the foreign minister of the Taliban government (in 1996) and that he still insists there are “good men” among the Taliban. He’s even offered to welcome Taliban chief Mullah Omar to Kabul for negotiations. In 2008 he appealed to Taliban chief Mullah Omar “to return home under guarantees of safety to help bring peace to Afghanistan.” The U.S. sternly objected, prompting an indignant public statement from Karzai that the U.S. had no veto rights on inter-Afghan matters.

The troops aren’t told that none of the 9/11 hijackers were Afghans and that only two of them were known to have ever been in that country at any point for any reason. They’re certainly not told that Attorney General John Ashcroft spoke falsely when he told a press conference after 9/11 that all of the hijackers had been trained in Afghanistan.

U.S. troops aren’t told that many — maybe most — Afghans aren’t even aware of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S. (A 2010 study showed that 92% of people in the Pashtun south have never heard about them!) And even if they learn about them, they don’t understand why they would justify the invasion and occupation of their country. It’s not hard to understand why many would assume that the invaders are waging a war on their religion.

U.S. soldiers are encouraged to believe the Taliban and al-Qaeda are closely connected, if not one and the same thing. But this is simply untrue. The Taliban is an inward-looking, Pashtun-Afghan nationalist movement. It wants to impose a version of Muslim law upon a country torn by war since 1978. But it’s shown no interest in joining an international jihad. It merely wants to do what Afghan resistance movements have done from the time of Alexander the Great (which, by the way, was a millennium before the introduction of Islam). It wants to drive the invader out.

Al-Qaeda, now based in Pakistan and Yemen, is actively promoting a global confrontation between Islam and the West. But the Taliban has repeatedly declared it will not allow attacks on other countries from Afghan soil when/if it regains power. (And again it has consistently stated it had no knowledge of al-Qaeda plans while bin Laden was in the country.) Intelligence officials in Pakistan have stated that the Taliban has broken with al-Qaeda and would, if returned to power, crack down on any remnants of the organization in the country.

The U.S. troops are not mainly in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from making Afghanistan its base for a global jihad. It’s unlikely that, even if the occupying forces withdrew tomorrow, this decentralized web of groups of unknown size, with franchises and affiliates in Algeria, Yemen, Pakistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere, would be able to transform Afghanistan into a headquarters for launching attacks on the U.S. (Anyway, weren’t the 9/11 attacks planned more in Germany and Florida than in Afghanistan?)

The foreign troops are not in Afghanistan to fight al-Qaeda, or anyone connected to attacks on the U.S. They’re, rather, to create and leave behind, whenever they leave, a “stable” country with a friendly regime, an effective security apparatus that will contain any “Islamist” forces the U.S. regards as potentially threatening, allow the presence of half a dozen U.S. military bases in the country (close to Iraq, Pakistan and Iran) and cooperate in the construction of a pipeline that will bring Caspian natural gas to the Indian Ocean. (The latter is of major geopolitical importance to Washington since most gas from the region is now piped through Russia, and the U.S. wants a pipeline that also avoids Iranian territory.)

Some of the troops have come to question their mission. Some have even been radicalized by their Afghan experiences and have become antiwar, anti-imperialist activists. But few fully grasp that they’re imperialist invaders, and so receiving the same treatment the Soviets experienced in the 1980s when they tried to occupy Afghanistan. So they cannot understand why the Afghan soldiers they’re supposed to train are so unenthusiastic, and why in general the people are so unwelcoming and unappreciative.

According to the Red Team study, most soldiers’ “perceptions of civilians” are “negative stemming from their insurgent sympathies.” But wasn’t this the case in Vietnam and Iraq as well? Or for that matter the Philippines from 1899 to 1902? Weren’t U.S. soldiers conditioned to expect warm receptions shocked to find the local people so cold and so prone to support the “enemy” instead of themselves?

The Sgt. Robert Bales Case

No one wants to be in a foreign country, asked to accomplish the impossible, surrounded by sullen people who find you rude and vulgar and want you to leave. Staff Sgt. Robert Bales surely didn’t.

Bales, relocated over Afghan objections to Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, is accused of going on a rampage the evening of March 11 in Panjwai district in Qandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban. He’s been charged with the premeditated murder of 17 Afghan civilians.

According to some reports, a roadside blast in the village of Mokhoyan, blew off the leg of one of Bales’ buddies on March 7 or 8. Villagers say U.S. troops rounded up all the adult males in the village, lined them up against a wall and told them they would “pay a price.” It’s, of course, not clear that this alleged incident influenced Bales’ subsequent actions in two villages. But the “Qandahar Massacre” may be the worst, clearest instance of a soldier to date expressing “negative perceptions of civilians” due to their “insurgent sympathies.”

Bales has his sympathizers, who see him as the victim of repeated deployments in places where U.S. soldiers confront resentful populations. They see him as someone who just “snapped” at a certain point, such that he decided to march off and shoot Afghan women and children, and burn their bodies. “I kind of sympathize for him,” a former neighbor told AP, “being gone, being sent over there four times. I can understand he’s probably quite wracked mentally, so I just hope that things are justified in court. I hope it goes okay.”

This is entirely in the tradition of unconditional “support for the troops” deeply entrenched in our culture. There was widespread outrage in this country when Sgt. William Calley was convicted of mass murder of Vietnamese in 1971. Georgia governor Jimmy Carter established “American Fighting Man’s Day” and urged Georgians to show Calley support. The governor of Indiana asked that all state flags to be flown at half-staff for Calley, and many states’ governors protested the verdict and demanded clemency. How, they wondered, could the U.S. court system persecute a hero-soldier who, fighting for his country and for freedom, just happened to slip up a little on the rules and kill between 22 and 500 Vietnamese civilians?

But Laura King, in the LA Times, takes the opportunity to assert a high American standard of morality, juxtaposing it against an Afghan one. “In American minds, “ she writes, “the moral distinction between the accidental and the deliberate, between the carefully judged risk and the deranged act, is incalculable. But for Afghans, the result — the shrouded bodies, the wailing relatives, the bite of shovels into dusty ground — speaks to the numbing sameness of unexpected and violent death.”

In other words, the “American mind” is highly moral, and while forgiving episodes of Accidental “collateral damage” it recoils in disgust at any deliberate act of terror. King seems to echo Bales’ own words to a home-town reporter in 2007. The soldier after an Iraq deployment expressed contempt for anyone who would put “his family in harm’s way,” adding “I think that’s the real difference between being an American as opposed to being a bad guy.” For this accused mass-murderer, Americans are, by definition, “good guys.”

Whatever her intentions, King’s piece seems almost an apologia for U.S. imperialism. U.S. citizens as “their” forces invade maintain this “incalculable moral distinction” between what the soldiers do deliberately and what they do by accident. But the poor natives are unable to distinguish between “the numbing sameness” of the accidental killing of civilians (the “collateral damage” of airstrikes or roadblock incidents) and the occasional deliberate targeting of civilians.

Isn’t the point that the invasion itself was a very deliberate event? A crime against peace? And that such invasions usually produce these sorts of results?

“End of the Rope”

Ekil Hakimi, the Afghan ambassador to the U.S., told CNN recently that Bales’ rampage was “not the first incident; it was the 100th, the 200th and 500th incident.”

Hakemi is very much in the pro-U.S. camp. And yet even he complains to the U.S. mass media that the U.S. is routinely slaughtering civilians in his country.

The Afghan parliament has voted — unanimously! — to withdraw from the existing military agreement with the U.S. in protest of the removal of Bates from Afghanistan and the Afghan legal process. The legislators (even though they obtained their own positions as a result of foreign occupation) see it as an insult to the nation. Karzai probably won’t sign the law; he is, however much he postures as a nationalist, dependent on U.S. aid to secure his own position. But isn’t it significant that even a parliament established under U.S. hegemony, excluding any Taliban forces, favoring the warlords grateful for U.S. support, is making such a statement?

Meanwhile Karzai’s demanding that foreign troops withdraw from villages and return to their bases, declaring U.S.-Afghan relations “at the end of their rope.” These are surely positive developments

Some of those most closely aligned to the U.S. in Afghanistan are saying: Please go away. We don’t like you. Even if we once did, we don’t anymore because you’ve killed too many of us, and insulted and offended us in too many ways. You have overstayed your welcome in our country.

And the U.S. troops are saying: We don’t like these people, and we’re shocked by their ingratitude and hostility.

Of course, mutual animosity shouldn’t generally be a cause for celebration. But mutual animosity between occupied and occupier is normal, and certainly (as Mao Zedong put it) “it’s right to rebel” against oppression. And don’t the host of Afghan grievances cited by Bordin constitute oppression?

At this point the level of animosity has become impossible to conceal with cheery reports of “progress” such as that delivered to Congress by Gen. John Allen, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, earlier this month. Fallout from the Qandahar Massacre is causing some to predict or urge a speedy pullout. Retired General James A. Marks, senior Army intelligence officer at the time of the Iraq invasion, has said it “not inconceivable” that that massacre might prompt a U.S. withdrawal “in weeks.”

The My Lai Massacre helped turn U.S. public opinion decisively against the Vietnam War, and so maybe we can say that Calley’s victims did not die entirely in vain. The silver lining to the Qandahar Massacre might just possibly be an early withdrawal from Afghanistan. Optimally, these episodes reflecting mutual contempt in Afghanistan might actually bind people in both Afghanistan and the U.S. together — in revulsion towards imperialism.

The medics were already sentenced by a military tribunal (a military tribunal!) to up to 15 years in prison after months of being held in illegal detention, denied legal counsel and subjected to torture.

Moving their case to a civilian court is presumably meant to signal a concession by the regime. But what it illustrates is that the Al Khalifa royal rulers of Bahrain are unreconstructed despots who are implacably set against accepting any kind of democratic reform.

The persecution of the majority Shia population – 70 per cent of the island – by an unelected Sunni elite is business as usual as epitomized by the vindictive targeting of medics whose only “crime” was that they treated hundreds of people injured in the state’s brutal crackdown against the pro-democracy movement.

Recently, Washington has been doing its PR best to present the monarchy in the Persian Gulf kingdom as being belatedly open to reform – this after a year of unrelenting repression against a largely peaceful pro-democracy uprising.

Bahraini grassroots activists are concerned that sections of the official opposition belonging to the Shia Al Wefaq political society are being groomed by the US State Department to accept a “compromise deal” with the royal rulers that would effectively see the monarchy remaining in power and the status quo merely being given a facelift.

King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa has been praised in the US corporate media for overseeing “brave” moves towards political power-sharing and dialogue with the mainly Shia-led opposition.

Washington’s envoy on human rights Michael Posner and former national security advisor Elliott Abrams have talked up “important steps” by the Bahraini regime towards reform.

However, no amount of Washington spinning can conceal the facts of life: that the US-backed Bahraini regime will continue violating human rights and international law in order to maintain its stranglehold hold on political and economic power at the expense of the Shia majority.

For 280 years, the Sunni rulers, who invaded the country from neighbouring Qatar, have sat on the chests of the indigenous Shia, and they are not going to give up their privileged seats of comfort. The Al Khalifa dynasty has enriched itself through graft and corruption while the majority of Bahrainis struggle with unemployment and poverty.

The oil wealth of the tiny island has lined the pockets of the Al Khalifas, but for the ordinary Shia it has brought poverty, pollution and sickness. To add insult to injury, when the mainly Shia-led uprising last February peacefully demanded elected government to replace the unelected venal family dynasty, it was met with batons, bullets and brutality, with thousands incarcerated or fired from their jobs, several tortured to death while in prison.

Historically, to maintain this excruciating state of inequality, the Bahraini rulers developed a system of governance and state security apparatus that is “bullet-proof to reform”. Under American and British tutelage, the Bahraini rulers became adept at presenting the kingdom as a relatively benign monarchy. They may have acquired the modern semantics and appearance of political progressivism, such as referring to the kingdom as a constitutional monarchy with a (rigged) parliament instead of an absolute monarchy as in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf sheikhdoms. But not far below the surface, Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism was always the dominant reality.

For example, the kingdom’s prime minister is 78-year-old Prince Khalifa Al Khalifa, the uncle of the incumbent king. He is the world’s longest sitting prime minister, having first occupied the post in 1971 when Bahrain gained nominal independence from Britain. Prime Minister Khalifa – also known locally as Mr Fifty-Fifty – has never faced an electorate and is notorious for siphoning off Bahrain’s oil wealth to become one of the richest men in the world.

For decades, despite glamorous images of mirrored skyscrapers and Formula One Grand Prix, Bahrain has been run with an ironclad National Security Agency. The agency was, and is, a veritable “torture apparatus” headed up by members of the royal family and assisted in its nefarious conduct by ex-colonial power Britain.

Between 1968-98, the main architect of the NSA and its sectarian methods of repression against the Shia population was British colonel Sir Ian Henderson. Henderson, who had previously gained British government commendation for his role in efficiently, that is brutally, suppressing the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya during the 1950s-60s, oversaw the detention and torture of thousands of Bahrainis held for years without trial in the dungeons of Bahrain.

