At a time when America’s public sector is apparently too strapped financially even to provide safe drinking water for some of its residents, the Obama administration plans to commit the nation to spending at least $1 trillion over the next three decades to improve our ability to fight a nuclear war. That’s right — an almost unthinkable war that would end up destroying much of the habitable portion of the globe.
That wasn’t the message President Obama conveyed in April, 2009 when he declared in Prague, “The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. … Generations lived with the knowledge that their world could be erased in a single flash of light. … Just as we stood for freedom in the Twentieth Century, we must stand together for the right of people everywhere to live free from fear in the Twenty-first Century.
“And as . . . the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act. … So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.”
How times change. Today, warns former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry, “we are now on the verge of a new nuclear arms race” based on a return to Cold War thinking. “Moreover, I believe that the risk of a nuclear catastrophe today is greater than it was during the Cold War — and yet our public is blissfully unaware of the new nuclear dangers they face.”
Russia shares some of the blame, with its ostentatious talk of developing new weapons like a giant nuclear-tipped torpedo designed to “cause guaranteed devastating damage to the country’s territory by creating wide areas of radioactive contamination.”
But a far greater risk to global security is the Obama administration’s so-called nuclear “modernization” program, which the Pentagon is promoting at the same time U.S. policymakers are incessantly demonizing Russia as the chief threat to the United States and its allies.
In theory, the administration aims merely to ensure that America’s nuclear deterrent remains “robust” — that is, credible enough to dissuade any other nuclear power from contemplating an attack on U.S. forces, or installations, or cities.
But U.S. nuclear forces are currently sized with only one potential enemy in mind: Russia. The United States has an estimated 1,900 nuclear weapons deployed, versus 1,780 for Russia. The next largest nuclear power is France, with just 290 deployed weapons. The total U.S. nuclear stockpile of 7,200 warheads is 28 times bigger than China’s.
Apparently all that isn’t enough to let top Pentagon officials sleep at night. President Obama’s new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Joseph Dunford, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year that he believes Russia poses the greatest threat to U.S. national security — “an existential threat” no less. “If you look at their behavior, it’s nothing short of alarming,” he declared.
Curtis LeMay Redux
Lest Russia launch an all-out attack, for reasons unknown, the Obama administration proposes building 12 new nuclear-armed submarines, 100 long-range strategic bombers armed with a new class of bombs, 400 silo-based ballistic missiles, and 1,000 nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. It’s almost as if Air Force General Curtis LeMay were still running the show.
An authoritative study by the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies estimates the full cost of this program over 30 years at more than $1 trillion — with no allowance for cost overruns, delays, or clean-up and decommissioning costs.
But cost may be the least of the problems with Obama’s agenda. One common if disguised element of these “modernization” programs is their ability to make nuclear “war-fighting” more, not less, conceivable by increasing the targeting flexibility of these weapons and, in some cases, reducing their yield so they resemble very large conventional weapons rather than the all-or-nothing nukes of old.
For example, as the New York Timesreported, the recently tested B61 Model 12 nuclear bomb has steerable fins that permit pin-point accuracy and configurable yields to as little as two percent of the “Little Boy” bomb dropped on Hiroshima. General James E. Cartwright, retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former head of the United States Strategic Command, said “what going smaller does is to make the weapon more thinkable.”
Similarly, the proposed new Long-Range Stand-Off weapon, a vastly upgraded nuclear cruise missile, “is designed for nuclear warfighting,” states Stephen Young, a senior analyst in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Unfortunately, for that very reason, deploying this weapon will actually make the United States less secure.”
Moving to a nuclear war-fighting capability violates the official U.S. policy outlined in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review, which called for steps to “reduce the role of nuclear weapons in deterring non-nuclear attack, with the objective of making deterrence of nuclear attack on the United States or our allies and partners the sole purpose of US nuclear weapons.”
Once policymakers start seriously considering “limited war” scenarios in which nuclear weapons might come in handy, the risk of war shoots way up. At the same time, the acquisition of war-fighting capabilities will prompt the other side to follow suit.
Easing into Nuclear War
As James Doyle, a former nonproliferation analyst at Los Alamos National Laboratory, put it, “Lowering the threshold of nuclear war poses the very real threat of rapid escalation in a conflict potentially resulting in the use of many, more destructive nuclear weapons.”
Russia certainly views the Obama administration’s current nuclear program as upsetting the stability of traditional deterrence. Following a recent test of the new B61-12 bomb, Russia’s deputy defense minister, Anatoly Antonov, denounced it as “irresponsible” and “openly provocative.”
Russia is also gravely concerned about another development that could, in theory, make the United States contemplate a “limited” nuclear war: the expansion of the U.S. ballistic missile defense network in Europe. President Vladimir Putin called that “an attempt to undermine the existing parity in strategic nuclear weapons and essentially to upset the whole system of global and regional stability.”
