Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis
By Stephen Sniegoski / My Catbird Seat / June 27, 2011
A number of books have come out recently dealing with the neoconservatives, which have been published by mainstream presses. It is significant that these works acknowledge some obvious truths that were denied and even largely taboo some time ago.
They admit, for example, that neoconservatives not only exist (something that was denied a few years ago, most especially by the neocons themselves), but that they have been influential in shaping American policy in the Middle East, a view that continues to be rejected even by many critics of American foreign policy—e.g., Noam Chomsky and his acolytes, who see American foreign policy shaped only by all-powerful corporate interests. What these books still conceal, however, is the fact that the neocons are motivated by their Jewish ethnicity and the interests of the state of Israel. Instead the neocons are made to appear as an ideological group loyal solely on what they believe is good for the US. Consequently, this approach, despite allowing for some elements of truth, distorts the overall picture in a serious way.
Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), by Justin Vaïsse, which I have reviewed last August, reflects this partial truth approach. The current essay will focus on another recent work of this genre, Neoconservatism and American Foreign Policy: A Critical Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2011), authored by Danny Cooper, who is a lecturer at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. [A subsequent review will be of Neoconservatism and the New American Century by Maria Ryan (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010)]
THE TRANSPARENT CABAL
Of the recent books on this subject, Cooper’s is one of the more revealing in that it actually acknowledges the authors who have presented these taboo views and quotes them—allowing them to speak for themselves. And I must express my delight that Cooper even refers to The Transparent Cabal. It is this segment to which I will devote most of my attention in this essay. I do this largely because I have not been able to get hold of Cooper’s book but have had to read it on Google Books where only a small section of it is available. The book’s cost, exceeding one-hundred dollars from Amazon, is beyond my limited means, and the work is not available in the public and university libraries to which I have access. While I could only look at a small portion of the book, however, the part that I could see does seem to present the work’s fundamental thesis.
In discussing claims of the neocons’ ties to Israel, Cooper writes that “Mearsheimer and Walt were not the only scholars to discuss the influence of Israel on neoconservative thinking. Stephen Sniegoski’s The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel (2008) is the most detailed and exhaustive attempt to link neoconservatives with the policies of Israel’s Likud Party.” After this favorable introduction, he then implies that my “loyalties” to the Palestinians are “taken to dangerous and irresponsible extremes,” asserting that “[o]ne does not have to be a ‘Likudnik’ to find Sniegoski’s unqualified reference to the ‘Palestinian resistance’ to be morally offensive . . . ” (p. 32) Presumably, I should have qualified this non-committal reference with some disparaging remarks about the Palestinians, since I was not expressing anything positive about them in referring to their “resistance.” Criminals, for example, are said to resist arrest. Perhaps Cooper believes that nothing has been done to the Palestinians that calls for any resistance and that they are instead engaging in aggressive violence. No matter what his specific intent, Cooper’s comment would seem to indicate a pro-Israel bias.
Cooper does acknowledge that the neocons are “strong defenders of the Jewish state” and that some authored the “Clean Break” report (p. 32) , though he fails to elucidate the full significance of this work. The “Clean Break” report, which was presented to incoming Prime Minister Netanyahu in 1996, advocated that Israel undertake a war policy to reconfigure the Middle East for the sole purpose of enhancing its own security. Moreover, the neocon authors of the report emphasized the need to justify these belligerent moves in terms of American ideals in order, as I stated in The Transparent Cabal “[t]o prevent the debilitating American criticism of Israeli policy that took place during Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.” (TC, p. 92). And the success of Israel’s belligerent activities would have the effect of freeing it from United States pressure. As pointed out in The Transparent Cabal : “It was highly noteworthy that Americans would advise the Israeli government how to induce the United States to support Israeli interests and how to avoid having to follow the policies of the United States government.” (TC, p. 93) Since the actual policy prescription of “Clean Break” was broadly similar to what the neoconservatives would later advocate for the United States during the Bush II administration, the neocons, in this latter case, were actually having the United States pursue policies that had originally been developed to advance Israeli interests. As reiterated throughout The Transparent Cabal, the neocons look at U.S. Middle East policy through the “lens of Israel interest.” (TC, pp. 4, 5, 7, 193, 211, 365, 366). To state otherwise is to ignore Occam’s razor.
When acknowledging the neocons’ obvious link to Israel, Cooper simultaneously downplays its role in shaping their views on Middle East policy. “The affection neoconservatives have for the state of Israel cannot be dismissed,” Cooper avers. “The authors who demonstrate the degree to which many neoconservatives identify with the Jewish state make a number of thoughtful arguments. Yet what they truly reveal about the neoconservative approach to American foreign policy is a little unclear. Even authors such as Sniegoski who aim to ‘expose’ the connections between segments of the hard right in Israel and neoconservatives often acknowledge the limitations of their studies.” (p. 32)
To support his contention that I acknowledge limitations in my study, Cooper then quotes me: “To state that neoconservatives viewed American foreign policy in the Middle East through the lens of Israeli interest – and that this was the basis of the neocon Middle East war agenda is not to say that their support for Israel has been the be-all and end-all of their foreign policy ideas.” (p. 32)
Cooper leaves out my ending “which encompass the entire world” (TC, p. 7), which served to underscore what I meant. I also elaborate on this issue on the same page in my book where I write: “Lest any reader misinterpret this work, it is necessary to further explain what the book is not. Since it is not an analysis of neoconservatism per se it does not claim that neoconservatism is simply a cover for the support of Israel. Undoubtedly, the overall neoconservative viewpoint does not revolve solely around the security needs of Israel, and the same is true even of the neocons’ positions on foreign policy and national-security policy.” (TC, p. 7)
As is apparent, I explain the limits, or scope, of my subject—it is about the neocon position on the Middle East (and how they influenced US Middle East policy); it is not about neoconservative foreign policy in general. That my subject does not encompass a broader subject does not mean that I acknowledge any “limitations” in my study. All historical works (works on anything for that matter, even for those physicists who claim to have a “theory of everything”) deal with particular subjects—as opposed to everything—but to admit “limitations,” the word used by Cooper, would seem to imply that there are weaknesses in dealing with the particular subject matter of the work.
Cooper, however, makes the claim that my “admission [of ‘limitations’] raises immediate questions. If neoconservative support for Israel is not the ‘be-all and end-all of their foreign policy ideas,’ then to what extent are studies such as Sniegoski’s truly capable of illuminating the neoconservative approach to foreign policy? Is it not possible that some of these other ideas that go unexamined in The Transparent Cabal may even strongly conflict with the those of the Israeli right?”
Cooper’s logic escapes me here unless his purpose is to place me in a no-win position. Obviously, if I had stated that support for Israel (or any other factor) explained the neocons’ entire foreign policy thinking, I could be faulted for that, too. The idea that one factor might explain part of a group’s or individual’s world view, but not the totality of that world view, would seem perfectly appropriate.
For Cooper to imply that my claim that the neocons’ Middle East policy position revolves around their concern for Israel is invalidated by my unwillingness to apply that same motive to their policies elsewhere—for instance, the neocons’ China policy–makes no sense. My arguments are based on inductive reasoning. I have provided extensive empirical evidence to prove the case regarding the Middle East (inductive reasoning can only lead to tentative proofs); but I have made no in-depth study of the neocons’‘ China policy so I cannot draw a comparable conclusion.