Former detainees told Global Research that one of Henderson’s sadistic methods of interrogation was to force them to sit naked on upright glass bottles, the necks of which had been roughly broken off to leave protruding jagged points. The detainees told how Henderson personally oversaw the torture of inmates.

Today, the British influence on Bahrain’s NSA continues. One of Bahrain’s senior police chiefs is Briton John Yates, formerly of Scotland Yard; another senior police chief is American John Timoney, who formerly ran the force in Miami, Florida. Both men have reputations of corruption and brutality from their previous commands.

Bahrain’s institutionalized despotism under a family dynasty is backed up with a military and police force whose ranks are filled by foreign expatriate Sunnis recruited from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Jordan. The regime forces serve their Sunni masters with a vicious hatred towards the Shia population.

This fact is attested by the daily and nightly attacks on Shia villages by Saudi-backed regime forces, with massive amounts of tear gas fired into streets and homes. At least 25 people have died from suffocation with tear gas over the past year since Saudi-led forces invaded Bahrain to crush the uprising. The victims range from a five-day-old baby girl to elderly men and women who are too weak or infirmed to escape from their smoke-filled homes.

In the past week, mourners attending the funerals for two men who died from tear gas exposure were themselves attacked by riot police who proceeded to fire more tear gas.

So, on the one hand, we see the Bahraini rulers wearing a velvet glove offering “dialogue” and “reforms”, with Washington and London providing the positive-sounding script; while on the other hand, what is felt is an iron-fist smashing down the doors of homes, firing tear gas into houses, dragging suspects away in the middle of the night, detaining them without trial and torturing to death.

And this is all happening in a supposed new era of reformism and dialogue in Bahrain that Washington assures is underway.

The continued persecution of the Bahraini medics is another fact on the ground to demonstrate the despotic nature of Washington and London’s “important ally” in the Persian Gulf.

The medics were sentenced for up to 15 years by a military court last September on a range of outlandish charges, including “attempting to overthrow the government” and “spreading defamatory information” about the royal rulers.

That verdict caused international protests from human rights groups, who denounced it as a travesty of legal procedure, not least because the sole basis for the prosecution were the confessions of the defendants – confessions that were obtained under torture.

Then, as now, the response from Washington and other Western governments and media was muted.

The medics include world-renowned surgeons Ali Al Ekri and Ghassan Dhaif and his wife, Zahra, and brother and sister, Bassim and Nada. Also sentenced was Rula Al Suffar, the former head of Bahrain’s Nursing Society. These are individuals of impeccable medical professionalism and ethics, who refused to close the doors of Bahrain’s main public hospital, Al Salmaniya, when the regime began butchering protesters last February-March. Global Research can bear witness to the dedication of these medics and countless others who struggled in the wards and corridors of the hospital to patch people up with the most horrendous wounds as wave after wave of injured were ferried in.

Dr Al Ekri was assaulted while performing surgery and hauled into detention by Saudi-backed forces who had smashed their way into Salmaniya Hospital – a crime against humanity, just one of many following the Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain that was given the green light by Washington and London.

There was a faint sign that Washington’s recent talk of progress and reform in Bahrain may have somehow sent the hint to its favoured despots to quietly drop the embarrassing show trial against the medics. But with the continuance of the prosecution – albeit in a civilian court instead of a military tribunal – it seems that institutionalized barbarism cannot overcome its tyrannical instincts for power, even at the behest of its more PR-savvy patron in Washington.

One can only imagine the sanctimonious mouth-foaming reaction by Washington, London and the corporate media if such a travesty was perpetrated against medics in Syria.

But Bahrain is not Syria; it is an ally, therefore Western governments and media suddenly develop blindness and speech impediment in the face of blatant crimes against humanity.

It makes no difference if it’s timber, oil, or coal. In the 1970s and 1980s, the nuclear energy industry promised well-paying jobs, clean energy, and a safe health and work environment. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Daiichi, and thousands of violations issued by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency, have shown that even with strict operating guidelines, nuclear energy isn’t as clean and safe as claimed. Like all other energy industries, nuclear power isn’t infinite. Most plants have a 40–50 year life cycle. After that, the plant becomes so radioactive hot that it must be sealed.

In the early 21st century, the natural gas industry follows the model of the other energy corporations, and uses the same rhetoric. James M. Taylor, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute, claims on the Institute’s website, “The newfound abundance of domestic gas reserves promises unprecedented energy prosperity and security.”

The energy policy during the eight years of the George W. Bush–Dick Cheney administration was to give favored status to the industry, often at the expense of the environment. In addition to negating Bill Clinton’s strong support for the Kyoto Protocol, signed by 191 countries, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, former oil company executives Bush and Cheney pushed to open significant federal land, including the 19 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), to drilling that would disrupt the ecological balance in one of the nation’s most pristine areas.

A study by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), published in 2004 concluded that fracking was of little or no risk to human health. However, Wes Wilson, a 30-year EPA environmental engineer, in a letter to members of Congress and the EPA inspector general, called that study “scientifically unsound,” and questioned the bias of the panel, noting that five of the seven members had significant ties to the industry. “EPA’s failure to regulate [fracking] appears to be improper under the Safe Water Drinking Act and may result in danger to public health and safety.”

The following year, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 — on a 249–183 vote in the House and an 85–12 vote in the Senate — exempted the oil and natural gas industry from the Safe Water Drinking Act. That exemption applied to the “construction of new well pads and the accompanying new roads and pipelines.” The National Defense Resource Council noted that the EPA interpreted the exemption “as allowing unlimited discharges of sediment into the nation’s streams, even where those discharges contribute to a violation of state water quality standards.” The exemption became known derisively as the Halliburton Loophole, named for one of the nation’s major energy companies, of which Cheney, whose promotion of Big Business and opposition to environmental policies is well-documented, had once been the CEO.

Bills introduced in the U.S. House (H.R. 2766) and U.S. Senate (S. 1215) in June 2009 to give federal regulatory oversight under the Safe Water Drinking Act to hydraulic fracturing languished. New bills (H.R. 1084 and S. 587), introduced in March 2011 in the 112th Congress, are also expected to die without a vote.

The natural gas industry has a long history of effective lobbying at the state and national level. America’s Natural Gas Alliance has four former Congressmen as lobbyists, according to research by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP). Through various political action committees (PACs), the industry has contributed about $238.7 million in campaign contributions, about three-fourths of it to Republican candidates, since 1990, according to the CRP. For the 2008 election, the gas and oil industry contributed $27.4 million, including contributions from individuals, PACs, and soft money, according to CRP data. Total contributions for the current election cycle, as of mid-March, are $20.6 million, with almost 90 percent of it going to Republicans.

At the federal level, the top recipients of oil and gas contributions during the current election cycle, according to the CRP, are former presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry of Texas ($833,674), Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst of Texas ($650,850), presidential hopeful Mitt Romney ($597,950), Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell ($264,700), and Sen. John Barasso of Wyoming ($225,400), a member of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Every one of the top 20 recipients is a Republican.

Barack Obama, although significantly more environmental friendly than his predecessor, had opened up off-shore drilling just prior to the BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast in April 2010. He has repeatedly spoken against the heavy use and dependence upon fossil fuels, and sees the expanded use of natural gas as a transition fuel to expanded use of wind and solar energy. Nevertheless, he has still received funding from the natural gas industry. During the 2008 presidential campaign, he received $920,922 from the oil and gas industry, according to data compiled by the CRP. His opponent, Sen. John McCain, according to CRP, accepted $2,543,154.

In contrast, the 1.4 million member Sierra Club, since August 2010, has refused to accept any donations from the natural gas industry. The Sierra Club, which has actively opposed the development of coal as an energy source, had received $27 million since 2007 from Chesapeake Energy. By 2010, “our view of natural gas [and fracking] had changed [and we] stopped the funding relationship between the Club and the gas industry, and all fossil fuel companies or executives,” says Michael Brune, Sierra’s executive director.

Mixed into Pennsylvania’s energy production is not only a symbiotic relationship of business and government, but a history of corruption and influence-peddling. Between 1859, when an economical method to drill for oil was developed near Titusville, Pa., and 1933, the beginning of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Pennsylvania, under almost continual Republican administration, was among the nation’s most corrupt states. The robber barons of the timber, oil, coal, steel, and transportation industries essentially bought their right to be unregulated. In addition to widespread bribery, the energy industries, especially coal, assured the election of preferred candidates by giving pre-marked ballots to workers, many of whom didn’t read English.

In a letter to the editor of The New York Times in March 2011, John Wilmer, a former attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), explained that “Pennsylvania’s shameful legacy of corruption and mismanagement caused 2,500 miles of streams to be totally dead from acid mine drainage; left many miles of scarred landscape; enriched the coal barons; and impoverished the local citizens.” His words serve as a warning about what is happening in the natural gas fields.

Pennsylvania’s new law that regulates and gives favorable treatment to the natural gas industry was initiated and passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and signed by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett. The House voted 101–90 for passage; the Senate voted, 31–19. Both votes were mostly along party lines.

In addition to forbidding physicians and health care professionals from disclosing what the industry believes are “trade secrets” in what it uses in fracking that may cause air and water pollution, there are other industry-favorable provisions.

The new law guts local governments’ rights of zoning and long-term planning, doesn’t allow for local health and environmental regulation, forbids municipalities to appeal state decisions about well permits, and provides subsidies to the natural gas industry and payments for out-of-state workers to get housing but provides for no incentives or tax credits to companies to hire Pennsylvania workers.

It also requires companies to provide fresh water, which can be bottled water, to areas in which they contaminate the water supply, but doesn’t require the companies to clean up the pollution or even to track transportation and deposit of contaminated wastewater. The law allows companies to place wells 300 feet from houses, streams and wetlands. The law also allows compressor stations to be placed 750 feet from houses, and gives natural gas companies authority to operate these stations continuously at up to 60 decibels, the equivalent of continuous conversation in restaurants. The noise level and constant artificial lighting has adverse effects upon wildlife.

As a result of all the concessions, the natural gas industry is given special considerations not given any other business or industry in Pennsylvania.

Each well is expected to generate about $16 million during its lifetime, which can be as few as ten years, according to the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center (PBPC). The effective tax and impact fee is about 2 percent. Corbett had originally wanted no tax or impact fees placed upon natural gas drilling; as public discontent increased, he suggested a 1 percent tax, which was in the original House bill. In contrast, other states that allow natural gas fracking have tax rates as high as 7.5 percent of market value (Texas) and 25–50 percent of net income (Alaska). The Pennsylvania rate can vary, based upon the price of natural gas and inflation, but will still be among the five lowest of the 32 states that allow natural gas drilling. Over the lifetime of a well, Pennsylvania will collect about $190,000–$350,000, while West Virginia will collect about $993,700, Texas will collect about $878,500, and Arkansas will collect about $555,700, according to PBPC data and analyses.

State Sen. Daylin Leach, a Democrat from suburban Philadelphia, says he opposed the bill because, “At a time when we are closing our schools and eliminating vital human services, to leave billions on the table as a gift to industry that is already going to be making billions is obscene.” State Rep. Mark Cohen, a Democrat from Philadelphia, like most of the Democrats in the General Assembly, agrees. The legislation, he says, “produces far too little revenue for local communities, gives the local communities local taxing power which most of them do not want, because it pits one community against the other, and gives no revenue at all to other areas of the state.”

The new law is generally believed to be “payback” by Corbett and the Republican legislators for campaign contributions. The industry contributed about $7.2 million to Pennsylvania candidates and their PACs between 2000 and the end of 2010, including $860,825 to the Republican party and $129,100 to the Democratic party, according to data compiled by Common Cause. In addition, the natural gas industry contributed about $1.6 million to Corbett’s political campaigns during the past 10 years, about $1.1 million of that for his campaign for governor, according to Common Cause. Rep. Brian L. Ellis (R-Butler County), sponsor of the House bill, received $23,300. Sen. Joseph B. Scarnati (R- Warren, Pa.), the senate president pro-tempore who sponsored the companion Senate bill (SB 1100), received $293,334. Of the 20 Pennsylvania legislators who received the most money from the industry since 2001, 16 are Republicans, according to Common Cause.

Rep. H. William DeWeese (D-Waynesburg, Pa.), received $58,750, the most of the four Democrats. DeWeese, first elected in 1976, had been Speaker of the House and Democratic leader.

It’s possible that the significant campaign contributions didn’t influence Pennsylvania’s politicians to rush to embrace the natural gas industry and its controversial use of hydraulic fracking. It’s possible that these politicians had always believed in fracking, and the natural gas industry was merely contributing to the campaigns of those who believed as they do. However, with the heavy amount of money spent by the natural gas lobby and, apparently, willingly accepted by certain politicians, there is no way to know how they might have voted had no money or lobbying occurred.

Tom Corbett’s first major political appointment after his election in November 2010 was to name C. Alan Walker, an energy company executive, to head the Department of Community and Economic Development. The Pennsylvania Progressive identified Walker as “an ardent anti-environmentalist and someone who hates regulation of his industry.” A ProPublica investigation revealed that Walker had given $184,000 to Corbett’s political campaign.