The biggest risk from all these developments isn’t a planned nuclear war, but an unplanned nuclear exchange triggered by a false alarm in an atmosphere of mutual paranoia. Both the United States and Russia have hundreds of nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready to “launch on warning” lest they be destroyed in a sneak attack. Our survival thus far is thanks in part to luck; scholars have documented at least 20 accidents that might have started an accidental nuclear war in years past.
There’s no guarantee that our luck will hold out, however. Thanks to growing fears of being wiped out without warning by stealthy U.S. weapons, “Russia has shortened the launch time from what it was during the Cold War,” according to Bruce Blair, a nuclear security expert at Princeton. “Today, top military command posts in the Moscow area can bypass the entire human chain of command and directly fire by remote control rockets in silos and on trucks as far away as Siberia in only 20 seconds.”
The priority of U.S. nuclear policy today should not be investing in staggeringly expensive new technology that makes us less secure by making nuclear war more thinkable and thus more unpredictable. It should be overwhelmingly focused on nuclear risk reduction: lowering the threats perceived by each nuclear power, eliminating launch-on-warning policies, and exploring other confidence-building measures. Our greatest security task is to modernize our thinking about nuclear weapons, not our nuclear weapons technology.
The latest Oxfam report on poverty and inequality in our dysfunctional world makes a depressing read. It shows that the chasm between the richest 1% and the rest of humanity has considerably widened in the last few years. One statistic that is truly shocking is the number of people whose wealth is equal to that of the poorest half of the world’s population (3.6 billion people); this number has gone down from 388 in 2010 to 62 in 2015.
These 62 people have a combined wealth of a staggering $1,760 billion, averaging $28.387 billion per individual. What is the point of owning so much wealth? If these individuals were to use 95% of their wealth to lift billions of people from grinding, oppressive poverty they would still be billionaires.
Their material life style need hardly change, but will be enhanced by having the inner contentment and happiness that comes from knowing that you have made such a positive difference to the lives of so many. I would like to think this is what I would do if I were in their position. But, wait; is there something in our psyche that makes us behave differently once we start accumulating wealth? Does our love of wealth dull our compassion and empathy with our fellow human beings? The answer to these questions is likely to be yes, and in that case do we need psychiatric help once we acquire such wealth?
These people have become members of the super-rich club, competing with one another on who has gone up and who has gone down in the table of the ultra-wealthy. This causes many of them anxiety and neuroses. This self-obsession renders them blind to the needs and suffering of fellow human beings in their own countries and beyond.
Imagine the contentment and happiness you feel when greeted by the smiles of adults and children as you visit places, knowing that your money has brought them such happiness and joy: children going to school instead of working to support a family simply to have enough to eat, health clinics to treat simple conditions to relieve pain and suffering, clean water to drink thus preventing disease and death that result from drinking contaminated water , shelter to protect families from heat, flooding and cold. The need is great, and the remedies are in our grasp if only the resources are made available.
Another issue highlighted by Oxfam is the use of tax havens. It states:
As a priority, it is calling [Oxfam] for an end to the era of tax havens which has seen increasing use of offshore centres by rich individuals and companies to avoid paying their fair share to society. This has denied governments valuable resources needed to tackle poverty and inequality. It is three years since David Cameron told Davos that he would lead a global effort against aggressive avoidance in the UK and in poor countries, yet promised measures to increase transparency in British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies, such as the Cayman Islands and British Virgin Islands, have not yet been implemented.
I really find it difficult to understand how democratic governments can tolerate the existence of tax havens. They serve no purpose other than to help the powerful, be it individuals or corporations, to hide their wealth, thus avoiding making contributions to their societies whose resources they used to create their wealth. Tax havens also help assorted despots, royals and the corrupted elite in the developing world to hide the wealth they pillage from their own countries. Oxfam reports that: “30 percent of all African financial wealth is estimated to be held offshore, costing an estimated $14billion in lost tax revenues every year.” Let us shut down these relics from a bygone age that steal wealth from the impoverished to the benefit of the already bloated few.
We are having a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union; here is a suggestion for another one: Should Britain continue to allow the existence of tax havens in its overseas territories and crown dependencies? Let the people decide.
What sort of system have we created that relentlessly siphons wealth from the poor to the richest 1%, and in the process deprives humanity of the resources that could bring happiness, contentment and joy to billions of people? When, oh when, will world leaders take concrete steps to remedy this injustice and unfairness?