He then implies, or at least, seems to imply, that the allegation that the Israeli government backed the war on Iraq was false, citing the view of one international relations expert (Russell Walter Mead), who held that “the Israeli defense establishment was deeply skeptical of neoconservative hopes for a democratic renaissance in the Middle East following the removal of Saddam Hussein (2007).” From that he asks rhetorically: “Is it not possible, in other words, that there is something distinctly American about neoconservatism?” (p. 33)
Here Cooper describes an alleged neocon position never expressed by me, or strictly speaking, anyone one else, as far as I know. Since no one claims that the there was ever democracy in the Middle East, no one could expect a “renaissance,” which, of course, means rebirth. And it is probably true that there is no evidence that the Israeli defense establishment, or anyone else with expertise on the Middle East, actually believed that the elimination of Saddam Hussein would create democracy in Iraq. And in The Transparent Cabal, I questioned the idea that the neocons themselves actually believed that their policies would lead to democracy, as democracy is conventionally understood. But whatever their beliefs on the eventual social systems in the Middle East, the policies they prescribed dovetailed with those of the Israeli Likudniks, which were designed solely for the enhancement of the national interest of the state of Israel. And, as documented in The Transparent Cabal, the Sharon government did promote the war on Iraq. (TC, pp. 169-72)
Moreover, contrary to Cooper’s insinuation, I never denied that there was “something distinctly American about neoconservatism,” since, as I explained in the book, neoconservatism in general was not my topic. There could very well be “something distinctly American about neoconservatism” while, simultaneously, their view on Middle East policy was shaped by their identification with Israel security interests. The two beliefs are not mutually exclusive.
In an effort to counter the claim of neocon loyalty to Israel, Cooper holds that the neocons are “just as steadfast in their support for Taiwan as they are in their support for Israel.” (p. 33) This is based on an article by William Kristol and Robert Kagan stating that the US should defend Taiwan from China. Viewing this as the overall position of the neocons, Cooper attributes neocon support for Israel and Taiwan to their belief that the two countries are “endangered liberal democracies living in hostile regions.” (p. 33) Cooper next cites a general statement by Irving Kristol, that “Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces, external or internal (2003).” These statements allegedly provide sufficient evidence to prove that the neocons are “driven more by feelings of ideological solidarity than ethnic identification.” (p. 33-34)
There are a number of problems with this notion of neocon support for Taiwan and other democratic nations being comparable to their support for Israel. A simple statement of support for Taiwan if threatened with attack, or in Irving Kristol’s case, a claim that the US “if possible” would “feel obliged” to defend democratic countries is obviously not equivalent to launching aggressive wars to weaken or eliminate Israel’s enemies. Furthermore, the connection of the neocons to other democratic foreign countries is not in anyway equal to the deep personal loyalty and intimate connection the neocons have with the state of Israel, which is illustrated throughout The Transparent Cabal.
Neocons present Israel as a model democracy but this is hardly the case, as liberal democracy is generally defined today. Rather, Israel is a Jewish supremacist ethno-state that favors Jews over Palestinians, going to the extent of dispossessing them of their land on the West Bank for Jewish settlements. Instead of supporting measures by Jewish leftists and liberals to allow more rights for the Palestinians in order to move Israel in the direction of a typical liberal democracy, the neocons support the Likudnik (explicitly Jewish supremacist) hard-line anti-Palestinian position, which is anything but pro-liberal democracy. Their goal is to maintain Israel as an ethnically-Jewish state instead of creating a modern liberal democracy with equal rights for all people. That the neocons see this Jewish ethno-state as a model democracy would illustrate their ethnic bias, since they find no fault with the type of ethnic discrimination that Jews have historically railed against when applied against them in gentile countries.
It would seem that the predominantly Jewish composition of the core membership of neoconservatism, the latter’s close connection to and championing of Israel, and the fact that the neocons advocated that the US take militant positions against the enemies of Israel would, taken together, provide strong prima facie evidence that Jewish ethnicity shaped the neocons Middle East policy. As pointed out in The Transparent Cabal, the Jewish orientation of neoconservatism has been acknowledged by some close students of the movement, including those who happen to be Jewish. For example, Gal Beckerman wrote in the Jewish weekly newspaper Forward in January 2006: “[I]t is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.” In fact, Beckerman went so far as to maintain that “[i]f there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.” (TC, p. 26) Murray Friedman wrote a favorable book about the neocons entitled The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, which stresses the significance of their Jewish ethnicity. In it he shows that the neocons explicitly mentioned their group loyalty: “A central element in [neocon godfather Norman] Podhoretz’s evolving views, which would soon become his and many of the neocons’ governing principle was the question, “Is It Good for the Jews,” the title of a February 1972 Commentary piece.” [quoted in TC, p. 27; Friedman, p. 147]
In the much reviewed The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (University of Chicago Press, 1993), noted political scientist (Johns Hopkins University) Benjamin Ginsberg writes: “One major factor that drew them [future Jewish neocons] inexorably to the right was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right’s hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security.” (T.C., p. 26; Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, p. 231)
The aforementioned illustrations of the neocons’ Jewish ethnicity shaping their policy positions represent cases where this issue was broached in the mainstream. However, the mainstream media has left out this ethnic reference when dealing with recent U.S. Middle East policy. For to include such a reference would imply that Jews are influential and exhibit “dual loyalty”– ideas that are taboo in the United States mainstream. It was these taboos that caused the whole idea of the neocons being the leading element for the war on Iraq to be blacked-out in mainstream presentations of the subject, a situation that recent works are only willing to change by discussing the role of the neoconservatives in a sanitized fashion, with the taboos expurgated or explained away.
However, there is nothing unusual in concluding that neocons would be motivated by ethnic loyalty to Israel. Historians and other commentators on American foreign policy have readily attributed ethnic loyalty as a fundamental factor in shaping the views of other groups – German-, Greek-, Polish-, Irish-, and Cuban-Americans. There is no reason to think that this interpretation would not also apply to the predominantly Jewish neoconservatives, especially since there is so much evidence of their close ties to the Jewish state.
That recent mainstream works on the neocons do everything possible to skirt their obviously ethnically-motivated concern for Israel represents not only a misinterpretation of a historical event, but has serious, negative ramifications for the understanding of ongoing U.S. Middle East policy. For neocons constitute only a more extreme element of the overall Israel lobby, which influences U.S. Middle East policy under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Without the willingness to recognize this major force behind America’s belligerent policy in the Middle East, it will not only be impossible to extricate the United States from the current Middle East morass, but there will be a strong possibility that the US will be involved in future wars in the region.
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Dr. Stephen Sniegoski earned his Ph.D doctorate in American history,with a focus on American foreign policy, at the University of Maryland. His focus on the neoconservative involvement in American foreign policy antedates September 11, and his first major work on the subject, “The War on Iraq: Conceived in Israel” was published February 10, 2003, more than a month before the American attack. He is the author of “The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, and the National Interest of Israel”.
The Myth of Precision-Guided Coercion
By FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY | CounterPunch | June 22, 2011
At the end of May the British press was filled with stories headlined “Gaddafi to be told to stand down or face Apache attack.” As of this writing, the Apaches have attacked, but Gaddafi has not stood down.
The Apache threat is a case study in the sterile but financially lucrative marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes by precision guided weapons. What passes for a war strategy in Libya is now a comic opera starring NATO as an understrength, self-referencing techno bully, who acts as if he is now so fearsome that he does not even need a carrot to go with his stick.
In effect, the British press said NATO forces were telegraphing their punch. NATO was about to deploy eight attack helicopters, four British Apaches and four French Tigers, armed with Hellfire precision-guided missiles, like those fired from US Predator drones in Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya. The Hellfires were to be targeted against Qaddafi’s forces besieging the Libyan city of Misrata in a desperate hope that that Qaddafi’s forces would crumble or withdraw their support from him.
The psychology described in these reports was not an aberration; it reflects a techno-dependency that comes straight out of the US playbook. In fact, the US version of technological supremacy eliminates the need for cleverness in a military strategist. The mental labors of a Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Grant, or a Manstein are no longer needed, because they can be displaced by silver bullets spit out by machines. All that is needed in a ‘strategist’ is the ability to construct coarse threats, even when, as in the case of Libya, the bullies making those threats are manifestly out of altitude, airspeed, and ideas.