Shortly after taking office, Corbett repealed environmental assessments of gas wells in state parks. The result could be as many as 2,200 well pads on almost 90 percent of all public lands, according to Nature Conservancy of Pennsylvania.

Corbett’s public announcements in March 2011, two months after his inauguration, established the direction for gas drilling in Pennsylvania.

In his first budget address, Corbett boldly declared he wanted to “make Penn­syl­va­nia the hub of this [drilling] boom. Just as the oil com­pa­nies decided to head­quar­ter in one of a dozen states with oil, let’s make Penn­syl­va­nia the Texas of the nat­ural gas boom. I’m deter­mined that Penn­syl­va­nia not lose this moment.” Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley would later boast, “The Marcellus [Shale] is revitalizing our main streets in downtowns.”

Within the budget bill, Corbett authorized Walker to “expedite any permit or action pending in any agency where the creation of jobs may be impacted.” This unprecedented reach apparently applied to all energy industries. That same month, Corbett created an Advisory Commission, loaded with persons from business and industry. Not one member was from the health professions; of the seven state agencies represented, not one member was from the Department of Health.

Between 2007 and the end of 2010, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) issued 1,435 violations to natural gas companies; 952 of those violations related to potential harm to the environment. In March, Michael Krancer, the new DEP secretary, also a political appointee, took personal control over his department’s issuance of any violations. By Krancer’s decree, every inspector could no longer cite any well owner in the Marcellus Shale development without first getting the approval of Krancer and his executive deputy secretary.

“It’s an extraordinary directive [that] represents a break from how business has been done” and politicizes the process, John Hanger told ProPublica. Hanger, DEP secretary under the Ed Rendell administration, said the new rules “will cause the public to lose confidence entirely in the inspection process.” He told the Scranton Times-Tribune the new policy was the equivalent of every trooper having to get permission from the state police commissioner before issuing a traffic citation.  Because the new policy is so unusual and broad “it’s impossible for something like this to be issued without the direction and knowledge of the governor’s office,” said Hanger. Corbett denied he was responsible for the decision. Five weeks after the Krancer decision was leaked to the media, and following a strong negative response from the public, environmental groups, and the state’s media, the DEP rescinded the policy—which Krancer claimed was only a three-month “pilot program.”

“When state agencies say they will ‘regulate’ or ‘monitor’ hydraulic fracturing to reduce known threats, we should not accept this as a guarantee of any kind,” says Eileen Fay, an animal rights/environmental writer. Fay argues that because of legislative corruption, it is a responsibility of citizens to protect their own health and environment by “putting pressure on our legislators.”

In February 2012, Corbett proudly signed Act 13, a merger of the House and Senate bills.

HB 1950 had initially included a provision to provide up to $2 million a year in funding to the Department of Health for “collecting and disseminating information, preparing and conducting  health care provider outreach and education and investigating health related complaints and other uses associated with unconventional natural gas production activity.” That provision, strongly supported by numerous public health and environmental groups, was deleted in the final bill.

The Pennsylvania Constitution (Article I, section 27) declares:

 The people have a right to clean air, pure water, and to the preservation of the natural, scenic, historic and esthetic values of the environment. Pennsylvania’s public natural resources are the common property of all the people, including generations yet to come. As trustee of these resources, the Commonwealth shall conserve and maintain them for the benefit of all the people.

However, unlike New York state, which placed a moratorium on well permits while it is evaluating the health and environmental risks, Pennsylvania has rushed to embrace the natural gas industry and its use of fracking, apparently disregarding its own Constitution. The Susquehanna River Basin Commission has routinely approved requests from drillers to remove millions of gallons of water each day from the river, although the commissioners have not requested any health impact statements or undertaken a complete cumulative impact study, according to Iris Marie Bloom, an environmental writer and activist. Because of the nature of the Marcellus Shale deposit in Pennsylvania, as opposed to neighboring states, natural gas companies have to transport the wastewater to other states for re-use or disposal or take it to sewage treatment plants. The plants then discharge the treated wastewater into the state’s rivers. However, present methods can’t remove the salt and some other chemicals and radioactive elements. Currently, about 11 million gallons of wastewater a day are taken from the Susquehanna for fracking operations; about three times that amount is anticipated when fracking reaches its peak in the state, according to Paul Swartz, Commission executive director. In contrast, the Delaware River Basic Commission has put a moratorium on taking water from that river until studies have been completed.

Pennsylvania is “handing out permits almost like popcorn in a theater,” says Diane Siegmund, a psychologist from Towanda. Between Jan. 1, 2005 and March 2, 2012, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection issued 10,232 permits, and denied only 36 requests.

Siegmund is frustrated by what she sees not only as state government’s acceptance of fracking but of numerous local governments in the Marcellus Shale region from speaking out on behalf of the preservation of health and the environment. When she went to the Bradford County commissioners with stacks of research about problems with fracking, “all they did was to thank me and claim it’s not their problem.” She says residents are beginning to believe that local governments are operating in collusion with the energy companies.

But it isn’t just governments. The issue of fracking has divided towns like Dimock, Pa. In November 2009, 15 residents sued Cabot Oil and Gas, charging that the company contaminated their drinking water. Tests conducted by the DEP during the last years of the Ed Rendell administration had revealed there was higher than expected methane gas in 18 water wells that provided drinking water to 13 homes near the drills. The build-up of methane gas had also led to well explosions and DEP warnings to citizens to keep their windows open. Among the provisions of a consent order, the state required Cabot to provide fresh water to families whose water had been affected by the excess methane gas. Cabot denied its fracking operation was responsible for the elevated levels. On November 30, 2011, after the DEP, now under the Tom Corbett administration, declared the water to be safe to drink, Cabot stopped delivering water.

And then something strange happened. The town of Binghamton, N.Y., about 35 miles north, said it would provide a tanker of fresh water. However, the supervisors of Dimock Twp., supported by most of the 140 residents who attended the meeting, most of them with some economic ties to the natural gas industry, refused the offer. According to reporting in the Scranton Times-Tribune, when Binghamton mayor Matthew T. Ryan asked “Why not let people help?” he was rebuffed by one of the township’s three supervisors who snapped, “Why should we haul them water? They got themselves into this. You keep your nose in Binghamton.”

In January 2012, after declaring that the water “contains levels of contaminants that pose a health concern,” the EPA decided it would bring water to residents in Dimock. The response by Cabot was that the EPA was wasting taxpayer money in its investigation of Cabot environmental and health practices. The response by Pennsylvania’s DEP was almost as inflammatory as the water in the taps. Michael Krancer, DEP’s head, not only disagreed with the EPA findings, he called the agency’s knowledge of fracking to be “rudimentary.”

In mid-March, following preliminary tests on several of the wells serving Dimock residents, the EPA found that the water “did not show levels of contamination that could present a health concern.” However, it acknowledged arsenic, some metals, and potentially explosive methane gas remained in the water. A ProPublica investigation revealed that four of the five water samples it obtained showed methane levels exceeding Pennsylvania standards.

“We are deeply troubled by Region 3’s rush to judge the science before testing is even complete, and by their apparent disregard for established standards of drinking water safety,” said Claire Sandberg, executive director of Water Defense. She questioned why EPA Region 3’s handling of the Dimock case differed from how other EPA regional offices handled similar cases in Texas and Wyoming when it didn’t release the information until all testing was completed. Dr. Ron Bishop, professor of biochemistry at SUNY/Oneonta, told ProPublica, “Any suggestion that water from these wells is safe for domestic use would be preliminary or inappropriate.”

The extraction of natural gas has also led to the development of other industries—and the exploitation of the people. In Jersey Shore, Pa., about 20 miles west of Williamsport, Aqua PVR bought a 37-unit mobile home village, with plans to build a water withdrawal plant to provide up to three million gallons a day to the natural gas industry. The day the purchase was completed on February 23, 2012, Aqua told the residents their leases were terminated “immediately,” according to reporting in the Sun-Gazette. The company gave residents until May 1 to leave. To sweeten what may be seen as a callous corporate action, Aqua said it would give $2,500 to each resident that moved by April 1, and $1,500 if they moved by May 1. However, as the Sun-Gazette reported, the cost to move each mobile home ranged from $5,000 to $12,000. Many of the residents lived in the village more than a decade; one was there 38 years. The newspaper reported that most trailer parks in the area were already at maximum occupancy, and others would not accept the older trailers.

“Residents are afraid to speak up,” says Diane Siegmund, who points out there is “a lot of fear” among the residents, those whose lives are being uprooted, those whose health is being compromised, and those whose economic benefits may be compromised if fracking operations are reduced.

“As long as the powers can keep the people isolated and fragmented,” says Siegmund, “the momentum for change can never be gained.” The experience in Dimock is seen throughout the Marcellus Shale region.

It’s not unreasonable to expect people who are unemployed or underemployed to grasp for anything to help themselves and their families, nor is it unreasonable to expect that persons—roustabouts, clerks, truck drivers, helicopter pilots, among several hundred thousand in dozens of job classifications—will take better paid jobs, even if it often means 60 hour work weeks under hazardous conditions. It’s also not unreasonable to expect that families living in agricultural and rural areas, who are struggling to survive, will snap at the lure of several thousand dollars to lease mineral rights and some of their land to an energy company, which will also pay royalties. But what is unreasonable is that government allows corporations to flourish at the expense of the people and their environment.

The Sierra Club urges that the country needs “to leapfrog over gas whenever possible in favor of truly clean energy. Instead of rushing to see how quickly we can extract natural gas, we should be focusing on how to be sure we are using less—and safeguarding our health and environment in the meantime.”

Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, calls for more research studies that “include all the ways people can be exposed [to health hazards], such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals.”

In November 2011, the Advisory Board of the U.S. Department of Energy concluded: “The public deserves assurance that the full economic, environmental and energy security benefits of shale gas development will be realized without sacrificing public health, environmental protection and safety.”

When the history of natural gas exploration in Pennsylvania is finally written, the story will be that it was a cheaper, cleaner energy source, and that it temporarily helped some people in rural areas, and brought some well-paying jobs into the state. But history will probably also record that the lure of immediate gratification led Pennsylvania’s politicians to willingly accept political donations that led them to sacrifice their citizens’ health and the state’s environment.

• Assisting on this series, in addition to those quoted within the articles, were Rosemary R. Brasch, Eileen Fay, and Dr. Wendy Lynne Lee.

The industry claims well drilling in the Marcellus Shale will bring several hundred thousand jobs, and has minimal health and environmental risk. President Barack Obama in his January 2012 State of the Union, said he believes the development of natural gas as an energy source to replace fossil fuels could generate 600,000 jobs.

However, research studies by economists Dr. Jannette M. Barth, Dr. Deborah Rogers, and others debunk the idea of significant job creation.

Barry Russell, president of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, says “no evidence directly connects injection of fracking fluid into shale with aquifer contamination.” Fracking “has never been found to contaminate a water well,” says Christine Cronkright, communications director for the Pennsylvania Department of Health.

Research studies and numerous incidents of water contamination prove otherwise.

In late 2010, equipment failure may have led to toxic levels of chemicals in the well water of at least a dozen families in Conoquenessing Twp. in Bradford County. Township officials and Rex Energy, although acknowledging that two of the drilling wells had problems with the casings, claimed there were pollutants in the drinking water before Rex moved into the area. John Fair disagrees. “Everybody had good water a year ago,” Fair told environmental writer and activist Iris Marie Bloom in February 2012. Bloom says residents told her the color of water changed (to red, orange, and gray) after Rex began drilling. Among chemicals detected in the well water, in addition to methane gas, were ammonia, arsenic, chloromethane, iron, manganese, t-butyl alcohol, and toluene. While not acknowledging that its actions could have caused the pollution, Rex did provide fresh water to the residents, but then stopped doing so on February 29, 2012, after the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said the well water was safe. The residents vigorously disagreed and staged protests against Rex; environmental activists and other residents trucked in portable water jugs to help the affected families. The Marcellus Outreach Butler blog (MOB) declared that residents’ “lives have been severely disrupted and their health has been severely impacted. To unceremoniously ‘close the book’ on investigations into their troubles when so many indicators point to the culpability of the gas industry for the disruption of their lives is unconscionable.”

In April 2011, near Towanda, Pa., seven families were evacuated after about 10,000 gallons of wastewater contaminated an agricultural field and a stream that flows into the Susquehanna River, the result of an equipment failure, according to the Bradford County Emergency Management Agency.

The following month, DEP fined Chesapeake Energy $900,000, the largest amount in the state’s history, for allowing methane gas to pollute the drinking water of 16 families in Bradford County during the previous year. The DEP noted there may have been toxic methane emissions from as many as six wells in five towns. The DEP also fined Chesapeake $188,000 for a fire at a well in Washington County that injured three workers.

In January 2012, an equipment failure at a drill site in Susquehanna County led to a spill of several thousand gallons of fluid for almost a half-hour, causing “potential pollution,” according to the DEP. In its citation to Carizzo Oil and Gas, the DEP “strongly” recommended that the company cease drilling at all 67 wells “until the cause of this problem and a solution are identified.”

In December 2011, the federal Environmental Protection Agency concluded that fracking operations could be responsible for groundwater pollution.