Adnan Al-Daini (PhD, Birmingham University, UK) is a retired University Engineering lecturer. He is a British citizen born in Iraq. He writes regularly on issues of social justice and the Middle East.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is dangerously and unaccountably distorting the direction of international development, according to a new report by the campaign group Global Justice Now. With assets of $43.5 billion, the BMGF is the largest charitable foundation in the world. It actually distributes more aid for global health than any government. As a result, it has a major influence on issues of global health and agriculture.
‘Gated Development – Is the Gates Foundation always a force for good?’ argues that what BMGF is doing could end up exacerbating global inequality and entrenching corporate power globally. Global Justice Now’s analysis of the BMGF’s programmes shows that the foundation’s senior staff are overwhelmingly drawn from corporate America. As a result, the question is: whose interests are being promoted – those of corporate America or those of ordinary people who seek social and economic justice rather than charity?
According to the report, the foundation’s strategy is intended to deepen the role of multinational companies in global health and agriculture especially, even though these corporations are responsible for much of the poverty and injustice that already plagues the global south. The report concludes that the foundation’s programmes have a specific ideological strategy that promotes neo-liberal economic policies, corporate globalisation, the technology this brings (such as GMOs) and an outdated view of the centrality of aid in ‘helping’ the poor.
The report raises a series criticisms including:
1) The relationship between the foundation and Microsoft’s tax practices. A 2012 report from the US Senate found that Microsoft’s use of offshore subsidiaries enabled it to avoid taxes of $4.5 billion, a sum greater than the BMGF’s annual grant making ($3.6 billion in 2014).
2) The close relationship that BMGF has with many corporations whose role and policies contribute to ongoing poverty. Not only is BMGF profiting from numerous investments in a series of controversial companies which contribute to economic and social injustice, it is also actively supporting a series of those companies, including Monsanto, Dupont and Bayer through a variety of pro-corporate initiatives around the world.
3) The foundation’s promotion of industrial agriculture across Africa, pushing for the adoption of GM, patented seed systems and chemical fertilisers, all of which undermine existing sustainable, small-scale farming that is providing the vast majority of food security across the continent.
4) The foundation’s promotion of projects around the world pushing private healthcare and education. Numerous agencies have raised concerns that such projects exacerbate inequality and undermine the universal provision of such basic human necessities.
5) BMGF’s funding of a series of vaccine programmes that have reportedly lead to illnesses or even deaths with little official or media scrutiny.
Polly Jones the head of campaigns and policy at Global Justice Now says:
“The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed. This concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of corporate America. The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”
The report states that that Bill Gates has regular access to world leaders and is in effect personally bankrolling hundreds of universities, international organisations, NGOs and media outlets. As the single most influential voice in international development, the foundation’s strategy is a major challenge to progressive development actors and activists around the world who want to see the influence of multinational corporations in global markets reduced or eliminated.
The foundation not only funds projects in which agricultural and pharmaceutical corporations are among the leading beneficiaries, but it often invests in the same companies as it is funding, meaning the foundation has an interest in the ongoing profitability of these corporations. According to the report, this is “a corporate merry-go-round where the BMGF consistently acts in the interests of corporations.”
Uprooting indigenous agriculture for the benefit of global agribusiness
The report notes that the BMGF’s close relationship with seed and chemical giant Monsanto is well known. It previously owned shares in the company and continues to promote several projects in which Monsanto is a beneficiary, not least the wholly inappropriate and fraudulent GMO project which promotes a technical quick-fix ahead of tackling the structural issues that create hunger, poverty and food insecurity But, as the report notes, the BMGF partners with many other multinational agribusiness corporations.
Many examples where this is the case are highlighted by the report. For instance, the foundation is working with US trader Cargill in an $8 million project to “develop the soya value chain” in southern Africa. Cargill is the biggest global player in the production of and trade in soya with heavy investments in South America where GM soya mono-crops have displaced rural populations and caused great environmental damage. According to Global Justice Now, the BMGF-funded project will likely enable Cargill to capture a hitherto untapped African soya market and eventually introduce GM soya onto the continent. The end markets for this soya are companies with relationships with the fast food outlet, KFC, whose expansion in Africa is being aided by the project.
Specific examples are given which highlight how BMGF is also supporting projects involving other chemicals and seed corporations, including DuPont Pioneer, Syngenta and Bayer.
According to the report, the BMGF is promoting a model of industrial agriculture, the increasing use of chemical fertilisers and expensive, patented seeds, the privatisation of extension services and a very large focus on genetically modified seeds. The foundation bankrolls the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in pushing industrial agriculture.
A key area for AGRA is seed policy. The report notes that currently over 80 per cent of Africa’s seed supply comes from millions of small-scale farmers recycling and exchanging seed from year to year. But AGRA is promoting the commercial production of seed and is thus supporting the introduction of commercial seed systems, which risk enabling a few large companies to control seed research and development, production and distribution.