This kind of primitive thinking proves again the extent to which NATO has bought into the flawed US ideology that its technological advantage gives it the ability to coerce all opponents into doing their bidding, even though NATO’s European forces can not afford to waste money on a scale remotely approaching that of the US. You would think a European planner would understand this economic limitation, if not the fallacy of ideology itself. After all, the European planners in NATO have seen this nonsense before — in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, not to mention Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The central idea in the compound theory of precision-guided coercion is a marriage of the military theory of techno-war, especially the use of high tech surveillance systems and precision-guided weapons, to the political theory of coercive diplomacy. This marriage is more a product of the Pentagon’s advocates of techno-war than the go-along bureaucrats in Foggy Bottom. The Pentagonians sold the succession of Presidents after 1990 on the idea of combining the cold-war inspired theory of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) with post-cold war foreign policies. The RMA (not to mention the Apache attack helicopter) was originally conceived for fighting the tank-heavy forces of the Warsaw Pact on the North German plain, although the roots of using precision guided weapons and surgical strikes can be traced back to the disgraced theory of gradual escalation in Vietnam and the theory of daylight precision bombing in WWII.
Its contemporary reincarnation was spearheaded by William Perry over a twenty year period between the mid 70s and mid 90s. Perry, a quintessential military-industrial operator, equally at home in the Pentagon, the boardroom, or in the lecture halls at Stanford University, got the ball rolling during the height of the Cold War when he was Director of Defense Research and Engineering in the late 1970s during the Carter Administration, and then he sealed it into the post-cold war mindset when he was Deputy Secretary and Secretary of Defense during the Clinton Administration in the 1990s. The Reaganauts merely followed his script during the interregnum in the 1980s by blindly pouring money into high-cost programs he worked so hard to start during the 1970s.
In the 1990s, when the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact evaporated, the threat of a peace dividend terrified the Pentagon, the contractors, and their wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress. Perry helped save the day by twisting old cold-war ideas into their contemporary form by combining the military theory of precision strikes to the political theory of coercive diplomacy that had become so attractive to the self-styled foreign policy elite housed in think tanks and academia, awaiting their calls to government service. Most of these ‘elites’ are trained in political science (itself and oxymoron), have little or no military experience, are technological illiterates, and lust after the policy jobs in the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom — in short, they are perfect consumers of the fools gold produced by the technically savvy alchemists of the MICC, like Perry and his ilk.
Coercive diplomacy assumes that carefully calibrated doses of punishment (sticks that would sometimes be accompanied by carrots, but not necessarily) will ineluctably persuade an adversary to act in a way that we would deem acceptable. There is, for example, no carrot in the case of Qaddafi, where Nato is trying to coerce him into leaving office, so NATO can send him to the dock in the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. Some choice! In theory, the precision guidance technologies give the military a capability to carefully calibrate the coercion by surgically striking selected targets with so-called precision-guided weapons, fired from a safe distance, with no friendly casualties, and little unintended damage. Hi-tech surveillance systems would enable target identification and selection and then monitor the effects of the surgical strikes — thus reducing strategy to a cybernetic negative feedback control system, a conception not unlike that of a common household thermostat.
This marriage of primitive pop psychology with the simplistic promises of hi-tech weapons makes war look easy, safe, and cheap — and therefore easy to sell to Presidents with little or no military experience but who are under political pressure to do something ‘decisive.’ These benefits quickly became evident in the United States’ increasing addiction to pointless drive-by shootings with cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs in the 1990s — e.g., bombing a pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan, or destroying an Al Qaeda obstacle course in Afghanistan, not to mention the endless attacks on Iraq’s air defense sites in the 1990s. This mode of thinking is now clearly evident in NATO’s operations against Qaddafi in Libya.
The military dimension of this theory was eagerly adopted by the US foreign policy elite during the 1980s and 1990s, because it mechanized their simplistic theories of coercion by giving them a tool to play their game. Madeline Albright, in particular, as Clinton’s Secretary of State, became addicted to coercive diplomacy in the Balkans, backed up by tit-for-tat surgical strikes. According to General Colin Powell’s memoirs, she once almost gave him an aneurism by demanding, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about, if we can’t use it?” Albright and Perry got their first chance to strut their stuff in Operation Deliberate Force in Bosnia in September 1995. While they claimed it was a stunning success, and notwithstanding the uncritical acceptance of these claims by the mainstream media, the results were ambiguous, to put it charitably.
Some might argue I am being unfair. Surely, the damage done in 11 days by the 708 guided weapons striking 48 target complexes forced Slobodan Miloševic to the bargaining table at Dayton. Did that not prove, to paraphrase Richard Holbrooke’s remarks to the annual convention of the Air Force Association in 1996, that more bombing leads to better diplomacy?
That argument, however, ignores the decisive effects of Operation Storm, the August 1995 Croatian ground offensive that cleansed the Krajina of more than 200,000 Serbs and changed the situation on the ground in Bosnia by cutting the Bosnian Serb supply lines. It also fails to consider that all the belligerents were exhausted and needed a rest. Nevertheless, the lesson the marriage partners wanted to learn, namely that a weak-willed Miloševic would respond predictably to precision-guided coercion, did have one effect: It set the stage for the gross miscalculation at the so-called Rambouillet peace conference.
This can be seen in an intelligence analysis of Miloševic’s psychology in late 1998 and early 1999. A U.S. National Intelligence Estimate issued in November 1998 (quoted in the Washington Post of April 8,1999) said, “Miloševic is susceptible to outside pressure. He will eventually accept a number of outcomes [in Kosovo], from autonomy to provisional status with final resolution to be determined, as long as he remains the undisputed leader in Belgrade.” An interagency report coordinated by the Central Intelligence Agency in January 1999 (reported in the April 18, 1999 New York Times) went even further, saying “After enough of a defense to sustain his honor and assuage his backers [Miloševic] will quickly sue for peace.”
The Rambouillet “Accord” aimed to give Miloševic a chance to defend his honor. That NATO’s demands were unacceptable should be no surprise. Like the infamous Austro-Hungarian diktat to Serbia in 1914, they were blatant infringements on Serbia’s national sovereignty. The Accord’s military implementation annex (Appendix B) proposed to give NATO forces “free and unimpeded access throughout the FRY” [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, i.e., Serbia, Montenegro, and Kosovo], immunity from “arrest, investigation or detention,” and authorized NATO to “detain” Serbian individuals and turn them over to unspecified “appropriate authorities.”
The plan backfired. Miloševic did not react predictably like a mechanical thermostat, but chose instead to escalate rapidly by unleashing his forces in Kosovo — whereupon the “carefully calibrated” limited bombing campaign aimed at changing one man’s behavior exploded into a general war against the Serbian people. NATO had expanded the target list to include the Serbian power grid and civilian infrastructure, the war settled into a grinding siege of attrition, and planners worried about running out of cruise missiles. The conduct of the bombing campaign was shaped more by the speed with which targets got through the approval cycle than by any strategy linking a particular target’s destruction to a desired tactical or strategic effect. As a result, NATO bombers effectively destroyed the economic infrastructure of a tiny nation with an economy smaller than that of Fairfax County, Virginia.
U.S. military planners had predicted that a “precision” bombing campaign would force the Serbs to capitulate in only two to three days, but the air campaign ground on for seventy-nine days. At war’s end, U.S. forces had flown only 15 per cent as many strike sorties as in Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991, but had expended 72 per cent as many precision-guided munitions and 94 per cent as many cruise missiles.