“Today’s methods make gas drilling a filthy business. You know it’s bad when nearby residents can light the water coming out of their tap on fire,” says Larry Schweiger, president of the National Wildlife Federation. What’s causing the fire is the methane from the drilling operations. A ProPublica investigation in 2009 revealed methane contamination was widespread in drinking water in areas around fracking operations in Colorado, Texas, Wyoming, and Pennsylvania. The presence of methane in drinking water in Dimock, Pa., had become the focal point for Josh Fox’s investigative documentary, Gasland, which received an Academy Award nomination in 2011 for Outstanding Documentary; Fox also received an Emmy for non-fiction directing. Fox’s interest in fracking intensified when a natural gas company offered $100,000 for mineral rights on property his family owned in Milanville, in the extreme northeast part of Pennsylvania, about 60 miles east of Dimock.

Research by a team of scientists from Duke University revealed “methane contamination of shallow drinking water systems [that is] associated with shale-gas extraction.” The data and conclusions, published in the May 2011 issue of the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that not only did most drinking wells near drilling sites have methane, but those closest to the drilling wells, about a half-mile, had an average of 17 times the methane of  those of other wells.

“Some of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing—or liberated by it—are carcinogens,” Dr. Sandra Steingraber told members of the Environmental Conservation and Health committee of the New York State Assembly. Dr. Steingraber, a biologist and distinguished scholar in residence at Ithaca College, pointed out that some of the chemicals “are neurological poisons with suspected links to learning deficits in children,” while others “are asthma triggers. Some, especially the radioactive ones, are known to bioaccumulate in milk. Others are reproductive toxicants that can contribute to pregnancy loss.”

An investigation by New York Times reporter Ian Urbina, based upon thousands of unreported EPA documents and a confidential study by the natural gas industry, concluded, “Radioactivity in drilling waste cannot be fully diluted in rivers and other waterways.” Urbina learned that waste water from fracking operations was about 100 times more toxic than federal drinking water standards; 15 wells had readings about 1,000 times higher than standards.

Research by Dr. Ronald Bishop, a biochemist at SUNY/Oneonta, suggests that fracking to extract methane gas “is highly likely to degrade air, surface water and ground-water quality, to harm humans, and to negatively impact aquatic and forest ecosystems.” He notes that “potential exposure effects for humans will include poisoning of susceptible tissues, endocrine disruption syndromes, and elevated risk for certain cancers.” Every well, says Dr. Bishop, “will generate a sediment discharge of approximately eight tons per year into local waterways, further threatening federally endangered mollusks and other aquatic organisms.” In addition to the environmental pollution by the fracking process, Dr. Bishop believes “intensive use of diesel-fuel equipment will degrade air quality [that could affect] humans, livestock, and crops.”

Equally important are questions about the impact of as many as 200 diesel-fueled trucks each day bringing water to the site and then removing the waste water. In addition to the normal diesel emissions of trucks, there are also problems of leaks of the contaminated water.

“We need to know how diesel fuel got into our water supply,” says Diane Siegmund, a clinical psychologist from Towanda, Pa. “It wasn’t there before the companies drilled wells; it’s here now,” she says. Siegmund is also concerned about contaminated dust and mud. “There is no oversight on these,” she says, “but those trucks are muddy when they leave the well sites, and dust may have impact miles from the well sites.”

Research “strongly implicates exposure to gas drilling operations in serious health effects on humans, companion animals, livestock, horses, and wildlife,” according to Dr. Michelle Bamberger, a veterinarian, and Dr. Robert E. Oswald, a biochemist and professor of molecular medicine at Cornell University. Their study, published in New Solutions, an academic journal in environmental health, documents evidence of milk contamination, breeding problems, and cow mortality in areas near fracking operations as higher than in areas where no fracking occurred. Drs. Bamberger and Oswald noted that some of the symptoms present in humans from what may be polluted water from fracking operations include rashes, headaches, dizziness, vomiting, and severe irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat. For animals, the symptoms often led to reproductive problems and death.

Significant impact upon wildlife is also noted in a 900-page Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) conducted by New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation, and filed in September 2011. According to the EIS, “In addition to loss of habitat, other potential direct impacts on wildlife from drilling in the Marcellus Shale include increased mortality . . . altered microclimates, and increased traffic, noise, lighting, and well flares.” The impact, according to the report, “may include a loss of genetic diversity, species isolation, population declines . . . increased predation, and an increase of invasive species.” The report concludes that because of fracking, there is “little to no place in the study areas where wildlife would not be impacted, [leading to] serious cascading ecological consequences.” The impact, of course, affects the quality of milk and meat production as animals drink and graze near areas that have been taken over by the natural gas industry.

Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, calls for more research studies that “include all the ways people can be exposed [to health hazards], such as through air, water, soil, plants and animals.”

The response by the industry and its political allies to the scientific studies of the health and environmental effects of fracking “has approached the issue in a manner similar to the tobacco industry that for many years rejected the link between smoking and cancer,” say Drs. Bamberger and Oswald. Not only do they call for “full disclosure and testing of air, water, soil, animals, and humans,” but point out that with lax oversight, “the gas drilling boom . . . will remain an uncontrolled health experiment on an enormous scale.”

Dr. Helen Podgainy, a pediatrician in Coraopolis, Pa., says she doesn’t want her patients “to be guinea pigs who provide the next generation the statistical proof of health problems as in what happened with those exposed to asbestos or to cigarette smoke.”

Fracking is the controversial method of forcing water, gases, and chemicals at tremendous pressure of up to 15,000 pounds per square inch into a rock formation as much as 10,000 feet below the earth’s surface to open channels and force out natural gas and fossil fuels.

Advocates of fracking argue not only is natural gas “greener” than coal and oil energy, with significantly fewer carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur emissions, the mining of natural gas generates significant jobs in a depressed economy, and will help the U.S. reduce its oil dependence upon foreign nations. Geologists estimate there may be as much as 2,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas throughout the United States. If all of it is successfully mined, it could not only replace coal and oil but serve as a transition to wind, solar, and water as primary energy sources, releasing the United States from dependency upon fossil fuel energy and allowing it to be more self-sufficient.

The Marcellus Shale—which extends beneath the Allegheny Plateau, through southern New York, much of Pennsylvania, east Ohio, West Virginia, and parts of Maryland and Virginia—is one of the nation’s largest sources for natural gas mining, containing as much as 500 trillion cubic feet  of natural gas.  Each of Pennsylvania’s 5,255 wells, as of the beginning of March 2012, with dozens being added each week, takes up about nine acres, including all access roads and pipe.

Over the expected life time of each well, companies may use as many as nine million gallons of water and 100,000 gallons of chemicals and radioactive isotopes within a four to six week period. The additives “are used to prevent pipe corrosion, kill bacteria, and assist in forcing the water and sand down-hole to fracture the targeted formation,” explains Thomas J. Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research. However, about 650 of the 750 chemicals used in fracking operations are known carcinogens, according to a report filed with the U.S. House of Representatives in April 2011. Fluids used in fracking include those that are “potentially hazardous,” including volatile organic compounds, according to Christopher Portier, director of the National Center for Environmental Health, a part of the federal Centers for Disease Control. In an email to the Associated Press in January 2012, Portier noted that waste water, in addition to bring up several elements, may be radioactive. Fracking is also believed to have been the cause of hundreds of small earthquakes in Ohio and other states.

The law, an amendment to Title 52 (Oil and Gas) of the Pennsylvania Consolidated Statutes, requires that companies provide to a state-maintained registry the names of chemicals and gases used in fracking. Physicians and others who work with citizen health issues may request specific information, but the company doesn’t have to provide that information if it claims it is a trade secret or proprietary information, nor does it have to reveal how the chemicals and gases used in fracking interact with natural compounds. If a company does release information about what is used, health care professionals are bound by a non-disclosure agreement that not only forbids them from warning the community of water and air pollution that may be caused by fracking, but which also forbids them from telling their own patients what the physician believes may have led to their health problems. A strict interpretation of the law would also forbid general practitioners and family practice physicians who sign the non-disclosure agreement and learn the contents of the “trade secrets” from notifying a specialist about the chemicals or compounds, thus delaying medical treatment.

The clauses are buried on pages 98 and 99 of the 174-page bill, which was initiated and passed by the Republican-controlled General Assembly and signed into law in February by Republican Gov. Tom Corbett.

“I have never seen anything like this in my 37 years of practice,” says Dr. Helen Podgainy, a pediatrician from Coraopolis, Pa. She says it’s common for physicians, epidemiologists, and others in the health care field to discuss and consult with each other about the possible problems that can affect various populations. Her first priority, she says, “is to diagnose and treat, and to be proactive in preventing harm to others.” The new law, she says, not only “hinders preventative measures for our patients, it slows the treatment process by gagging free discussion.”

Psychologists are also concerned about the effects of fracking and the law’s gag order. “We won’t know the extent of patients becoming anxious or depressed because of a lack of information about the fracking process and the chemicals used,” says Kathryn Vennie of Hawley, Pa., a clinical psychologist for 30 years. She says she is already seeing patients “who are seeking support because of the disruption to their environment.” Anxiety in the absence of information, she says, “can produce both mental and physical problems.”

The law is not only “unprecedented,” but will “complicate the ability of health department to collect information that would reveal trends that could help us to protect the public health,” says Dr. Jerome Paulson, director of the Mid-Atlantic Center for Children’s Health and the Environment at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C.  Dr. Paulson, also professor of pediatrics at George Washington University, calls the law “detrimental to the delivery of personal health care and contradictory to the ethical principles of medicine and public health.” Physicians, he says, “have a moral and ethical responsibility to protect the health of the public, and this law precludes us from doing all we can to protect the public.” He has called for a moratorium on all drilling until the health effects can be analyzed.

Pennsylvania requires physicians to report to the state instances of 73 specific diseases, most of which are infectious diseases. However, the list also includes cancer, which may have origins not only from chemicals used to create the fissures that yield natural gas, but also in the blow-back of elements, including arsenic, present within the fissures. Thus, physicians are faced by conflicting legal and professional considerations.

“The confidentiality agreements are worrisome,” says Peter Scheer, a journalist/lawyer who is executive director of the First Amendment Coalition. Physicians who sign the non-disclosure agreements and then disclose the possible risks to protect the community can be sued for breech of contract, and the companies can seek both injunctions and damages, says Scheer.

In pre-trial discovery motions, a company might be required to reveal to the court what it claims are trade secrets and proprietary information, with the court determining if the chemical and gas combinations really are trade secrets or not. The court could also rule that the contract is unenforceable because it is contrary to public policy, which places the health of the public over the rights of an individual company to protect its trade secrets, says Scheer. However, the legal and financial resources of the natural gas corporations are far greater than those of individuals, and they can stall and outspend most legal challenges.

Although Pennsylvania is determined to protect the natural gas industry, not everyone in the industry agrees with the need for secrecy.  Dave McCurdy, president of the American Gas Association, says he supports disclosing the contents included in fracturing fluids. In an opinion column published in the Denver Post, McCurdy further argued, “We need to do more as an industry to engage in a transparent and fact-based public dialogue on shale gas development.”

The Natural Gas committee of the U.S. Department of Energy agrees. “Our most important recommendations were for more transparency and dissemination of information about shale gas operations, including full disclosure of chemicals and additives that are being used,” said Dr. Mark Zoback, professor of geophysics at Stanford University and a Board member.

Both McCurdy’s statement and the Department of Energy’s strong recommendation about full disclosure were known to the Pennsylvania General Assembly when it created the law that restricted health care professionals from disseminating certain information that could help reduce significant health and environmental problems from fracking operations.

•  Assisting on this series, in addition to those quoted within the articles, were Rosemary R. Brasch, Eileen Fay, Dr. Bernard Goldstein, and Dr. Wendy Lynne Lee.

And make no mistake; Vlad the Putinator will relish it. He’s back exactly where he wants to be: as Russia’s commander-in-chief, in charge of the military, foreign policy and all national security matters.

Anglo-American elites still squirm at the mention of his now legendary Munich 2007 speech, when he blasted the then George W Bush administration for its obsessively unipolar imperial agenda “through a system which has nothing to do with democracy” and non-stop overstepping of its “national borders in almost all spheres.”

So Washington and its minions have been warned. Before last Sunday’s election, Putin even advertised his road map. The essentials; no war on Syria; no war on Iran; no “humanitarian bombing” or fomenting “color revolutions” — all bundled into a new concept, “illegal instruments of soft power.” For Putin, a Washington-engineered New World Order is a no-go. What rules is “the time-honored principle of state sovereignty.”

No wonder. When Putin looks at Libya, he sees the graphic, regressive consequences of NATO’s “liberation” through “humanitarian bombing”; a fragmented country controlled by al-Qaeda-linked militias; backward Cyrenaica splitting from more developed Tripolitania; and a relative of the last king brought in to rule the new “emirate” — to the delight of those model democrats of the House of Saud.

More key essentials: no US bases encircling Russia; no US missile defense without strict admission, in writing, that the system will never target Russia; and increasingly close cooperation among the BRICS group of emerging powers.