In order for commercial seed companies to invest in research and development, they first want to protect their ‘intellectual property’. According to the report, this requires a fundamental restructuring of seed laws to allow for certification systems that not only protect certified varieties and royalties derived from them, but which actually criminalise all non-certified seed.
The report notes that over the past two decades a long and slow process of national seed law reviews, sponsored by USAID and the G8 along with the BMGF and others, has opened the door to multinational corporations’ involvement in seed production, including the acquisition of every sizeable seed enterprise on the African continent.
At the same time, AGRA is working to promote costly inputs, notably fertiliser, despite evidence to suggest chemical fertilisers have significant health risks for farm workers, increase soil erosion and can trap small-scale farmers in unsustainable debt. The BMGF, through AGRA, is one of the world’s largest promoters of chemical fertiliser.
Some grants given by the BMGF to AGRA have been specifically intended to “help AGRA build the fertiliser supply chain” in Africa. The report describes how one of the largest of AGRA’s grants, worth $25 million, was used to help establish the African Fertiliser Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) in 2012, whose very goal is to “at least double total fertiliser use” in Africa. The AFAP project is being pursued in partnership with the International Fertiliser Development Centre, a body which represents the fertiliser industry.
Another of AGRA’s key programmes since its inception has been support to agro-dealer networks – small, private stockists of transnational companies’ chemicals and seeds who sell these to farmers in several African countries. This is increasing the reliance of farmers on chemical inputs and marginalising sustainable agriculture alternatives, thereby undermining any notion that farmers are exercising their ‘free choice’ (as the neo-liberal evangelists are keen to tell everyone) when it comes to adopting certain agricultural practices.
The report concludes that AGRA’s agenda is the biggest direct threat to the growing movement in support of food sovereignty and agroecological farming methods in Africa. This movement opposes reliance on chemicals, expensive seeds and GM and instead promotes an approach which allows communities control over the way food is produced, traded and consumed. It is seeking to create a food system that is designed to help people and the environment rather than make profits for multinational corporations. Priority is given to promoting healthy farming and healthy food by protecting soil, water and climate, and promoting biodiversity.
Recent evidence from Greenpeace and the Oakland Institute shows that in Africa agroecological farming can increase yields significantly (often greater than industrial agriculture), and that it is more profitable for small farmers. In 2011, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (Olivier de Schutter) called on countries to reorient their agriculture policies to promote sustainable systems – not least agroecology – that realise the right to food. Moreover, the International Assessmentof Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) was the work of over 400 scientists and took four years to complete. It was twice peer reviewed and states we must look to smallholder, traditional farming to deliver food security in third world countries through agri-ecological systems which are sustainable.
In a January 2015 piece in The Guardian, Director of Global Justice Now said that ‘development’ was once regarded as a process of breaking with colonial exploitation and transferring power over resources from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’, involving a revolutionary struggle over the world’s resources. However, the current paradigm is based on the assumption that developing countries need to adopt neo-liberal policies and that public money in the guise of aid should facilitate this.
If this new report shows anything, it is that the notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and a super-rich ‘philanthrocapitalist’ (whose own corporate practices have been questionable to say the least, as highlighted by the report). In effect, the model of ‘development’ being facilitated is married to the ideology and structurally embedded power relations of an exploitative global capitalism.
The BMGF is spearheading the ambitions of corporate America and the scramble for Africa by global agribusiness.
In Part I, Erdogan’s mounting dilemmas—ISIS terrorism, Kurdish resistance, Assad’s Syria alive and well—showed how his bid for regional hegemony has gone awry. His pact with the ISIS devil, as long as they target Kurds, just made things worse. Davutoglu’s dream of a “common history and a common future” for the Middle East under Turkish guidance is now in history’s dustbin. The Turkish plan for a “global, political, economic and cultural new order” in the Middle East remains in the hands of the US and, of course, Israel.
Israeli rationale
Israel has been noncommittal about Syria since the uprising in 2011, not joining the western chorus for Assad’s head. Israeli indifference to the outcome can be explained easily enough. First, Israeli public support for anyone would be a kiss of death for the beloved. On the other hand, the Assads have been the biggest thorn in Israel’s side since 1971 when Hafiz Assad consolidated power, and Israel would be delighted to see the last of Bashar. But Israel was worried about what might emerge from a post-Assad Islamic state.
With Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked’s bold call for an independent Kurdish state, a radical new claim for regional hegemony is unfolding, not by a neo-Ottoman Turkey, but by the Jewish state. “We must openly call for the establishment of a Kurdish state that separates Iran from Turkey, one which will be friendly towards Israel,” Shaked told the Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv. This sounds novel, but it really only reflects age-old plans for a Jewish state to control the Middle East which have been on the drawing board since Lord Shaftesbury first made it a British imperial objective in 1839. 1948 got the project off to a savage start, 1967 added the entire Holy Land to the map, and let the settler state move into high gear.