When it was over, NATO intelligence determined that only minute quantities of Serbian tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery, and trucks—all high-priority targets—were destroyed, in part because the Serbs fooled our complex surveillance and precision guidance technologies with simple decoys. There are even reports that they used cheap microwave ovens as decoys to attract our enormously expensive radar homing missiles. Serbian troops marched out of Kosovo in good order, their fighting spirit intact, displaying clean equipment and crisp uniforms, and in larger numbers than planners said were in Kosovo to begin with. Moreover, the terms of Serb “surrender,” which the undefeated Serb military regarded as a sellout by Serbian president Miloševic, were the same as those the Serbs agreed to at the Rambouillet Conference, before U.S. negotiators led by Secretary of State Madeleine Albright inserted a poison pill (in the form of the military annex mentioned above) to queer the deal.
Of course, the weapons makers love the marriage of high-cost precision weapons to coercive diplomacy, because it generates an astronomical need for a never ending flow of money into their financial coffers with orders for new weapons, even when the quantity of those weapons decreases. Congressmen love it because the money and patronage continues to flow to their districts. So, the economic result is what we in the Pentagon used to call a self-licking ice cream cone. And the cone has become particularly tasty in the age of perpetual small wars we have created after the Cold War ended in 1991. [Readers interested in the domestic causes of this perpetual war are referred to my essay, The Domestic Roots of Perpetual War.]
Will precision guided coercion get lucky and eventually work for NATO in its pissant operation in Libya?
Perhaps. After all, Qaddafi’s forces are tiny, ill equipped and poorly trained. They can not possibly be compared in terms of effectiveness to the Serb Army in the 1990s. On the other hand, England and France cannot afford to waste money on the scale of the US. Moreover, it is by no means certain that the theory will work in Libya: it did not and has not worked in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the decapitations of Saddam and Osama were done the old fashioned way via lots of detective work coupled with by activities that looked more like those of a police SWAT team than a military combat operation. In any case, it is not at all clear that these decapitations are silver bullets that achieve anything beyond soothing our pride. The Pentagon and its wholly owned subsidiaries in Congress certainly do not want these decapitations to end the perpetual war. Indeed, Buck McKeon, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, is madly trying to legislate the idea that the terrorist threat posed by Al Qaeda has mutated and the long war will continue for the foreseeable future.
If the marriage of coercive diplomacy to surgical strikes succeeds in Libya, its proponents will trumpet it as a canonical proof of their theory. If it fails again like it did in Kosovo, it won’t matter. There will be no divorce in the US, and the union will live on and grow richer. The high-cost of precision guided coercion may bankrupt England and France and reduce the foreign market for US weapons, but that is a small price to pay. It will not affect the money flowing into the coffers of the US Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex. That is because new, more-expensive weapons are always on the drawing board to discount any failures in the present weapons. In this way, the promise of new technology repeatedly washes the inconvenient truth of history from what is left of the critical faculties of the mind.
No one will question what is a patently silly way of thinking, because, as the late American strategist Colonel John Boyd used to say, ‘the real strategy is don’t interrupt the money flow, add to it’ — and that always works like a charm in Versailles on the Potomac, if not Brussels.
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Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon. He currently lives on a sailboat in the Mediterranean and can be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com
Which Bankrupt EU State Is the World’s Fourth Biggest Arms Importer?
By Steve McGiffen | Spectrezine | June 21st, 2011
Nothing exposes the hypocrisy of those currently running the EU and almost every one of its member states more than the recent discovery by French journalist Jean-Louis Denier that the Greek government is being encouraged to spend vast sums of money on a range of hardware which no-one needs and no sane person wants.
Having spent the last couple of years arguing that austerity is not the ‘necessary’ policy response demanded by the financial and economic crisis, I find that, behind the scenes, it isn’t in any real sense austerity which is happening at all.
It turns out that throughout this crisis of Greek public debt, and under the direction of the same international potentates who are imposing cuts in spending on welfare, pensions, health care, the public sector and all of the other usual targets, the country’s ‘socialist’ government has continued to spend vast sums on armaments.
The fact that the principal suppliers of these arms are two of ‘austerity’s’ biggest proponents, the USA and Germany, should not surprise us. We have moved beyond a situation in which lying by leaders is not so much accepted as expected, into one in which reality plays no role whatsoever in their discourse.
Greece may, in the estimation of politicians and the mass media, be a badly-governed, corrupt kleptocracy populated by robber barons and a lazy, feckless class of reluctant workers, but it is at least armed to the teeth. The immediate cause of Greece’s financial crisis was a doubling, from 2005 to 2008, of the value of loans from western banks to the country’s government. By the end of that period, these loans amounted to $160 billion.
At the same time, the ‘defence’ bill of this relatively small, relatively poor European Union member state was growing by a third in five years (to 2009) as it became the world’s fourth largest importer of armaments.
This is a country with fewer than 11 million people, one of the world’s lowest birth-rates, and a negative rate of growth. With a GDP close to that of Spain it isn’t as poor as sometimes assumed, but its wealth is unequally distributed and it spends only 4% of its annual budget on education, putting it 105th in a global league table. Within the EU, only Slovakia spends proportionally less on schooling its people.
The Greek ‘defence’ budget, moreover, is higher than this, at 4.3% of GDP. Such figures can be hard to credit.
It’s more than two thousand years since any part of Greece was a superpower, yet its leaders prefer bombs to books. It is thus clear that the ever-increasing bail-outs are in reality, directly or indirectly, consecrated to the purchase of arms. Year on year, Greece has been spending money it does not have on weapons it does not need.
According to a joint investigation by Greek and German justices, bribery of top Greek politicians, public officials and military leaders has been used to secure contracts. The money to purchase these weapons is supplied by bank loans which come from the same countries which are supplying the arms, including the US, Germany and France. About $3 billion on French combat helicopters; $2 billion on US fighter planes; roughly the same figure on French Mirage aircraft; almost three times that sum on German submarines; and a trifling half a million or so on French combat helicopters.
This presumably exempts Greece from recent criticism from outgoing US Defence Secretary Robert Gates that Europeans don’t spend enough on arming themselves. Just what Greece is expecting to defend itself from is unclear.
Its old enemy Turkey is in fact gradually reducing its arms purchases and last year proposed to Greece an accord under which each would cut its spending on weaponry by 20%. Despite its financial crisis, Greece refused to agree to this.
Only in 2009 did Athens start to experience difficulties in paying for imported arms, and at that point the EU began to show concern. When it could meet the bill for the astronomical sums spent on weaponry which, mercifully enough, is for the most part unlikely ever to be used, no-one had a problem.
This puts into a strange new context the recent spat between Germany and the European Central Bank as to how best to help Greece to pay its debts without destabilising markets. Every single aspect of this row serves merely to cover up the reality of a situation in which a middle-income country can no longer afford to provide the means whereby its people can lead decent, productive, satisfying lives, yet can spend billions and billions on instruments designed to bring other lives to a premature end.
Back in Greece, protests continue as a new round of cuts, amounting to €6.5 billion before the end of 2011, is debated in the Greek parliament. Deputies from the ruling former social-democratic PASOK are beginning to defect.
I was recently asked an interesting question by a young American woman who had been watching events unfolding in Spain. An uprising in a dictatorship has an easy solution, in a sense, she said: you can introduce parliamentary democracy and hope that this provides a platform for resolving grievances which everyone can respect. But what happens if you have an uprising in a parliamentary democracy?
I couldn’t answer. But I suspect we may soon find out.
‘Obama lawyers worse than Bush’s’
Press TV – June 20, 2011
An analyst says George W. Bush’s lawyers threatened to resign en mass when placed in a situation similar to Barack Obama’s lawyers, who were overruled on the Libya war.
American lawyer, columnist, and author Glenn Greenwald says in 2007 lawyers in the Bush administration threatened to resign en mass over the National Security Agency’s (NSA) warrantless eavesdropping program, The Huffington Post reported.