Most of this was already implied in Putin’s previous road map — his paper A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making. That was Putin’s ippon — he loves judo — against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the International Monetary Fund and hardcore neo-liberalism. He sees a Eurasian Union as a “modern economic and currency union” stretching all across Central Asia.

For Putin, Syria is an important detail (not least because of Russia’s naval base in the Mediterranean port of Tartus, which NATO would love to abolish). But the meat of the matter is Eurasia integration. Atlanticists will freak out en masse as he puts all his efforts into coordinating “a powerful supranational union that can become one of the poles of today’s world while being an efficient connecting link between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region.”

The opposite roadmap will be Obama and Hillary’s Pacific doctrine. Now how exciting is that?

Putin plays Pipelineistan

It was Putin who almost single-handedly spearheaded the resurgence of Russia as a mega energy superpower (oil and gas accounts for two-thirds of Russia’s exports, half of the federal budget and 20% of gross domestic product). So expect Pipelineistan to remain key.

And it will be mostly centered on gas; although Russia holds no less than 30% of global gas supplies, its liquid natural gas (LNG) production is less than 5% of the global market share. It’s not even among the top ten producers.

Putin knows that Russia will need buckets of foreign investment in the Arctic — from the West and especially Asia — to keep its oil production above 10 million barrels a day. And it needs to strike a complex, comprehensive, trillion-dollar deal with China centered on Eastern Siberia gas fields; the oil angle has been already taken care of via the East Siberian Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline. Putin knows that for China — in terms of securing energy — this deal is a vital counterpunch against Washington’s shady “pivoting” towards Asia.

Putin will also do everything to consolidate the South Stream pipeline, which may end up costing a staggering $22 billion (the shareholder agreement is already signed between Russia, Germany, France and Italy. South Stream is Russian gas delivered under the Black Sea to the southern part of the EU, through Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Slovakia). If South Stream is a go, rival pipeline Nabucco is checkmated, a major Russian victory against Washington pressure and Brussels bureaucrats.

Everything is still up for grabs at the crucial intersection of hardcore geopolitics and Pipelineistan. Once again Putin will be facing yet another Washington road map — the not exactly successful New Silk Road (See US’s post-2014 Afghan agenda falters, Asia Times Online, Nov 4, 2011.)

Ant then there’s the joker in the pack: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Putin will want Pakistan to become a full member as much as China is interested in incorporating Iran. The repercussions would be ground-breaking — as in Russia, China, Pakistan, and Iran coordinating not only their economic integration but their mutual security inside a strengthened SCO, whose motto is “non-alignment, non-confrontation, and non-interference in the affairs of other countries.

Putin sees that with Russia, Central Asia, and Iran controlling no less than 50% of world’s gas reserves, and with Iran and Pakistan as virtual SCO members, the name of the game becomes Asia integration — if not Eurasia’s. The SCO develops as an economic/security powerhouse, while, in parallel, Pipelineistan accelerates the full integration of the SCO as a counterpunch to NATO. The regional players themselves will decide what makes more sense: this or a New Silk Road invented in Washington.

Make no mistake. Behind the relentless demonization of Putin and the myriad attempts to delegitimize Russia’s presidential elections, lie some very angry and powerful sections of Washington and Anglo-American elites.

They know Putin will be an ultra tough negotiator on all fronts. They know Moscow will apply increasingly closer coordination with China, on thwarting permanent NATO bases in Afghanistan, on facilitating Pakistan’s strategic autonomy, on opposing missile defense, on ensuring Iran is not attacked.

He will be the devil of choice because there could not be a more formidable opponent in the world stage to Washington’s plans — be they coded as Greater Middle East, New Silk Road, Full Spectrum Dominance, or America’s Pacific Century. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to rumble.

Long overweight, he has always sought to expand his eating horizon. Starting with the blasé turkey, he moved on to spicy Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino and Okinawan, etc. Lately he’s been stuffing his face with all-you-can-eat helpings of hummus, sharwama and sheikh mahshi. Yummm! But no earth is big enough to satisfy this infinite growth appetite, so with his overseas options dwindling, the fat man is consuming his own body. America is eating up its own young and future.

What to do? When a country is this sick, how do you go about curing it? And what should we tend to first? Among presidential candidates, the only one with anything like a sensible platform is Ron Paul, who insists on bringing all the troops home, restoring our raped Constitution, and lopping off the Federal Reserve, thus castrating our thieving banksters, but since Paul threatens the beast so directly, there’s no way our military/banking complex will allow him to win.

American electoral politics is modeled after game shows, sit-coms, professional wrestling and Jerry Springer, with everything well-orchestrated and media sculpted, but should the masses fail to cheer, laugh, tear up or become indignant on cues, there’s still the Diebold voting machine to yield a preordained result. Even with a fair shake, however, voters may still reject Ron Paul because of his opposition to social programs and abortion, as well as his laissez-faire stance towards big business.

As for third party candidates, the last one to have even the remotest chance of winning was Ross Perot, in 1992, but he ended up with zero Electoral College vote! As for Ralph Nader, his best showing was 2.74% of the popular vote, in 2000. In short, we don’t have a viable candidate to lever us from this quicksand. The system simply won’t allow it.

It won’t allow it because it’s not there to serve us, silly. This is no government for the people. Where have you been? While we had a brief moment occupying a few plazas, dusty lots and parks, they continued to occupy everything else. With their nonstop media pollution, they occupy your very mind. So what are you going to do about it?

Many of us just want to get off this death train. In 2008, a Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believed that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” A growing number would rather be a citizen of the Second Vermont Republic or Cascadia, etc., and in Wyoming, lawmakers just narrowly voted down a “doomsday bill” that would have prepared the state to function independently of Washington. Though it was posed as an emergency measure, it sounded suspiciously like a secession plan, what with the state having its own currency, army and even aircraft carrier.

Aspiring Cascadians chafe having “to put up with indifference and condescendence from distant seats of power,” but you can live in Washington DC itself and feel exactly the same way. Just ask the many homeless sprawling on the sidewalks within sight of the US Capitol, or the people of Adams Morgan or Anacostia. Like those in Bagdad or Kabul, they are not being served by the war criminals who huddle daily on that hill. So the distance is ideological and not necessarily physical. In the latest poll, released three weeks ago, 86% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Some may see their “representatives” as incompetent, but many Americans already know that they are being ruled by an alien government that only got elected through a rigged system and lying.

The more illegitimate they become, the more flags they display, and the bigger the flags, though they care nothing about what the flag stands for. To them, the American flag is just something to drape over your coffin, after they’ve sent you to commit mass murder for Big Oil, Big Banks and Israel, after they’ve used you thoroughly to enrich themselves. Isn’t it time we bury this grotesquely corrupt and bloodthirsty cabal? The big question is how?

Strategies, strategies. Recognizing that one-day protests accomplish nothing, the Occupy Movement sought to disrupt the system by occupying Wall Street. It didn’t happen that way, of course, because hundreds of cops were brought in to protect the New York Stock Exchange for months on end.

Thwarted, the occupiers moved to a park, and that became the model nationwide, but you can occupy as many parks as you want and the system will not change. As you sleep outside and become symbolically homeless, your sneering masters will continue to ruin lives by starting wars and ripping people off in plain sight.

And so the first stage of our rebellion is over, and though I fully applaud the courage and sacrifice of those who endured prolonged discomfort or police brutality to rouse America from its slumber, we must now aim for tangible results and not symbolic victories. Since time is short, we must get deadly serious. No more hedges.

But the structural causes of poverty are rarely addressed in the Western press. Why, for example, if capitalism is the best of all possible socio-economic systems, do most of the people on the planet live in poverty?

We are told that developing countries have dragged their populations out of poverty by opening up their markets to direct foreign investment. Rather than reining in the excesses of capitalism, then, intensifying its expansion is, many would argue, the solution to poverty.

But if that is the case, why is Haiti one of the poorest countries in the world? Haiti has had direct foreign investment for decades, yet standards of living have declined drastically. The same can be said for most Latin American countries who have sold their natural resources to foreign corporations.

Countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Bolivia have achieved socio-economic progress through nationalization not privatization. But there is a state at the other side of the world which has succeeded in providing almost full employment; is continuously raising wages; investing in education, scientific and technological research and development, and has achieved self-sufficiency in agriculture, creating an environment of social hope for its citizens. That country is the Republic of Belarus.

Venezuela and Belarus. Multi-polarity and endogenous development.

In 2007 President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela described the Republic of Belarus as a “model state”. Driving through the streets of Minsk, it is not difficult to see why the Venezuelan president would use such terms to describe Belarus.

Since the 1998 election of Chavez in Venezuela, the Bolivarian revolution has reduced poverty by half, eradicated illiteracy, and implemented radical reforms aimed at improving the standard of living of Venezuela’s poor majority.

However, much remains to be done; the hillsides of Caracas are still dotted with make-shift slum housing while the city’s economic elite on the Eastern side of the city live in sybaritic luxury. Driving through Minsk, on the other hand, one is struck by a vision of what Caracas could become. There are no slums in Minsk. The city’s inhabitants live in modern, European standard apartment blocks. There are plenty of clean open spaces with the excellent recreation facilities for children. Caracas has a major litter problem, wheras the streets and neighborhoods of Minsk are among the cleanest in the world.

The Venezuelan government has been implementing measures to reduce violence and social delinquency. But Caracas still remains a dangerous city. Minsk, on the other hand, is arguably one of the safest cities in Europe.

While decades of plutocratic dictatorship, corruption and neglect, Venezuelan agriculture remains underdeveloped and the population still depends on imports from the United States, Belarus is self sufficient in high quality food production.

Belarus has been able to help Venezuela develop its agricultural sector through the dispatch of consultants and the export of high quality trucks and agricultural machinery. The construction of agro-towns by Belarusian companies in Venezuela agreed in 2011 is a cogent illustration of progressive bilateral co-operation.

The bilateral agreement between Venezuela’s state oil company PDVSA and Belarusnef to create a joint-venture called Servicio Belovenezolana is another example of the advantages of a multi-vectored foreign policy for Belarus.

The Republic of Belarus has been able to decrease its dependence on Russia for oil through co-operation with oil-rich Venezuela, while Venezuela has been able to benefit from Belarusian industrial and scientific expertise. Both countries seek to diversify their markets. Venezuela wants to reduce its dependence on oil sales to the United States, while Belarus is trying to reduce its dependence on Russian oil. And both countries are dealing with fifth columns funded by Euro-Atlantic imperialism.

The advanced manufacturing sector in Belarus has also been an inspiration for Venezuela who have sent technicians to Belarus to be trained with a view to creating Latin America’s first national truck factory in Venezuela.

There are also many projects to increase further co-operation between Belarus and Venezuela such as increased imports and exports of agricultural products, medical technology and supplies, and joint state initiatives in the textile industry.

The increasing bilateral trade and co-operation between Belarus and Venezuela is a direct result of the commonalities in social policies of both countries. The five chief priorities of the Belarusian government are:

1 Maintaining equality and raising the standard of living of the working people.
2 Maintaining a full-employment economy.
3 Investment in education and scientific research.
4 The protection and development of a strong indigenous production base.
5 Inviolable national sovereignty

For Venezuela, Belarus is a model state because it has achieved what every progressive government in the world aspires to: near full employment and the elimination of extreme poverty. It has developed an impressive manufacturing base; maintained autonomy in the production of food; a consistently high rate of economic growth, and attained a standard of living and level of social equality unparalleled anywhere else in the developing world. This is precisely the dream of the Bolivarian Revolution and this is why the experience of Belarus since the fall of the Soviet Union is so important for the developing world.

Unlike Venezuela, which is emerging out of an extreme form of plutocracy where a tiny minority controlled the country’s wealth, Belarus has emerged from the Soviet Union where social classes had been eradicated during the construction of socialism in the 1920s and 30s.

In this sense Belarus has a distinct advantage over Venezuela as it does not have a super-rich bourgeoisie using its connections with the United States to prevent re-distribution of wealth. Belarus does, however, have the aforementioned fifth column, but they do not possess the obscene wealth and power of their Venezuelan counterparts.

President Lukashenko’s vision of a multi-polar world threatens the proponents of a New World Order, where the interests of the many are subordinated to those of the Euro-Atlantic financial elites.

Unlike neighboring states such as Poland and Lithuania, for whom “freedom” since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 has resulted in mass unemployment, emigration, and the supply of troops for NATO’s foreign wars and occupations, Belarus has shown that the state has a vital role in regulating the market for the general good.

If global poverty is to be eradicated, then sustainable industries, endogenous development and planned economies will have to become the norm. Belarus, perhaps more than any other country, could play a leading role in the transition to a new global era of socially-oriented economies.

The Venezuelan ambassador to Belarus Americo Diaz Nunez recently told reporters in Minsk that:

The two countries are implementing joint projects to construct brick manufacturing plants, assemble tractors and trucks (this facility will open in Venezuela soon), construct agro-towns, produce oil and gas, build more than 20,000 apartments and trade in goods. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Belarus really helps change the life of the Venezuelans.

The constructive and creative relationship between two countries in different continents aimed at improving the living standards of the many rather than the privileges of the few, is in stark contrast to the belligerent and decadent kleptocracies of the West who mask their lucre-lust in high-sounding phrases about “human rights” and “democracy” while proceeding to kill the social hope of billions of people.