The Yinon Doctrine of 1980 set out how to consolidate Israel’s theft, by playing various ethnic and religious forces among its Arab neighbors against each other—Maronite and Orthodox Christian, Sunni and Shia Muslim, Druze, etc—in order to undermine Arab nationalism, and keep the Middle East weak and unstable. In Syria, that even meant quietly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood during its ill-fated uprising in 1981, not because Israel wanted an Islamist Syria, but to keep the Syrian government off-balance.
Syria and Egypt fought a war with Israel in 1967. These secular nationalist governments were the big threat, and it was only natural to try and cripple them, even if that meant working with Islamists. After Egypt made peace with Israel in 1978, it had only Iraq, Syria and Iran as its main enemies—the Arab nationalism of the first two and the Persian nationalism in Iran had proved immune to Israeli intrigues.
Israeli ‘friendship’ with the Kurds is merely the ethnic variable in the Yinon formula. There have always been contacts with Iraqi Kurds, which went into high gear in 1991 when northern Iraq was made a ‘no-fly’ zone, allowing Israeli agents relative freedom. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 fit the bill, though bungled by the dismantling of the Iraqi army, creating a bit too much Yinon for comfort.
Middle East borders, as reimagined by Lt. Col. (ret.) Ralph Peters (2006)
US-Israeli Plan B
When Israeli fears about what a post-Assad Syria might look like were proven justified, it was ready with plan B: a new, improved Yinon Doctrine, featuring the creation of a pro-Israeli Kurdish state, keeping Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and—what the hell—Iran off-base?
This has been plan B for US-Israel since at least 2006, when a plan for restructuring the Middle East published in the Armed Forces Journal in 2006 stated, “Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately” creating a “Free Kurdistan” carved out of Turkey, Iran and Iraq, which “would be the most pro-western state between Bulgaria and Japan.” The Saban Center for Middle East Policy issued a similar policy recommendation in 2007, and in 2008, Joseph Biden, Obama’s future vice president, also called for the partition of Iraq into three autonomous regions.
Israel gets it right (for the wrong reasons)
ISIS and Turkey came to the rescue with their own wild schemes, leaving the Kurds as “the only ones fighting ISIS as their highest priority,” as Yadlin told the Israeli security conference. “We Kurds and Jews have a long history. The 20 million Kurds who didn’t get a state [at the Treaty of Versailles], and nobody takes care about them. They are the only ones fighting ISIS as their highest priority.”
Every one of Erdogan’s moves has backfired. He flip-flopped on Libya and Syria. He turned a blind eye on ISIS. He stubbornly continues a policy of oppression against the Kurds. He abruptly broke relations with Israel in 2011 over Israel’s killing of nine Turkish peace activists. But it’s better to at least speak with your enemy. Israel wouldn’t have been quite so bold about advocating a Kurdish state if it realized that it would forfeit a working relationship with Turkey. But there is nothing to lose now.
Like Turkey these days, Israel is also running out of friends, and this call for an independent Kurdistan is really a rather far-fetched plan to establish at least one Muslim ally for the Jews. The travail of Turkish Kurds (20 million, 20% of the population) is well known. They are not allowed to speak Kurdish or have Kurdish names, let alone Kurdish language education.
In comparison, Iraqi Kurds (7 million, 20%) live a privileged life, with the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) in the autonomous government tilting towards Saudi Arabia, and its key rival, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), supporting the Iranian-led camp.
Kurds are culturally and linguistically so closely related to the Iranians, they are sometimes classified as an Iranian people. Of the more than 6 million Iranian Kurds (9% of the population), a significant portion are Shia. There are tensions in Iran, as the majority of Kurds are Sunni, but the strong Iranian roots of Kurds culturally and linguistically, and the lack of the suppression of their culture, language and political rights, mean there is no strong movement for independence.
There is a silver lining in the Israeli chutzpah in reviving Plan B. No major Kurdish faction calls for the Yinon plan for independence, even among Iraqi Kurds. Why bother when you already have virtual independence now? Syrian Kurds also have de facto autonomy as a result of western bungling. They won’t be stuffed back into a one-size-fits-all Syria. Iranian Kurds are just getting on with life. Turkish Kurds would love to just have basic human rights in their Turkish state. Erdogan could undercut Israel’s latest wild plan easily by using his still robust political power to push for a genuine peace deal with his Kurds.
Today marks seven years to the day since President Obama’s first drone strike in office, which he was reportedly informed afterwards had killed innocent civilians.
Faheem Qureshi, was 14 years old at the time of the strike. It killed several members of his family and left him without his left eye and severely burned.