Similar to how Obama ignored legal advice on his Libya war campaign being illegal without congressional approval Bush decided to reject the legal conclusions of his top lawyers and order NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program to continue.
In the Republican’s case, however, several top administration lawyers, including, FBI Director Robert Mueller, threatened to resign en masse if Bush continued with the illegal spying program.
Earlier this week, Obama overruled top White House lawyers by deciding to argue that US military operations in Libya do not require congressional approval. However, his lawyers failed to take any decisive action.
Obama rejected the legal advice of Pentagon general counsel lawyer Jeh Johnson and the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, Caroline Krass, in concluding that his administration was not in violation of the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR) by continuing its operation in Libya beyond 90 days, The New York Times reported on Friday.
Obama argued that the US military in Libya is only active in support roles and its actions do not amount to “hostilities,” therefore it is not in violation of the WPR despite having extended US operations in Libya to more than 90 days without seeking congress’s approval.
Why Regime Change in Libya?
By ISMAEL HOSSEIN-ZADEH | CounterPunch | June 17, 2011
In light of the brutal death and destruction wrought on Libya by the relentless US/NATO bombardment, the professed claims of “humanitarian concerns” as grounds for intervention can readily be dismissed as a blatantly specious imperialist ploy in pursuit of “regime change” in that country.
There is undeniable evidence that contrary to the spontaneous, unarmed and peaceful protest demonstrations in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, the rebellion in Libya has been nurtured, armed and orchestrated largely from abroad, in collaboration with expat opposition groups and their local allies at home. Indeed, evidence shows that plans of “regime change” in Libya were drawn long before the insurgency actually started in Benghazi; it has all the hallmarks of a well-orchestrated civil war [1].
It is very tempting to seek the answer to the question “why regime change in Libya?” in oil/energy. While oil is undoubtedly a concern, it falls short of a satisfactory explanation because major Western oil companies were already extensively involved in the Libyan oil industry. Indeed, since Gaddafi relented to the US-UK pressure in 1993 and established “normal” economic and diplomatic relations with these and other Western countries, major US and European oil companies struck quite lucrative deals with the National Oil Corporation of Libya.
So, the answer to the question “why the imperialist powers want to do away with Gaddafi” has to go beyond oil, or the laughable “humanitarian concerns.” Perhaps the question can be answered best in the light of the following questions: why do these imperialist powers also want to overthrow Hugo Cavez of Venezuela, Fidel Castro (and/or his successors) of Cuba, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Rafael Correa Delgado of Ecuador, Kim Jong-il of North Korea, Bashar Al-assad of Syria and Evo Morales of Bolivia? Or, why did they overthrow Mohammad Mossadeq of Iran, Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, Kusno Sukarno of Indonesia, Salvador Allende of Chile, Sandinistas in Nicaragua, Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras?
What does Gaddafi have in common with these nationalist/populist leaders? The question is of course rhetorical and the answer is obvious: like them Gaddafi is guilty of insubordination to the proverbial godfather of the world: US imperialism, and its allies. Like them, he has committed the cardinal sin of challenging the unbridled reign of global capital, of not following the economic “guidelines” of the captains of global finance, that is, of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and World Trade Organization; as well as of refusing to join US military alliances in the region. Also like other nationalist/populist leaders, he advocates social safety net (or welfare state) programs—not for giant corporations, as is the case in imperialist countries, but for the people in need.
This means that the criminal agenda of Messrs Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, and their complicit allies to overthrow or kill Mr. Gaddafi and other “insubordinate” proponents of welfare state programs abroad is essentially part of the same evil agenda of dismantling such programs at home. While the form, the context and the means of destruction may be different, the thrusts of the relentless attacks on the living standards of the Libyan, Iranian, Venezuelan or Cuban peoples are essentially the same as the equally brutal attacks on the living conditions of the poor and working people in the US, UK, France and other degenerate capitalist countries. In a subtle (but unmistakable) way they are all part of an ongoing unilateral class warfare on a global scale—whether they are carried out by military means and bombardments, or through the apparently “non-violent” processes of judicial or legislative means does not make a substantial difference as far as the nature or the thrust of the attack on people’s lives or livelihoods are concerned.
In their efforts to consolidate the reign of big capital worldwide, captains of global finance use a variety of methods. The preferred method is usually non-military, that is, the neoliberal strategies of Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), carried out by representatives of big business disguised as elected officials, or by the multilateral institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. This is what is currently happening in the debt- and deficit-ridden economies of the United States and Europe. But if a country like Libya (or Venezuela or Iran or Cuba) does not go along with the neoliberal agenda of “structural adjustments,” of outsourcing and privatization, and of allowing their financial system to be tied to the network of global banking cartel, then the military option is embarked upon to carry out the neoliberal agenda.
The powerful interests of global capitalism do not seem to feel comfortable to dismantle New Deal economics, Social Democratic reforms and welfare state programs in the core capitalist countries while people in smaller, less-developed countries such as Libya, Venezuela or Cuba enjoy strong, state-sponsored social safety net programs such as free or heavily-subsidized education and health care benefits. Indeed, guardians of the worldwide market mechanism have always been intolerant of any “undue” government intervention in the economic affairs of any country in the world. “Regimented economies,” declared President Harry Truman in a speech at Baylor University (1947), were the enemy of free enterprise, and “unless we act, and act decisively,” he claimed those regimented economies would become “the pattern of the next century.” To fend off that danger, Truman urged that “the whole world should adopt the American system.” The system of free enterprise, he went on, “can survive in America only if it becomes a world system” [2].
Before it was devastated by the imperialist-orchestrated civil war and destruction, Libya had the highest living standard in Africa. Using United Nations statistics, Jean-Paul Pougala of Dissident Voice reports,
“The country now ranks 53rd on the HDI [Human Development Index] index, better than all other African countries and also better than the richer and Western-backed Saudi Arabia. . . . Although the media often refers to youth unemployment of 15 to 30 percent, it does not mention that in Libya, in contrast to other countries, all have their subsistence guaranteed. . . . The government provides all citizens with free health care and [has] achieved high coverage in the most basic health areas. . . . The life expectancy rose to 74.5 years and is now the highest in Africa. . . . The infant mortality rate declined to 17 deaths per 1,000 births and is not nearly as high as in Algeria (41) and also lower than in Saudi Arabia (21).
“The UNDP [United Nations Development Program] certified that Libya has also made ‘a significant progress in gender equality,’ particularly in the fields of education and health, while there is still much to do regarding representation in politics and the economy. With a relative low ‘index of gender inequality’ the UNDP places the country in the Human Development Report 2010 concerning gender equality at rank 52 and thus also well ahead of Egypt (ranked 108), Algeria (70), Tunisia (56), Saudi Arabia (ranked 128) and Qatar (94)” [3].
It is true that after resisting the self-centered demands and onerous pressures from Western powers for more than thirty years, Gaddafi relented in 1993 and opened the Libyan economy to Western capital, carried out a number of neoliberal economic reforms, and granted lucrative business/investment deals to major oil companies of the West.
But, again, like the proverbial godfather, US/European imperialism requires total, unconditional subordination; half-hearted, grudging compliance with the global agenda of imperialism is not enough. To be considered a real “ally,” or a true “client state,” a country has to grant the US the right to “guide” its economic, geopolitical and foreign policies, that is, to essentially forgo its national sovereignty. Despite some economic concessions since the early 1990s, Gaddafi failed this critical test of “full compliance” with the imperialist designs in the region.
For example, he resisted joining a US/NATO-sponsored military alliance in the region. Libya (along with Syria) are the only two Mediterranean nations and the sole remaining Arab states that are not subordinated to U.S. and NATO designs for control of the Mediterranean Sea Basin and the Middle East. Nor has Libya (or Syria) participated in NATO’s almost ten-year-old Operation Active Endeavor naval patrols and exercises in the Mediterranean Sea and neither is a member of NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue military partnership which includes most regional countries: Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Mauritania [4].