The Venezuelan-Belarus relationship is a unique example of what international diplomacy in a socialist world could mean for humanity.

The international media campaign of demonization, calumny, lies and disinformation about the Belarusian government has fooled not only die-hard proponents of neo-liberal economics but many so-called “leftists” and “progressives”, who have fallen for the double speak about “human rights,” “freedom,” and “democracy.”

The absence of solidarity by the European “left” with the Republic of Belarus is a symptom of just how corrosive and all-pervasive capitalist ideology has become in Western post-modern societies. This is a trend which will lead to social and political catastrophe if not is not reversed.

Ales Bialiatski: legally a convicted criminal, ideologically a “human rights activist”

On the 8th of August as plans for the siege of Sirte in Libya were underway, American senator John McCain was already signaling that Belarus would be America’s next target for regime change. McCain referred to the imprisonment of Ales Bialiatski, the so-called “human rights” activist arrested by the Belarusian authorities for fiscal fraud in 2011.

Bialiatski is the vice-president of the International Federation of Human Rights, (Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l’Homme) a sub-organisation of which provided the United Nation’s Human Rights Council with false information in February 2011 accusing the Libyan government of “massacres” in Benghazi.

This false information served as a pretext for a war of aggression that led to the killing of tens of thousands of people, reducing a prosperous socially-oriented economy to rubble and imposing a corrupt foreign-selected dictatorship against the wishes of the Libyan people.

The barbaric destruction of the Libyan Jamahirya should serve as a sufficient lesson to any intelligent person of what NATO countries mean by “human rights,” “democracy,” and the “rule of law.”

Amnesty International’s condemnation of Bialiatski’s prosecution, without showing any proof of a miscarriage of justice on the part of the Belarusian courts, shows that the so-called “human rights” organization is more concerned with providing moral legitimacy for the foreign policy objectives of Western governments than protecting human rights.

Bialiatski was arrested by the Polish and Lithuanian police for fiscal fraud on intelligence supplied to them by Interpol. He was not arrested for his political opposition to the Belarusian government. This is not the first time Amnesty International has falsely accused Belarus of human rights violations and it is unlikely to be the last.

Since Bialiatski’s imprisonment, the Polish government has moved to prevent further Interpol arrest warrants issued from “undemocratic” countries. This is rather farcical coming from a state where wearing a Che Guevara T-Shirt could land you in jail!

The human rights charade is now becoming so ridiculous it is likely to backfire in the long term. Regime change specialists such as Canvas, a US funded colour revolution training centre based in Belgrade, are now orchestrating stunts involving the use of naked women protesting outside the KGB headquarters in Minsk. Behaviour of this kind would get one arrested in any country.

However, the point of the exercise is, in fact, to get arrested, film it and thereby embarrass the KGB. But the KGB, being an intelligence agency, have pre-empted their plans and the silly nudists have only succeeded in catching a cold and providing light entertainment for pedestrians, all in the cause of the “revolution.”

That Amnesty International should hold openly take sides in favour of US-funded pseudo-dissidents should not surprise us. After all, the head of Amnesty International USA Suzanne Nossel is a former assistant to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the man they call Dr. Stranglove, former National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski is also a former board member of the same human rights organisation.

The Threat of NATO and its minions

The war of aggression waged against Libya in 2011 and the current covert war being waged by NATO agencies against Syria have shown that the Euro-Atlantic powers have, as in the past, decided to use war as a means of securing a re-division of the world propitious to their geo-political interests.

The sophisticated disinformation campaign waged against Libya by social media and international satellite TV channels that saw Africa’s richest country bombed to ruins, should serve as a warning to the Belarusian government of the danger posed by NATO to world peace.

Thanks to the exemplary actions of the Belarusian security forces during the post-election riots of December 19th 2010, an unpopular Western-imposed dictatorship was averted. The Belarusian people have seen the horror and immiseration of Western-backed regime change in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgystan and other countries. The US-funded colour coups have been smashed in the Republic of Belarus and they are not likely to succeed in the near future.

Given the failure of CIA-backed colour revolutions in Belarus in the recent past and the country’s proximity to Russia, it is difficult to imagine what strategy NATO will devise in order to place its puppets in Minsk.

However, a strategy of tension involving the use of covert mercenaries disguised as peaceful protestors such as we have seen in Syria, presents a real danger for the Republic of Belarus in the coming months.

Addressing the Belarusian Armed Forces on February 23rd president Lukashenko noted political and information technologies of Western NGOs effected regime change across North Africa. Belarus, he stressed, has the unity and technical ability to withstand such destabilization.

Conlusion

President Lukashenko once remarked that dishonest journalists can be worse than assassins. The centrality of mass media disinformation during the Libyan war and the ongoing demonization campaign against the Republic of Belarus have shown the danger which news stenographers to corporate power pose for humanity.

The clash between the politics of human endogenous development and the politics of cancerous greed is the internecine conflict facing our world today. If there is to be a future for the next generation, a multi-polar world based on Westphalian sovereignty and endogenous socio-economic development will have to built.

That is why those of us who stand for world peace, economic development and international law, must continue to expose the slanderous corporate media campaign against the socially-oriented domestic and foreign policy of the Republic of Belarus.

It’s like a pudgy armchair action man mesmerized by a nimble lap dancer. I’m gonna make you mine, honey. It’s regime change time, gotta snuff out the owner of this joint. Otherwise, people will start talking; what kind of chicken global hegemon is this?

So the neo-cons got their New Year’s Eve Barack Obama administration’s Iran sanctions/embargo package, duly replicated by the European poodle parade. But it was not supposed to be like this. The lap dancer leapt from the stage and applied a neck scissors on the armchair action man; he’s suffocating, not her. The whole thing is … misfiring! Just like the latest neo-con Big Idea — the invasion, occupation and inevitable defeat in Iraq, to the tune of more than US$1 trillion.

Baby, sanction me one more time

Let’s review some of the latest evidence. Tehran has just sent two of its warships through the Suez Canal towards the Mediterranean; they docked at the Syrian port of Tartus — no less. Not so long ago, disgraced dictator and close House of Saud pal Hosni Mubarak would have probably bombed them.

Tehran cut off oil exports to the top European war poodles, Britain and France. That’s only 1% of British imports and 4% of France’s imports — but the message was clear; if the depressed Club Med countries insist on following Anglo-French warmongering, they’re next.

Brent crude is hitting $121 a barrel — an eight-month high. West Texas Intermediate, traded in New York, is hovering around $105. Brent is crucial, because it sets the consumer price for gasoline in most of the US and Western Europe. The neo-cons swore on their Bibles and Torahs there would be no oil spike. It happened — like clockwork, proving once again their knowledge of market speculation is of a two-year-old (no offense to lovely two-year-olds).

The funds Tehran is losing because of the sanctions — in terms of less exports to Europe — are being largely compensated by the oil-price spike caused by the neo-con-driven warmongering. On top of it, Tehran is bound to sell more oil to its top Asian clients — China, India, Japan and South Korea, and even Turkey, all of whom, with varying degrees of diplomacy, have told Washington to mind its own business.

As Asia Times Online had advanced, it took some time but Iran and China have just closed a new oil pricing deal. And the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline is a definitive go. And Afghanistan and Pakistan — as well as Iran — badly want to be admitted at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), accelerating regional economic integration.

The fact that the Israel lobby drafters of the sanctions package couldn’t foresee any of this proves once again they live the vegetative life of armchair “action” men.

Neo-con parrots are left to the “sanctions are biting” blah blah blah. Or to State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, married to neo-con Robert Kagan, assuring pressure is being put on all these countries so they may do “what they can to increase sanctions, particularly to wean themselves from Iranian crude”. Nobody is “weaning” from anything – apart from the self-defeating European poodles.

Also exposed is the myth of Saudi spare capacity. There is none. Saudi reserves are falling at a rate of 3% a year (it’s exporting 11.8 million barrels a day, and falling). Moreover, the House of Saud does not want to pump more oil; it needs high oil prices to bribe its own population out of noxious Arab Spring ideas.

Then there’s the strawberry on the cheesecake, too delicious to pass up. Goldman Sachs has just placed Iran as one of the “Next 11″ in the developing world after the BRICS, only one among five developing nations with above average “productivity and sustainability of growth”. Perhaps a Persian Britney Spears should be singing “Baby, sanction me one more time.”

Baby, I’m coming to get ya

From the point of view of Washington, the only thing that really counts in the interminable nuclear charade is whether Iran may reach the ability to build a nuclear weapon in record time in case the leadership in Tehran is absolutely sure the US/Israel axis will attack.

That’s exactly what Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the US Senate Armed Services Committee last Thursday; Iran is “more than capable of producing enough highly-enriched uranium for a weapon if its political leaders — specifically the Supreme Leader himself — chooses to do so.”

What Clapper didn’t specify is that Tehran is enriching uranium to a paltry 3.5%; a nuclear bomb needs 95% — and that would be immediately detected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

If that happens — and that’s a major if — there’s no way regime change from the outside may be imposed. Thus bye bye to the Big Prize in oil and gas coveted by anyone from realist Dr Zbig Brzezinski to former Darth Vader, Dick Cheney.

So it’s Ouroboros all over again – the serpent biting its own tail. We need to bomb to get regime change, so that oily dancer will dance on our wealthy lap.

The problem is neither the Obama administration nor key Pentagon generals are convinced this is a good deal.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin E Dempsey, thinks, “It would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option was upon us.”

And Lieutenant General Ronald Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress last Thursday, “Iran is unlikely to initiate or intentionally provoke a conflict.” No wonder; Dempsey himself admitted that the leadership in Tehran — contrary to relentless neo-con media spin — “is a rational actor”.

Does this all matter for the neo-cons and their legion of media shills? Not really. Until they find a sucker to fight a war for them — as in a Republican US president — real cowards will keep going to Tehran, all day and all of the night, in their wettest of wet dreams.

In 2007, in a closed discussion, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that in her opinion “Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel.” She “also criticized the exaggerated use that [Israeli] Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears.”¹

2009: “A senior Israeli official in Washington” asserted that “Iran would be unlikely to use its missiles in an attack [against Israel] because of the certainty of retaliation.”²

In 2010 the Sunday Times of London (January 10) reported that Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, war hero, pillar of the Israeli defense establishment, and former director-general of Israel’s Atomic Energy Commission, “believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.”

Early last month, US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a television audience: “Are they [Iran] trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No, but we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability.”³

A week later we could read in the New York Times (January 15) that “three leading Israeli security experts — the Mossad chief, Tamir Pardo, a former Mossad chief, Efraim Halevy, and a former military chief of staff, Dan Halutz — all recently declared that a nuclear Iran would not pose an existential threat to Israel.”

Then, a few days afterward, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, in an interview with Israeli Army Radio (January 18), had this exchange:

Question: Is it Israel’s judgment that Iran has not yet decided to turn its nuclear potential into weapons of mass destruction?

Barak: People ask whether Iran is determined to break out from the control [inspection] regime right now … in an attempt to obtain nuclear weapons or an operable installation as quickly as possible. Apparently that is not the case.

Lastly, we have the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, in a report to Congress: “We do not know, however, if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons. … There are “certain things [the Iranians] have not done” that would be necessary to build a warhead.⁴

Admissions like the above — and there are others — are never put into headlines by the American mass media; indeed, only very lightly reported at all; and sometimes distorted — On the Public Broadcasting System (PBS News Hour, January 9), the non-commercial network much beloved by American liberals, the Panetta quote above was reported as: “But we know that they’re trying to develop a nuclear capability, and that’s what concerns us.” Flagrantly omitted were the preceding words: “Are they trying to develop a nuclear weapon? No …”⁵

One of Israel’s leading military historians, Martin van Creveld, was interviewed by Playboy magazine in June 2007:

Playboy: Can the World live with a nuclear Iran?

Van Creveld: The U.S. has lived with a nuclear Soviet Union and a nuclear China, so why not a nuclear Iran? I’ve researched how the U.S. opposed nuclear proliferation in the past, and each time a country was about to proliferate, the U.S. expressed its opposition in terms of why this other country was very dangerous and didn’t deserve to have nuclear weapons. Americans believe they’re the only people who deserve to have nuclear weapons, because they are good and democratic and they like Mother and apple pie and the flag. But Americans are the only ones who have used them. … We are in no danger at all of having an Iranian nuclear weapon dropped on us. We cannot say so too openly, however, because we have a history of using any threat in order to get weapons … thanks to the Iranian threat, we are getting weapons from the U.S. and Germany.

And throughout these years, regularly, Israeli and American officials have been assuring us that Iran is World Nuclear Threat Number One, that we can’t relax our guard against them, that there should be no limit to the ultra-tough sanctions we impose upon the Iranian people and their government. Repeated murder and attempted murder of Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotage of Iranian nuclear equipment with computer viruses, the sale of faulty parts and raw materials, unexplained plane crashes, explosions at Iranian facilities … Who can be behind this but USrael? How do we know? It’s called “plain common sense”. Or do you think it was Costa Rica? Or perhaps South Africa? Or maybe Thailand?