At the time, Faheem was a high school student whose favourite subject was chemistry. Several of his cousins and uncles were killed in the strike, which Faheem survived only because he was able to drag his body far enough away that people felt it was safe to provide aid. Faheem was hospitalised for 24 days in Peshawar before he was recovered enough to leave. To this day, he still requires medical treatment for head injuries suffered in the attack.
During his time in office, President Obama has significantly expanded the CIA’s covert drone programme in Pakistan and Yemen, launching over 500 strikes in those two countries alone. He has never fully acknowledged the programme’s existence nor apologised to any of the hundreds of Yemeni and Pakistani civilians who have been killed since the drone programme began. Analysis of data by international human rights NGO Reprieve in 2014 found that 1,147 people – including women and children – were killed in attempts to target 41 men, raising serious concerns about the ‘precise’ nature of strikes.
Last year, US citizen Warren Weinstein and Italian Giovanni Lo Porto were mistakenly killed in a US drone strike. For the first and only time, President Obama admitted the US’ error and publicly apologised to the families of the two men. Attempts by Pakistani and Yemeni victims to get a similar apology have been met with silence.
Speaking about his ordeal this week to international human rights organization Reprieve, Faheem Qureshi said:
“On January 23rd 2009, a hellfire missile tore my family’s lives apart as they sat down to dinner. The drone strike – President Obama’s first – killed three members of my family. As the sole survivor, I lost my left eye and suffered serious head injuries. I was only 14 years old at the time, but I can still remember as if it was yesterday the feeling of my body burning and how I had to crawl from the rubble to get help. I am told reporting has since revealed that the President was told, almost immediately, that a mistake had been made. He had killed innocent civilians – my family – in the strike.
“In the years since, I have witnessed hundreds of drone strikes in my community that have killed many more innocent civilians. People became scared to go to funerals because drones targeted them. They became scared to remove bodies from the aftermath of a drone strike in case another strike hit. The constant threat from drones dominated every minute of our lives. And yet, seven years on, President Obama will not even fully acknowledge the existence of the covert drone program. The only ‘mistakes’ he acknowledges are an American and an Italian he accidentally killed last year.
“What about the hundreds of innocent Pakistanis who have also lost their lives in drone strikes? What about my family? President Obama knows we were innocent and yet we’ve never received an explanation for why we were targeted, much less an apology. As President Obama prepares to leave the White House, he needs to bring his drone programme out of the shadows. It is past time he face up to what his drones really do and apologise to me, to my family, and to all the other innocent people who have been killed by these terrible weapons.”
Commenting, Jennifer Gibson, staff attorney at international human rights organization Reprieve, which investigates civilian casualties from drone strikes, said: “For seven years, secret drone strikes have been President Obama’s weapon of choice in the War on Terror. Taken covertly in places where the US is not at war, these strikes have killed and injured hundreds of innocent men, women and children just like Fahim. Yet, even as is own Generals warn how counterproductive the programme is, President Obama has refused calls for even basic transparency.
This is a legacy no president should want to leave. President Obama needs to bring a halt to this illegal and counterproductive programme. He needs to open it up to scrutiny and he needs to extend the same apology to the innocent Pakistani and Yemenis he has killed, as the one he extended to the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni La Porto. Fahim deserves nothing less.”
As German independent TV station K-TV has revealed, the current refugee crisis is most likely the brain child of the afore-mentioned US military grand strategist General Thomas PM Barnett. Barnett was a strategic advisor to former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and currently works with the Israeli military consultancy firm Wikistrat. Wikistrat are close collaborators with US Africa Command (Africom). Barnett’s books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action have had a major influence on US/Israeli global military geostrategies.
A former student of Vice-Admiral Andrew K. Cebrowski, former director of the Office of Transformations in the US Department of Defense, Barnett’s work focuses on integrating Cebrowski’s concepts of Network Centred Warfare, Colonel Boyd’s OODA loop theory, and Lind’s Fourth Generation Warfare, by ‘simultaneously seeking to relate their yin-and-yang interplay to the larger economic reality of globalization’s emergence as the dominant characteristic of today’s strategic environment’.1
Barnett divides the world into ‘functioning core’, ‘non-integrating gap’ countries and ‘seam states’. The first category of ‘functioning core’ countries includes Europe and North America, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. These are economies which are actively integrating into the global economy. This category is subdivided into ‘old core’ Europe, the USA and Japan and ‘new core’, Brazil, Russia, China and India.
The second major category is the ‘non-integrated gap’. This is made up of the Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, Africa, parts of the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The third category contains some members of the first two. This category is referred to as the ‘Seam States’, countries which surround the Gap — such as Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, Algeria, Morocco, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil.