To the chagrin of US imperialism, Libya’s Gaddafi also refused to join the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), designed to control valuable resources in Africa, safeguard trade and investment markets in the region, and contain or evict China from North Africa. “When the US formed AFRICOM in 2007, some 49 countries signed on to the US military charter for Africa but one country refused: Libya. Such a treacherous act by Libya’s leader Moummar Qaddafi would only sow the seeds for a future conflict down the road in 2011” [5].
Furthermore, by promoting trade, development and industrialization projects on a local, national, regional or African level, Gaddafi was viewed as an obstacle to the Western powers’ strategies of unhindered trade and development projects on a global level. For example, Gaddafi’s Libya played a leading role in “connecting the entire [African] continent by telephone, television, radio broadcasting and several other technological applications such as telemedicine and distance teaching. And thanks to the WMAX radio bridge, a low cost connection was made available across the continent, including in rural areas” [3].
The idea of launching a pan-African system of technologically advanced network of telecommunication began in the early 1990s, “when 45 African nations established RASCOM (Regional African Satellite Communication Organization) so that Africa would have its own satellite and slash communication costs in the continent. This was a time when phone calls to and from Africa were the most expensive in the world because of the annual $500 million fee pocketed by Europe for the use of its satellites like Intelsat for phone conversations, including those within the same country. . . . An African satellite only cost a onetime payment of $400 million and the continent no longer had to pay a $500 million annual lease” [3].
In pursuit of financing this project, the African nations frequently pleaded with the IMF and the World Bank for assistance.
As the empty promises of these financial giants dragged on for 14 years, “Gaddafi put an end to [the] futile pleas to the western ‘benefactors’ with their exorbitant interest rates. The Libyan guide put $300 million on the table; the African Development Bank added $50 million more and the West African Development Bank a further $27 million – and that’s how Africa got its first communications satellite on 26 December 2007.
“China and Russia followed suit and shared their technology and helped launch satellites for South Africa, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria and a second African satellite was launched in July 2010. The first totally indigenously built satellite and manufactured on African soil, in Algeria, is set for 2020. This satellite is aimed at competing with the best in the world, but at ten times less the cost, a real challenge.
“This is how a symbolic gesture of a mere $300 million changed the life of an entire continent. Gaddafi’s Libya cost the West, not just depriving it of $500 million per year but the billions of dollars in debt and interest that the initial loan would generate for years to come and in an exponential manner, thereby helping maintain an occult system in order to plunder the continent” [3].
Architects of global finance, represented by the imperialist governments of the West, also viewed Gaddafi as a spoiler in the area of international or global money and banking. The forces of global capital tend to prefer a uniform, contiguous, or borderless global market to multiple sovereign markets at the local, national, regional or continental levels. Not only Gaddafi’s Libya maintained public ownership of its own central bank, and the authority to create its own national money, but it also worked assiduously to establish an African Monetary Fund, an African Central Bank, and an African Investment Bank.
The $30 billion of the Libyan money frozen by the Obama administration belong to the Central Bank of Libya, which “had been earmarked as the Libyan contribution to three key projects which would add the finishing touches to the African Federation – the African Investment Bank in Syrte (Libya), the establishment in 2011 of the African Monetary Fund to be based in Yaoundé (Cameroon) . . ., and the Abuja-based African Central Bank in Nigeria, which when it starts printing African money will ring the death knell for the CFA franc [the French currency] through which Paris has been able to maintain its hold on some African countries for the last fifty years. It is easy to understand the French wrath against Gaddafi.
“The African Monetary Fund is expected to totally supplant the African activities of the International Monetary Fund which, with only $25 billion, was able to bring an entire continent to its knees and make it swallow questionable privatization like forcing African countries to move from public to private monopolies. No surprise then that on 16-17 December 2010, the Africans unanimously rejected attempts by Western countries to join the African Monetary Fund, saying it was open only to African nations” [3].
Western powers also viewed Gaddafi as an obstacle to their imperial strategies for yet another reason: standing in the way of their age-old policies of “divide and rule.” To counter Gaddafi’s relentless efforts to establish a United States of Africa, the European Union tried to create the Union for the Mediterranean (UPM) region. “North Africa somehow had to be cut off from the rest of Africa, using the old tired racist clichés of the 18th and 19th centuries, which claimed that Africans of Arab origin were more evolved and civilized than the rest of the continent. This failed because Gaddafi refused to buy into it. He soon understood what game was being played when only a handful of African countries were invited to join the Mediterranean grouping without informing the African Union but inviting all 27 members of the European Union.” Gaddafi also refused to buy into other imperialist-inspired/driven groupings in Africa such as ECOWAS, COMESA, UDEAC, SADC and the Great Maghreb, “which never saw the light of day thanks to Gaddafi who understood what was happening” [3].
Gaddafi further earned the wrath of Western powers for striking extensive trade and investment deals with BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China), especially with China. According to Beijing’s Ministry of Commerce, China’s contracts in Libya (prior to imperialism’s controlled demolition of that country) numbered no less than 50 large projects, involving contracts in excess of $18 billion. Even a cursory reading of U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) strategic briefings shows that a major thrust of its mission is containment of China. “In effect, what we are witnessing here,” points out Patrick Henningsten, “is the dawn of a New Cold War between the US-EURO powers and China. This new cold war will feature many of the same elements of the long and protracted US-USSR face-off we saw in the second half of the 20th century. It will take place off shore, in places like Africa, South America, Central Asia and through old flashpoints like Korea and the Middle East” [5].
It is obvious (from this brief discussion) that Gaddafi’s sin for being placed on imperialism’s death row consists largely of the challenges he posed to the free reign of Western capital in the region, of his refusal to relinquish Libya’s national sovereignty to become another unconditional “client state” of Western powers. His removal from power is therefore designed to eliminate all “barriers” to the unhindered mobility of the US/European capital in the region by installing a more pliant regime in Libya.
Gaddafi’s removal from power would serve yet another objective of US/European powers: to shorten or spoil the Arab Spring by derailing their peaceful protests, containing their non-violent revolutions and sabotaging their aspirations for self-determination. Soon after being caught by surprise by the glorious uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, the imperialist powers (including the mini Zionist imperialism in Palestine) embarked on “damage control.” In pursuit of this objective, they adopted three simultaneous strategies. The first strategy was to half-heartedly “support” the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia (of course, once they became unstoppable) in order to control them—hence, the military rule in those countries following the departure of Mubarak from Cairo and Ben Ali from Tunis. The second strategy of containment has been support and encouragement for the brutal crackdown of other spontaneous and peaceful uprisings in countries ruled by “client regimes,” for example, in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia. And the third policy of sabotaging the Arab Spring has been to promote civil war and orchestrate chaos in countries such as Libya, Syria and Iran.
In its early stages of development, capitalism promoted nation-state and/or national sovereignty in order to free itself from the constraints of the church and feudalism. Now that the imperatives of the highly advanced but degenerate global finance capital require unhindered mobility in a uniform or borderless world, national sovereignty is considered problematic—especially in places like Libya, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Bolivia and other countries that are not ruled by imperialism’s “client states.” Why? Because unhindered global mobility of capital requires doing away with social safety net or welfare state programs; it means doing away with public domain properties or public sector enterprises and bringing them under the private ownership of the footloose-and-fancy-free global capital.