Defense Secretary Panetta recently commented on one of the assassinations of an Iranian scientist. He put it succinctly: “That’s not what the United States does.”⁶

Does anyone know Leon Panetta’s e-mail address? I’d like to send him my list of United States assassination plots. More than 50 foreign leaders were targeted over the years, many successfully.⁷

Not long ago, Iraq and Iran were regarded by USrael as the most significant threats to Israeli Middle-East hegemony. Thus was born the myth of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, and the United States proceeded to turn Iraq into a basket case. That left Iran, and thus was born the myth of the Iranian Nuclear Threat. As it began to sink in that Iran was not really that much of a nuclear threat, or that this “threat” was becoming too difficult to sell to the rest of the world, USrael decided that, at a minimum, it wanted regime change. The next step may be to block Iran’s lifeline — oil sales using the Strait of Hormuz. Ergo, the recent US and EU naval buildup near the Persian Gulf, an act of war trying to goad Iran into firing the first shot. If Iran tries to counter this blockade, it could be the signal for another US Basket Case, the fourth in a decade, with the devastated people of Libya and Afghanistan, along with Iraq, currently enjoying America’s unique gift of freedom and democracy.

On January 11, the Washington Post reported: “In addition to influencing Iranian leaders directly, [a US intelligence official] says another option here is that [sanctions] will create hate and discontent at the street level so that the Iranian leaders realize that they need to change their ways.”

How utterly charming, these tactics and goals for the 21st century by the leader of “The Free World”. (Is that expression still used?)

The neo-conservative thinking (and Barack Obama can be regarded as often being a fellow traveler of such) is even more charming than that. Listen to Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at America’s most prominent neo-con think tank, American Enterprise Institute:

The biggest problem for the United States is not Iran getting a nuclear weapon and testing it, it’s Iran getting a nuclear weapon and not using it. Because the second that they have one and they don’t do anything bad, all of the naysayers are going to come back and say, “See, we told you Iran is a responsible power. We told you Iran wasn’t getting nuclear weapons in order to use them immediately. … And they will eventually define Iran with nuclear weapons as not a problem.⁸

What are we to make of that and all the other quotations above? I think it gets back to my opening statement: Being “the only nuclear power in the Middle East” is a great card for Israel to have in its hand. Is USrael willing to go to war to hold on to that card?

Please tell me again … What is the war in Afghanistan about?

With the US war in Iraq supposedly having reached a good conclusion (or halfway decent … or better than nothing … or let’s get the hell out of here while some of us are still in one piece and there are some Iraqis we haven’t yet killed), the best and the brightest in our government and media turn their thoughts to what to do about Afghanistan. It appears that no one seems to remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

President Obama declared in August 2009:

But we must never forget this is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.⁹

Never mind that out of the tens of thousands of people the United States and its NATO front have killed in Afghanistan not one has been identified as having had anything to do with the events of September 11, 2001.

Never mind that the “plotting to attack America” in 2001 was devised in Germany and Spain and the United States more than in Afghanistan. Why hasn’t the United States bombed those countries?

Indeed, what actually was needed to plot to buy airline tickets and take flying lessons in the United States? A room with some chairs? What does “an even larger safe haven” mean? A larger room with more chairs? Perhaps a blackboard? Terrorists intent upon attacking the United States can meet almost anywhere, with Afghanistan probably being one of the worst places for them, given the American occupation.

The only “necessity” that drew the United States to Afghanistan was the desire to establish a military presence in this land that is next door to the Caspian Sea region of Central Asia — which reportedly contains the second largest proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world — and build oil and gas pipelines from that region running through Afghanistan.

Afghanistan is well situated for oil and gas pipelines to serve much of south Asia, pipelines that can bypass those not-yet Washington clients, Iran and Russia. If only the Taliban would not attack the lines. Here’s Richard Boucher, US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asian Affairs, in 2007: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan, so it can become a conduit and a hub between South and Central Asia so that energy can flow to the south.”¹⁰

Since the 1980s all kinds of pipelines have been planned for the area, only to be delayed or canceled by one military, financial or political problem or another. For example, the so-called TAPI pipeline (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) had strong support from Washington, which was eager to block a competing pipeline that would bring gas to Pakistan and India from Iran. TAPI goes back to the late 1990s, when the Taliban government held talks with the California-based oil company Unocal Corporation. These talks were conducted with the full knowledge of the Clinton administration, and were undeterred by the extreme repression of Taliban society. Taliban officials even made trips to the United States for discussions.¹¹ Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific on February 12, 1998, Unocal representative John Maresca discussed the importance of the pipeline project and the increasing difficulties in dealing with the Taliban:

The region’s total oil reserves may well reach more than 60 billion barrels of oil. Some estimates are as high as 200 billion barrels … From the outset, we have made it clear that construction of the pipeline we have proposed across Afghanistan could not begin until a recognized government is in place that has the confidence of governments, leaders, and our company.

When those talks stalled in July, 2001 the Bush administration threatened the Taliban with military reprisals if the government did not go along with American demands. The talks finally broke down for good the following month, a month before 9-11.

The United States has been serious indeed about the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf oil and gas areas. Through one war or another beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1, the US has managed to establish military bases in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.

The war against the Taliban can’t be “won” short of killing everyone in Afghanistan. The United States may well try again to negotiate some form of pipeline security with the Taliban, then get out, and declare “victory”. Barack Obama can surely deliver an eloquent victory speech from his teleprompter. It might even include the words “freedom” and “democracy”, but certainly not “pipeline”.

Love me, love me, love me, I’m a Liberal (Thank you, Phil Ochs. We miss you.)

Angela Davis, star of the 1960s, like most members of the Communist Party, was/is no more radical than the average American liberal. Here she is recently addressing Occupy Wall Street:

When I said that we need a third party, a radical party, I was projecting toward the future. We cannot allow a Republican to take office. … Don’t we remember what it was like when Bush was president?¹²

Yes, Angela, we remember that time well. How can we forget it since Bush, by all important standards, is still in the White House? Waging perpetual war, relentless surveillance of the citizenry, kissing the corporate ass, police brutality? … What’s changed? Except for the worse. Where’s our single-payer national health insurance? Nothing even close. Where’s our affordable university education? Still the most backward in the “developed” world. Where’s our legalized marijuana — I mean really legalized? If you think that’s changed, you must be stoned. Where’s our abortion on demand? What does your guy Barack think about that? Are the indispensable labor unions being rescued from oblivion? Ha! The ultra-important minimum wage? Inflation adjusted, equal to the mid-1950s.

Has the American threat to the environment and the world environmental movement ceased? Tell that to a dedicated activist-internationalist. Has the 50-year-old embargo against Cuba finally ended? It has not, and I can still not go there legally. The police-state War on Terror at home? Scarcely a month goes by without the FBI entrapping some young “terrorists”. Are more Banksters and Wall Street Society-Screwers (except for the harmless insider-traders) being imprisoned? Name one. The really tough regulations of the financial area so badly needed? Keep waiting. How about executives of the BP Oil Spill Company being arrested? Or war criminals, mass murderers, and torturers with names like … Oh, I don’t know, let’s see … maybe like Cheney or Bush or Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or someone with a crazy name like Condoleezza? All walking completely free, all celebrated.

A major decline of progressive America occurred during the Clinton years as many liberals and their organizations accepted the presence of a Democratic president as an adequate substitute for the things liberals once believed in. Liberalism and a social democratic spirit painfully grown over the previous 60 years withered during the Clinton administration.

— Sam Smith¹³

A change of Presidents is like a change of advertising campaigns for a soft drink; the product itself still tastes the same, but it now has a new ‘image’.

— Richard K. Moore

1. Haaretz.com (Israel), October 25, 2007; print edition October 26
2. Washington Post, March 5, 2009
3. “Face the Nation“, January 8, 2012
4. The Guardian (London), January 31, 2012
5. “PBS’s Dishonest Iran Edit”, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), January 10, 2012
6. Reuters, January 12, 2012
7. U.S. Government Assassination Plots
8. Video of Pletka making these remarks
9. Talk given by the president at Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, August 17, 2009
10. Talk at the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, September 20, 2007
11. See, for example, the December 17, 1997 article in the British newspaper, The Telegraph, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas“. For further discussion of the TAPI pipeline and related issues, see this article by international petroleum engineer John Foster
12. Washington Post, January 15, 2012
13. Sam Smith was a longtime publisher and journalist in Washington, DC, now living in Maine. Subscribe to his marvelous newsletter, the Progressive Review

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama declared amid thunderous applause and a standing ovation from Congress, “Let there be no doubt: America is determined to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and I will take no options off the table to achieve that goal.”

Similar to sanctions legislation signed into law by Obama on December 31, the EU-approved measures ban imports on future and existing contracts beginning July 1 of crude oil, petrochemical products; as well, the measures forbid the export of equipment and technology to Iran’s energy sector.

The EU sanctions also hit Iran’s Central Bank, freezing its assets. Also on Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department announced new sanctions on Iran’s third-largest bank, Bank Tejarat; a sign that the administration intends to further isolate Iran from the global financial system.

The New York Times claimed that the EU’s “phased” ban on oil purchases “was needed to help force a shift in policy and avert the risk of military strikes against Tehran.”

France’s Foreign Minister, Alain Juppé, told reporters that in order to “avoid any military solution, which could have irreparable consequences, we have decided to go further down the path of sanctions.”

“It is a good decision that sends a strong message and which I hope will persuade Iran that it must change its position,” Juppé said, “change its line and accept the dialogue that we propose.”

Writing in Asia Times Online, Pepe Escobar rejected the foolish notion that the West is interested in defusing the crisis.

“The EU defends its strategy–or economic war–as the only way to avert ‘chaos in the Middle East.’ Yet the economic war may end up sparking the full-blown war it is theoretically trying to avert; talk about an array of unintended consequences waiting in the wings.

“The EU insists on spinning its so-called ‘dual track’ approach towards Iran,” Escobar averred. “Stripped of spin, dual track essentially translates in practice as ‘shut up, bow to our sanctions, stop enriching uranium and sit on the table to negotiate on our terms’”

“Senior EU officials,” The Guardian disclosed, “concede that the move could be risky and send oil prices rocketing at a time of extreme economic difficulty in the west.”

Reflecting the growing danger to the world economy by this stunt, “oil prices rose on Monday after the European Union agreed to ban imports of Iranian crude,” Reuters reported.

“Brent March crude rose 72 cents to settle at $110.58 a barrel, having reached $111.36 intraday but unable to threaten front-month Brent’s 200-day moving average of $112.19.” One analyst warned, “heaven knows what will happen between now and the first of July” when the EU’s date for full implementation of the embargo takes effect.

On Wednesday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned “that global crude prices could rise as much as 30 percent if Iran halts oil exports as a result of U.S. and European Union sanctions,” Reuters disclosed.

Accordingly, if the Islamic Republic stops exporting oil to the EU and other countries that join the “attack Iran” coalition of the feckless, “it would likely trigger an ‘initial’ oil price jump of 20 to 30 percent, or about $20 to $30 a barrel, the IMF said in its first public comment on a possible Iranian oil supply disruption.”

“In addition the oil embargo, the EU also decided to freeze the assets of the Iranian central bank, arguing that the aim was to choke off funding for the nuclear programme,” according to The Guardian. The EU’s move against Iran’s Central Bank follow policies put in place by the United States.

“The Iranian programmes are proceeding apace and represent a strategic threat,” an unnamed “senior diplomat” The Guardian. “The aim is to have a big impact on the Iranian financial system, targeting the economic lifeline of the regime.”

The Guardian also informed us that “David Cameron, the German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the French president Nicolas Sarkozy, issued a joint statement calling on Iran to suspend its nuclear activities.”

“Our message is clear,” the statement read. “We have no quarrel with the Iranian people”–a diplomatic cliché that generally means: do what we say or else–”but the Iranian leadership has failed to restore international confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of its nuclear programme. We will not accept Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon.”

In a day filled with joint statements by imperial shills, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner (Henry Kissinger’s wunderkind in Obama’s cabinet) and Secretary of State Hillary (bomb the Libyans back to the Stone Age) Clinton said that “the measures agreed to today by the EU Foreign Affairs Council are another strong step in the international effort to dramatically increase the pressure on Iran. This new, concerted pressure will sharpen the choice for Iran’s leaders and increase their cost of defiance of basic international obligations.”

Commenting on the slow-motion apocalypse in progress, Robert Fisk wrote in The Independent: “Bring on the sanctions. Send in the Clowns.”

More Israeli Threats

How did America’s “stationary aircraft carrier in the Middle East” react?

According to Debkafile, a right-wing publication privy to leaks from Israel’s intelligence and military establishment, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that a “new round of sanctions will not stop Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon … stressing that Israel’s hand was always near the trigger.”

Barak’s comments were “aimed at cooling the optimistic notes emanating from Washington, Europe and some Israeli circles Monday after the European Union foreign ministers approved an oil embargo against Iran from July 1 and froze its central bank’s assets.”

The Defense Minister said “that because Iran had not stopped developing a nuclear weapon Israel had not removed any options from the table. We say this ‘very seriously,’ he stressed.”