The former Pentagon general has developed the theory of the ‘Five Flows of Globalisation’ — five flows which must come about if US Zionist imperialism is to dominate the world. These involve the free flow of money, security, food, energy and people. The ‘free flows’ theory means breaking down nation-state structures, thus freeing up resources for pillage by US multinational corporations. The inundation of Europe with immigrants from the Southern Hemisphere is a key feature of Barnett’s geo-strategic thinking. That is why it would be wrong to see the immigrant crisis from Libya and Syria as an unintended consequence of NATO policy as some form of unforeseen blowback.
Europe’s top demographers have known for some time that the Southern Hemisphere countries are experiencing a population boom and what that means for Europe’s relative population decline. German sociologist and demographer Gunnar Heihsohn published a major book on this topic, Söhne und Weltmacht:Terror im Aufstieg und Fall der Nationen (Sons and World Power: The Rise of Terror and the Fall of Nations). In his book Heinsohn argues that population youth bulges were the driving factor behind European colonialism and world conquest. From 1900 to 2000 the population of the Muslim World has grown from 150 million to 1,200 million, an increase of 800 percent. He argues that large families tend to produce ‘superfluous’ sons, who, unable to find work at home, emigrate.
Heinsohn contends that these youth bulges can lead to extreme violence as the young men, needing to carve out a place for themselves in the world, often tend to resort to violence in order to survive. This is one of the many factors driving the Islamic State. The youth bulge means boom time for imperialism’s merchants of death, who are harnessing youthful anger and hatred for the fomentation of proxy wars against geopolitical enemies. Heinsohn predicted that Europe would be overwhelmed with Southern Hemisphere youths by 2015.
The German sociologist notes that Islamism is more a tool which enables disaffected ‘superfluous’ sons to justify genocide, rather than an ideology which they necessarily believe in. In other words, once demographic balances have been restored, the Korans will be for sale in second-hand book shops. He gives the example of Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores in the 15th and 16th century who, needing to kill in order to carve out colonies in the New World, made convenient use of the Bible in order to absolve themselves from feelings of guilt.
Heinsohn notes that Europe’s immigration policy contrasts markedly with that of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In Europe, there are no requirements that immigrants possess the qualifications needed by European economies, whereas in Canada and Australia those with the highest skills are given preference. The result of these policies is that 98 percent of immigrants in Canada have higher qualifications than the native population, whereas in Europe only 10 percent have higher qualifications. At the same time, the percentage of highly qualified Europeans leaving the continent for the Anglophone world is rising steadily every year. In this sense one can understand the logic behind Anglo-Saxon imperialism of flooding Europe with uneducated immigrants, while simultaneously siphoning off the continent’s brains and skills, thus ensuring Anglo-American/Zionist global hegemony. It is the ability to take into account these complex demographic realities which constitutes the importance of Thomas P.M. Barnett’s grand strategy of US globalisation.
In her book Weapons of Mass Migration: Forced Displacement, Coercion and Foreign Policy Kelly M. Greenhill argues that one of the reasons for Europe’s rapprochement with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was the latter’s offer to stem the tide of African emigration to Europe. It would be erroneous, therefore, to suggest that the chaos wrought by the Arab Spring was unintentional. While many European politicians may have wanted to prevent a chaotic overflow of immigration into Europe, the imperial agencies behind the Arab Spring wanted just that.
The mass exodus of migrants/refugees is a central part of the globalisation of class war in accordance with the Pentagon’s long term objectives of global hegemony or “Full Spectrum Dominance”. What we are dealing with here is a well-planned strategy of chaos. To paraphrase Shakespeare, it is madness but there is method in it.
General Barnett’s Wikistrat are heavily involved in the development of ‘crowd sourcing’ and ‘crowd leveraging’ technologies. Investigative journalist Andrey Fomine, using the analyses of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has convincingly shown that most of the twitter entries encouraging refugees/migrants in Turkey to travel to Germany come from the UK, USA and Australia.
What we are witnessing here is a covert war being waged by the Anglo-Saxon Zionist elite against the German Federal Republic. The low-intensity war is using people as weapons to create conditions of social chaos in order to prevent Berlin’s inevitable rapprochement with Moscow. The migrants cannot possibly integrate in German society if the German economy does inot integrate with Eurasia, as Germany will have no viable market for its exports.
Barnett has predicted that Muslim immigrants in Europe will form their own Islamist political parties. In his book Blueprint for Action he quotes approvingly from Oliver Roy’s Globalized Islam, who claims that while in the past working class Muslims would have joined Marxist political movements: “There are now in the West only two movements of radical protest that claim to be ‘internationalist’: the antiglobalization movement and radical Islam. For a rebel, to convert is to find a cause”
Both of these movements, that of ‘human rights’ and ‘jihad’, represent petty bourgeois objections to the global order, but as they do not have a scientific analysis of the capitalist mode of production, they cannot possibly change that order. That is why they are both backed by the forces they supposedly oppose. Hence Barnett welcomes this development:
By channeling their sense of economic and social disconnecteness into political action, Muslims in Europe achieve connectivitiy with governments there that allow for their integration into political life on a peaceful basis while preserving a sense of cultural identity. (p. 292)
In other words, these movements will help increase and further entrench globalization, imperialism and class warfare.