This explains why the corporate media, political pundits and other mouthpieces of imperialism are increasingly talking about Western powers’ “responsibility to protect,” by which they mean that these powers have a responsibility to protect the Libyan (or Iranian or Venezuelan or Syrian or Cuban or …) citizens from their “dictatorial” rulers by instigating regime change and promoting “democracy” there. It further means that, in pursuit of this objective, the imperialist powers should not be bound by “constraints” of national sovereignty because, they argue, “universal democratic rights take primacy over national sovereignty considerations.” In a notoriously selective fashion, this utilitarian use of the “responsibility to protect” does not apply to nations or peoples ruled by imperialism’s client states such as Saudi Arabia or Bahrain. [6].
This also means that the imperialist war against peoples and states such as Libya and Venezuela is essentially part of the same class war against peoples and states in the belly of the beast, that is, in the United States and Europe. In every instance or place, whether at home or abroad, whether in Libya or California or Wisconsin or Greece, the thrust of the relentless global class war is the same: to do away with subsistence-level guarantees, or social safety net programs, and redistribute the national or global resources in favor of the rich and powerful, especially the powerful interests vested in the finance capital and the military capital.
There is no question that global capitalism has thus woven together the fates and fortunes of the overwhelming majority of the world population in an increasingly intensifying struggle for subsistence and survival. No one can tell when this majority of world population (the middle, lower-middle, poor and working classes) would come to the realization that their seemingly separate struggles for economic survival are essentially part and parcel of the same struggle against the same class enemies, the guardians of world capitalism. One thing is clear, however: only when they come to such a liberating realization, join forces together in a cross-border, global uprising against the forces of world capitalism, and seek to manage their economies independent of profitability imperatives of capitalist production—only then can they break free from the shackles of capitalism and control their future in a coordinated, people-centered mode of production, distribution and consumption.
Ismael Hossein-Zadeh, author of The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave-Macmillan 2007), teaches economics at Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.
References
1. Michel Chossudovsky, “When War Games Go Live: Staging a ‘Humanitarian War’ against ‘SOUTHLAND’ Under an Imaginary UN Security Council Resolution 3003,” Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24351
2. D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and Its Origins (New York: Double Day, 1961), p. 436.
3. Jean-Paul Pougal, “Why the West Wants the Fall of Gaddafi?” Dissident Voice: http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/04/why-is-gaddafi-being-demonized/
4. Rick Rozoff, “Libyan Scenario for Syria: Towards A US-NATO ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ directed against Syria?” Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24562
5. Patrick Henningsten, “WEST vs. CHINA: A NEW COLD WAR BEGINS ON LIBYAN SOIL,” 21st Century Wire: http://21stcenturywire.com/2011/04/12/2577/
6. For an insightful and informative discussion of this issue see (1) F. William Engdahl, “Humanitarian Neo-colonialism: Framing Libya and Reframing War—Creative Destruction Part III,” Global Research: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24617; (b) Marjorie Cohn, “The Responsibility to Protect – The Cases of Libya and Ivory Coast,” Counter Punch: http://www.counterpunch.org/cohn05162011.html
2010 bonanza for Israeli arms sales
Press TV – June 16, 2011
Israel says it has reaped more benefit from its arms sales in 2010, earning more than USD seven billion, despite the worldwide financial crisis.
“Despite the global economic crisis, Israel’s military industries have experienced a period of stability and growth,” said Director General of Israel’s Ministry of Military Affairs, Major General Udi Shani, AFP reported.
However, the report does not provide details about countries that purchase weapons from the Israeli regime or what type of arms are involved in the deals.
Israeli officials attribute the 2010 boost of USD 300 million in arms sales compared to its previous year figures to Tel Aviv’s newly-deployed missile system known as the Iron Dome.
The apparatus has been jointly developed by Israel and the United States and awaits the injection of another billion dollars by Tel Aviv.
In its 2011 budget, Washington also allocates USD 415 million to the procurement, research and development of the missile projects jointly conducted with the Israeli regime, including USD 205 million for the Iron Dome system.
The amount of the US aid for the missile system is on top of the annual USD 3 billion allocated by Washington to Tel Aviv in mostly military grants.
‘US to stay in Afghanistan for decades’
Press TV – June 14, 2011
A new report has revealed that secret talks between American and Afghan officials could see foreign troops remain in Afghanistan for several decades.
In a report published Monday, The Guardian, quoted US and NATO sources, as saying that secret negotiations have reportedly been underway for more than a month.
American negotiators will be in Kabul for a new round of talks later this month. The talks are aimed at securing a strategic partnership agreement that includes US presence in Afghanistan beyond the 2014 withdrawal deadline.
According to the report, any such agreement is likely to see American troops, spies and air power stay in the country for decades.
Meanwhile, senior NATO officials have also predicted that their troops will remain in Afghanistan far beyond 2014. However, Russia, China and India have voiced concern over any such ‘strategic partnership’ deal that would prolong US presence in the region.
The report comes days after and Washington exchanged proposals on possible US presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014.
“Our proposal had gone to the US government in response to their proposal. A delegation will come from the United States to discuss this and that will determine the nature of US presence in Afghanistan (after 2014),” Karzai said during an official visit to the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, on Saturday.
Senior US and NATO officials have signaled that foreign troops will remain in the country beyond 2014. This is while US President Barack Obama had pledged a major drawdown from Afghanistan by July 2011.
Experts have described the new contradictory transition dates as a devastating truth for Americans.
Washington says the transition does not mean that Afghan forces will be in charge everywhere. Obama has promised to keep American forces in Afghanistan even after other Western countries withdraw their troops.
According to official figures, over 2,500 US-led soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion began in 2001.
The AfPak Tanker War
Moon of Alabama | June 9, 2011
The campaign against tankers trucking fuel for NATO from Karachi to Afghanistan is back in full force after a lull earlier this year.
While now only some 50% of the fuel needed in Afghanistan is coming through Pakistan, the total fuel need has nearly doubled over the last year due to the “surge”, the buildup of Afghan forces and an increased operations. It would be impossible to fight this war if that line-of-communication gets interrupted.
Here is a, likely incomplete, list of recent attacks on NATO tankers. The losses are significant:
Explosion destroys Nato tanker in Khyber, June 9
PESHAWAR: A Nato oil tanker was destroyed following an explosion in the Khyber tribal region on Thursday, DawnNews quoted security sources as saying.
Eight Nato supply tankers torched, June 8
KHYBER AGENCY – As many as eight Nato oil supply tankers were torched on Tuesday here in Torkham, political administration and Khasadar sources said.
Five Nato tankers burn in explosion, June 7
PESHAWAR: A Pakistani government official says five Nato oil tankers burned after an explosion at the Afghan border.
Two Nato tankers gutted, June 6
QUETTA – Two tankers carrying supplies for the Nato forces stationed in Afghanistan were torched in two separate incidents in Bolan and Khuzdar districts of Balochistan on Sunday.
Miscreants set NATO supply oil tanker on fire, June 5
According to details, an oil tanker was carrying oil for the NATO forces percent in Afghanistan from Karachi through Sibi, three unknown miscreants targeted this oil tanker near Konbari Bridge in Bolan.
Two NATO oil tankers torched in Nasirabad, June 1
QUETTA: The driver of a NATO oil tanker was injured while two tankers were torched in Mastung and Wadh areas, respectively, on Tuesday.
Two NATO tankers torched in Pakistan, May 31
The attack took place on Tuesday morning, when unknown gunmen opened fire on the oil tankers in Khuzdar district of the volatile Balochistan province, local police told Press TV.
3 NATO Tankers destroyed in separate incidents: One killed , May 31
QUETTA: Three NATO Tankers were destroyed and a person was killed in two separate incidents in Mastong and Khuzdar hereon Tuesday.
Driver killed, 4 injured in 3 NATO oil tankers collision, May 26
NOWSHERA: Driver was killed and four were injured when three NATO oil tankers collided with each other on Nowshera-Peshawar G.T. Road while overtaking from the wrong side hereon Thursday.
…
Two of the tankers were completely destroyed and thousands liters of oil spilled over the G.T. Road.