Barak’s noxious statements were amplified in a lengthy piece published this week in The New York Times.

Titled “Will Israel Attack Iran?,” Ronen Bergman, a political analyst with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper who, like Debkafile, has cozy ties to Israeli defense mavens, wrote: “After speaking to many senior Israeli leaders and chiefs of the military and the intelligence, I have come to believe that Israel will indeed strike Iran in 2012.”

Speaking at the Davos economic summit on Friday, Barak warned “that a situation could be rapidly reached when even ‘surgical’ military action could not block the Tehran regime from getting the bomb. ‘We will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons’,” The Independent reported.

“We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear,” Barak said. “It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them.”

Barak’s message to Washington and the “international community”: “We’re ready to attack, now!”

‘Europe Will Burn in the Fire of Iran’s Oil Wells’

The new sanctions, coupled with escalating threats from Israel and the West are hardly “bridge builders” aimed at resuscitating stalled talks, but in fact are economic acts of war designed to force Iran into a corner.

Rejecting demands to “dialogue” with guns pointed at their heads, Iranian lawmaker Mohammad Kowsari, the deputy leader of the parliamentary National Security and Foreign Policy Committee told Press TV that “in the event of US ‘military adventurism’ in the Strait of Hormuz, Iran will respond in the shortest possible time by making the entire world unsafe for Americans.”

Kowsari reiterated Iran’s long-standing promise to “definitely” close the strategic Strait of Hormuz “if there is a disruption in the sales of the country’s crude, stressing that the “US and its allies will not be able to reopen the strategic waterway.”

Hardly fazed by Western threats, and apparently ready to take “preemptive” measures of their own, Seyyed Emad Hosseini, a spokesperson for Iran’s parliamentary Energy Commission said on Friday that “Iran has the world’s third biggest oil reserves and cannot be eliminated from global energy equations,” Press TV reported.

Hosseini said that parliament “is considering a plan to completely stop oil exports to EU members which will initially paralyze the economies of Italy, Spain and Greece.”

“Iran is powerful [as a country] and oil sanctions imposed by European countries will only harm the European Union.” Hosseini added, “Europe will definitely lose its oil war with Iran because European countries are grappling with numerous domestic challenges and disruption of Iran oil flow will lead to the escalation of domestic pressure and crisis in EU member states.”

On Saturday, Fars News Agency reported that “members of the Iranian parliament finalized a draft bill on cutting the country’s oil exports to the European states in retaliation for the EU’s oil ban against Tehran.”

Nasser Soudani, the vice chairman of the parliamentary Energy Commission told Fars that “the bill has 4 articles, including one which states that the Islamic Republic of Iran will cut all oil exports to the European states until they end their oil sanctions against the country.”

Soudani told Fars earlier this week when the oil cut-off bill was introduced, “Europe will burn in the fire of Iran’s oil wells.” Take that, Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy!

Driving home the point, Bloomberg News reported Friday that “Fitch Ratings cut the credit ratings of Italy, Spain and three other euro-area countries, saying they lack financing flexibility in the face of the regional debt crisis.”

In addition to Italy and Spain, the ratings agency also downgraded the credit worthiness of Belgium, Slovenia and Cyprus. And with Greece currently negotiating with creditors on how to avoid a default, soaring oil prices would severely impact the ability of EU countries to climb out of the economic ditch and is a further sign that the 2008 capitalist economic crisis is accelerating.

Commenting, Asia Times Online political analyst Pepe Escobar again warned: “According to the EU sanctions package, all existing contracts will be respected only until July 1–and no new contracts are allowed. Now imagine if this preemptive Iranian legislation is voted within the next few days. Crisis-hit Club Med countries such as Spain and especially Italy and Greece will be dealt a deathblow, having no time to find a possible alternative to Iran’s light, high-quality crude.”

“Not surprisingly,” Escobar averred, “the losers lost in these Cold War tactics anachronistically applied to a global open market are the Europeans themselves.”

“Greece,” Asia Times pointed out, “already facing the abyss–has been buying heavily discounted oil from Iran. The strong possibility remains of the oil embargo precipitating a Greek government bond default–and even a catastrophic cascade effect in the eurozone (Ireland, Portugal, Italy, Spain–and beyond).”

Not that any of this matters to the Americans who are exacerbating the manufactured “Iran crisis,” partially as a hammer to beat down their EU competitors–under the tattered flag of Western “unity”–while gambling that war and their delusional hope for “regime change” in Iran will bring them one step closer to energy hegemony in Central Asia and the Middle East.

Eyes Wide Shut

Which brings us back to Iran’s “red line.”

“Tehran has repeatedly said that it would close Hormuz only if–and we should repeat–only if Iran is blocked from exporting its oil,” Asia Times warned.

“This would represent a deathblow to the Iranian economy–totally dependent on oil exports–not to mention the regime controlled by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Regime change is the real agenda of Washington and its European poodles– but that cannot be spelled out to global public opinion,” Pepe Escobar noted.

Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Ali Akbar Velayati, a senior adviser to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, told Press TV that “in the absence of Iranian supply, oil prices will go up and they (the Western states) know it. However, Iran will never allow itself to be in a situation in which it cannot sell oil but other regional states can.”

And how did the global godfather react to Tehran’s warning? Why with more bellicose rhetoric of course! The United States and their “partners” have pledged to “do what needs to done” to keep the strategic waterway open, U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder warned.

The ambassador added: “These situations, the choices are very, very difficult. I have not looked at the exact military contingency plannings that there are … But of this I am certain: the international waterways that go through the strait of Hormuz are to be sailed by international navies including ours, the British and the French and any other navy that needs to go through the Gulf; and second, we will make sure that that happens under every circumstance.”

The Defense Department announced last week that it will maintain a fleet of 11 nuclear-armed aircraft carriers despite budget constraints, as a threat to Iran but also to geopolitical rivals China and Russia.

Russia Today reported that “with Washington’s decision to deploy a second carrier strike group in the Gulf, the EU’s attempt to pressure Iran economically could greatly increase the likelihood of all-out war in the region.”

Ramping things up even further, Interfax reported Thursday that the U.S. “plans to deploy a third convoy of warships led by USS Enterprise to the Gulf in March.”

“The country’s second aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln and its battle group entered the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz last Sunday, accompanied by UK and French warships.”

Last Saturday, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told sailors aboard the USS Enterprise, that “the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran,” the Associated Press reported.

While Iran reiterated its threat to close the narrow Strait, through which 20% of the world’s oil passes, Tehran has done so as a defensive response to an aggressive military build-up along their borders, the assassination of scientists, terrorist bombings of defense facilities, surveillance overflights by U.S. and Israeli drones and economic sanctions by the West that could crater their economy.

“That’s what this carrier is all about,” Panetta blustered. “That’s the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East … We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

Yet despite Israeli threats to “go it alone,” they do not possess the assets capable of mounting a decisive military offensive against the Islamic Republic.

On Thursday, Time Magazine reported that an unnamed “senior security official” told Netanyahu’s cabinet last fall that the prospects for “success” were “not altogether encouraging.”

“‘I informed the cabinet we have no ability to hit the Iranian nuclear program in a meaningful way,’ the official quoted a senior commander as saying. ‘If I get the order I will do it, but we don’t have the ability to hit in a meaningful way’.”

Short of launching a preemptive nuclear first strike on Iran, the Israelis will heel when the master whistles. Only the United States has the requisite military assets capable of inflicting damage on the Islamic Republic, but they are well-aware of the risks an Iranian counterstrike would pose.

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya cautioned: “U.S. naval strength, which includes the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard, has primacy over all the other navies and maritime forces in the world. Its deep sea or oceanic capabilities are unparalleled and unmatched by any other naval power. Primacy does not mean invincibility. U.S. naval forces in the Strait of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf are nonetheless vulnerable.”

Noting the findings of a Pentagon war game, Millennium Challenge 2002, Nazemroaya wrote that “even the small Iranian patrol boats in the Persian Gulf, which appear pitiable and insignificant against a U.S. aircraft carrier or destroyer, threaten U.S. warships. Looks can be deceiving; these Iranian patrol boats can easily launch a barrage of missiles that could significantly damage and effectively sink large U.S. warships. Iranian small patrol boats are also hardly detectable and hard to target.”

During that $250 million war game, the “scenario hypothetically pitted the Blue Team (representing US warships) against a Red Team that launched a coordinated assault using swarming boats and missiles–the kind of tactics Iran might employ,” The Christian Science Monitor reported.

Red Team commander, Lt. General Paul K. Van Riper, told The New York Times back in 2008 that “the sheer numbers involved overloaded their ability, both mentally and electronically, to handle the attack.”

“The whole thing was over in 5, maybe 10 minutes,” Van Riper told the Times. “It is not a matter of size or of individual capability, but whether you have the numbers and come from multiple directions in a short period of time,” the general cautioned.

“Iran’s strategy of asymmetric warfare recognizes that, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has little chance of winning any face-to-face military contest with powerful enemies like the United States,” the Monitor noted.

“Instead,” journalist Scott Peterson averred, “Iran aims to ‘exploit enemy vulnerabilities through the used of ‘swarming’ tactics by well-armed small boats and fast-attack craft, to mount surprise attacks at unexpected times and places’ which will ‘ultimately destroy technologically superior enemy forces,’ writes Iranian military expert Fariborz Haghshenass in a 2008 study based on published doctrines of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).”

“Part of Iran’s strategy includes decentralized decision-making.”

A “former European diplomat” told the Monitor that “the entire [IRGC] structure–if you look at how air defense is organized, the land forces, the combination of the Basij [militia] and the [IRGC]–this is all geared toward what they call the Mosaic Strategy, where you have individual military units who have a great deal of independence to decide what they can do without referring back to the center.”

“When the Red Team sank much of the Blue navy despite the Blue navy’s firing of guns and missiles,” the Times grimly observed, “it illustrated a cheap way to beat a very expensive fleet. After the Blue force was sunk, the game was ordered to begin again, with the Blue Team eventually declared the victor.”

Nazemroaya warned, “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

Undeterred by warnings from their own military experts, Washington and Tel Aviv are heading towards the edge of the cliff and seem eager to jump.

On Friday, Russia Today disclosed that the mysteriously “delayed” Austere Challenge 12 joint missile defense exercise with Israel “originally slated for this spring, will be scheduled for October 2012.”

Amid conflicting reports that first had the Obama administration, and then the Israelis, postponing the exercise, allegedly because “a series of events,” according to Inter Press Service, “impelled the Barack Obama administration to put more distance between the United States and aggressive Israeli policies toward Iran.” On the other hand however, Debkafile averred that Netanyahu called it off “as a mark of Israel’s disapproval for the administration’s apparent hesitancy.”

Well, it’s on again.

As Russia Today reported, the drill will “signal a surge of American troops to Israel by the thousands” and Iranian authorities “fear that the exercise will try out more than just the missile capabilities of the allies. Also being put to the test is Iran’s patience.”

“Now after a brief delay,” RT averred, “America will send thousands of troops and its anti-missile defense systems to Israel, albeit a few months later than planned.”

“With the exercise back in the books, it could mean that an eventual war between the US and Iran is still in the works–and now the world has a timeline to see it through.”

Indications are that Washington’s timeline is shrinking as the Pentagon accelerates plans to rush new weapons into the deployment phase.

The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that “Pentagon war planners have concluded that their largest conventional bomb isn’t yet capable of destroying Iran’s most heavily fortified underground facilities, and are stepping up efforts to make it more powerful.”

“The 30,000-pound ‘bunker-buster’ bomb, known as the Massive Ordnance Penetrator, was specifically designed to take out the hardened fortifications built by Iran and North Korea to cloak their nuclear programs.”

However, “initial tests indicated that the bomb, as currently configured, wouldn’t be capable of destroying some of Iran’s facilities, either because of their depth or because Tehran has added new fortifications to protect them.”

“The push boost the power of the MOP is part of stepped-up contingency planning for a possible strike against Iran’s nuclear program,” the Journal disclosed.

Having already spent some $300 million for 20 bombs, designed by military-industrial-complex heavyweight Boeing, the Pentagon sought an additional $82 million this month in a secret request to Congress.

Warning of the “grave consequences” of a U.S.-led attack on Iran, last week Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov described “the scenario Russia and the global community could face if things in the Middle East, especially in Iran, get out of hand,” Russia Today informed us.

“As for the chances that this disaster (a military attack against Iran) could occur, this question would be better addressed to those who keep mentioning this as an option that remains on the table,” Lavrov said in a comment apparently intended for Israel and the United States. “The consequences will be really grave, and we are seriously concerned about this.”

Pointedly, the Foreign Minister said “this will not be an easy walk, and it’s impossible to calculate all of the possible consequences.”

Earlier this month, Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister and former NATO envoy, Dmitry Rogozin, warned that “Iran is our close neighbor, just south of the Caucasus. Should anything happen to Iran, should Iran get drawn into any political or military hardships, this will be a direct threat to our national security.”

Braggadocio aside, unlike the Millennium Challenge 2002 exercise, American forces will not have the luxury of a “do-over” if events really do spin out of control.