15 dead in NATO tanker fire in Pakistan: officials, May 20
PESHAWAR, Pakistan — A bomb attack Saturday on a NATO fuel tanker headed to Afghanistan sparked a huge fire that killed 15 people who had rushed to collect petrol leaking from the bombed-out vehicle.
…
Earlier, 11 other NATO supply vehicles, “most of them oil tankers” were destroyed at a terminal in nearby Torkham town, another administration official, Iqbal Khattak, said, but there were no casualties.
19 Nato tankers torched near Torkham, May 15
LANDIKOTAL: The number of Nato oil tankers that were burnt in bomb blast near Afghan border Friday night reached 19, as 14 more tankers caught fire early Saturday, official sources said.
Caught red-handed: British assassins in the Horn of Africa
By Thomas C. Mountain | Intrepid Report | June 8, 2011
ASMARA, Eritrea—In early February of this year, a six-man squad of British mercenaries were caught red-handed in the midst of preparing an attempt to assassinate the top leadership of the Eritrean government in the port city of Massawa on the Red Sea.
Of the six, four were apprehended and two managed to escape, abandoning their mates while blazing out of Massawa Bay into the Red Sea in an inflatable speedboat, never to be seen again by Eritrean eyes.
A search of the vessel they arrived on uncovered a cache of tools of the assassins’ trade. Included was a small arsenal of automatic weapons, a sophisticated satellite communications system, state of the art electronic target range finders, and most damning, several sniper rifles.
All of those arrested have since been confirmed as employees of a British “security” firm akin to the notorious US company Blackwater/Xe. At least two of the four are former British Special Forces. As in the case of Richard Davis, the CIA killer caught in the act in Pakistan, the British Foreign Office has been claiming Vienna Convention protections for these gun thugs all but confirming their being on an official mission for the British Government.
Their arrest took place just a few hundred yards from our Red Sea home in Massawa, and happened while we were there. In the weeks and months that followed, each time I have driven by that spot I have felt a sick feeling in my stomach for the salt embankment they were hiding behind has an unobstructed view of the site where just a few days later all the top leadership of the Eritrean government would be gathering for the annual outdoor celebration of the 1990 capture of the Port of Massawa by Eritrean liberation fighters.
These professional killers were discovered almost by accident by a woman, taking a short cut home through an adjacent out of service salt flat, who noticed, as all good Eritreans should, that sa’ada, white people, were taking photos (with telephoto lenses) somewhere they were not allowed. These Brit “diplomats” took their sweet time scoping out their firing points and parameters of their potential killing field for their discoverer had to walk almost a mile to the nearest police station to report this and then the police had to drive the roundabout route to the spot in question.
But for the vigilance of one Eritrean woman Eritrea might have experienced an unthinkable disaster, the loss of Eritrea’s president and only god knows how many of Eritrea’s top leaders.
This is not the first time I have written about an attempt to assassinate Eritrea’s leadership. In 2002 and 2003, I wrote of how during the Western backed Ethiopian invasion of Eritrea in 2000 a series of long range artillery attacks destroyed Eritrean front line command centers within minutes of President/Commander-in-Chief Issias Aferworki departure. In one case, there is strong evidence that a missile caused the destruction, and if this is true, it is almost certain to have been launched by a US fighter aircraft at high altitude.
Again, the question must be asked, why would the West want to kill Eritrea’s leaders?
Maybe its because Eritrea’s economy is once again about to don the mantle of the fastest growing economy in Africa, and this without significant Western aid projects or predatory loans from the IMF and World Bank.
More likely it’s the fact Eritrea has long been a thorn in the side of Western attempts to dominate the Horn of Africa, one of the most strategically important regions in the world. With some 40 percent of the world maritime traffic passing Eritrean shores everyday, including much of the world’s oil and the entire trade between China, Japan and India with the EU, the Horn of Africa may not be of concern to the average Westerner, but those in power in Western capitals know better.
The policy of the USA and its Western allies is one of “crisis management” here in Africa. The West creates a crisis and then manages, or exploits the war and chaos that follows, to divide and conquer, the better to loot and plunder the natural and human resources of a region.
Eritrea has been the main obstacle to the Western implementation of this policy in the Horn of Africa, and this explains this desperate attempt to assassinate Eritrea’s leadership.
The saying is “that all roads to peace in the Horn of Africa run through Asmara [Eritrea]” and I have witnessed firsthand its truth. Peace in Sudan was born and nurtured here in Asmara, first in Eastern Sudan, then with the South and now the ongoing Darfur peace efforts.
A grand attempt was made here in Asmara to reconstitute a new government in Somalia, though this was sabotaged by the West and its Ethiopian enforcers.
The denizens of the intelligence offices in the West responsible for Africa remember all too well how a short two decades ago it was a rag-tag, Afro coiffed army of Eritrean guerilla fighters driving captured Ethiopian tanks that smashed their way across northern Ethiopia, drove the dictator Mengistu from power and brought peace to Ethiopia for the first time in 30 years.
This past year I have witnessed a disparate collection of leaders of far-flung ethnic-based Ethiopian guerilla fighters gathering here in Asmara, beginning to build a consensus on how to construct a new, national unity government to help keep the peace in Ethiopia once the Meles Zenawi regime is driven from power.
All of this is the main threat to the West’s implementing its policy of “crisis management” in the Horn of Africa.
With its empire in decline, suffering defeat after defeat, unable even to drive Muammar Gaddafi from power, despite the combined airpower of most of NATO’s European members, one would be wise to expect ever more desperate measures from the Western regimes.
The Western elite may loudly preach about the rule of law but reality is that international law is the law of the jungle where only the strong survive. Eritrea is not only surviving but ever so slowly growing stronger and more influential every day, which should help explain why British mercenaries brought their assassins’ tools to Eritrean shores.
Note; Some of the information in this article comes from the independent.co.uk, including the employment confirmation of the British mercenaries, their background and the British Foreign Office claims of Vienna Convention protections for them. Firsthand interviews with Eritreans directly involved are the basis for the rest of the story.
Thomas C. Mountain is the only independent Western journalist in the Horn of Africa, living and reporting from Eritrea since 2006.
See also:
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US says dropping bombs is not war, but guessing a computer password is
By Ethan A. Huff – Natural News – June 5, 2011
The US government sure has an interesting way of defining war these days. Just a few months after the Obama administration played word games with the public by insisting that air strikes in Libya were just “kinetic military action,” not acts of war, the Pentagon has now come on the record stating that it will treat all acts of cyber-hacking against the US as “acts of war.”
The announcement came on the heels of a supposed cyber-attack that occurred a few weeks ago against defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Officials say when hacking incidents like this occur in the future, retaliation in the form of reverse cyber-attacks, economic sanctions, and even “military strike[s]” may take place.
“A response to a cyber-incident or attack on the US would not necessarily be a cyber-response,” said Col. Dave Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman. “All appropriate options would be on the table.” A White House statement also said the US plans to “respond to hostile acts in cyberspace as we would to any other threat to our country,” implying that computer hackers could soon face retaliatory attacks by the US military.
So when the US decides to invade foreign nations, often times without necessary congressional approval, it is just a simple act of exerting kinetic energy. But when a computer hacker correctly guesses a password and breaches the security protocols of the US government or one of its contracted companies, this is an act of war. And so it goes in the arbitrary world of the military-industrial complex, where definitions of war are applied only when it benefits the corporate oligarchy.
In truth, this latest cyber fear mongering out of the Pentagon is just another excuse for those running the US government to widen the scope of those it considers to be terrorists and enemies of the state. And now that the announcement has been made, you can expect to hear about many more “cyber-attacks” that will predicate convenient excuses to launch new kinetic military actions against nations, groups, and perhaps even fellow American citizens.
Sources for this story include:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-…
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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