In Europe’s case, this isn’t just the political release valve for both sides but an economic one as well: Europe needs workers to balance its rapidly aging population, while the Middle East needs to be able to siphon off a portion of its huge youth bulge for emigration. (p. 292)
Barnett predicts that the mass migration of people from the Middle East into Europe will lead to a ‘revival of ethnicity’. He argues that their immigration into Europe will generate a paradoxical attitude that will marry Muslim identity politics at home with European human rights evangelism in their countries of origin. He writes:
So when Muslims emigrate from the Middle East and immigrate into Europe, both regions respond to this transaction by becoming, respectively, more Islamic and more European in the near term, until such time passes that new rule sets emerge to define these profound forms of social(family ties), economic( remittances), and ultimately political connectivity. While the movement of Core citizens into the Gap occasionally force Core powers to defend them through military means…. a far more potent form of political connectivity comes in expatriate populations living inside the Core and agitating for their adopted nations to intervene militarily or diplomatically in their countries of origin in response to instability or political repression there. A good example of this, of course, is the role of Iraqi expatriates in the US decision to lead a multinational coalition into that country in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. (p. 294)
This is imperialist grand strategy accounting for demographics, economics, religion and ethnicity. But its core function is similar to the imperialist ideologies of the past: divide and conquer the workers of the world on the basis of religious and ethnic sectarianism, as well as bourgeois values such as human rights, thereby making the world “safe for capitalism” and global imperialist domination.
A recent example of expats mobilising for imperialist intervention in their own country was provided by demonstrations by Eritreans in Germany against President Issias Afwerki in 2012, with the predictable US NGO inspired slogan “Down, down dictator”.
Barnett predicts that Europe and Russia will disintegrate in the 21st Century, leaving only India and China to rival the United States. The US strategist clearly believes that coercive engineered mass migration into Europe, coupled with American occupation of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, will prevent Eurasian integration, whilst securing the US/Israeli control of Europe and the conquest of Africa, thereby establishing US/Israeli global supremacy in the 21st century.
The choreography and mediatisation of the ‘Refugees Welcome’ campaign bears a striking resemblance to the ‘Je Suis Charlie’ campaign launched less than 30 minutes after the first reports of the Paris terrorist attack in January 7th were broadcast.
Many of the migrants are receiving welcome booklets packed with maps and information distributed by an NGO called w2eu,which stands for welcome to the EU.
One is reminded of the non-violent revolution rule book by Zionist ideologue Gene Sharp which was used to train activists in the US/Israeli fomented counter-revolutions in North Africa in 2011.
Our government is guilty of the most egregious criminal acts as defined by Nuremberg Principles, and we are bona fide members of the State Sponsors of Terrorism club.
When our government bombs the sovereign state of Syria without the consent of President al-Assad and without United Nations Security Council approval, we are committing war crimes of the highest order.
When we support and fund foreign mercenary terrorists that are invading Syria, we are state sponsors of terrorism. There are no “moderate” terrorists. The mercenaries are all being paid and enabled by the West and its allies, including Turkey (a NATO member), Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan.
On all counts we are guilty. We are war criminals and state sponsors of terrorism.
The popular refrain that “Assad must go”, echoed by Canada’s Defense Minister, Harjit Sajjan, is in itself an endorsement of criminality. Regime change operations are criminal according to international law.
A soft power complex that disseminates lies and confusion is seemingly sufficient to make gullible western audiences accept criminality, even as the pretexts for previous illegal invasions invariably reveal themselves to be self-serving fabrications.
Hussein didn’t have WMD, but Western sanctions before the pre-meditated Iraq invasion willfully destroyed water treatment facilities and subsequently killed almost two million people, including about half a million children.
Gaddafi wasn’t “bombing his own people” or destroying Libya. The West and its proxies did the killing. The bombing in Libya – in support of al Qaeda ground troops – targeted and destroyed civilian infrastructure, including the Great Man-Made River Project. The bombs and the foreign terrorist ground troops killed Libyans, including Gadaffi, but Western propagandists and “confusion mongers” always portray an inverted version of reality to justify their atrocities.
Likewise for Assad – he is defending his country from foreign terrorists, not “killing his own people” – the Western invaders are killing Assad’s people.
Assad is not starving his own people either. Recently the discredited Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) fabricated a story alleging that Assad was starving people in Madaya. Evidence has recently emerged, however, that Western-supported rebels have been stockpiling food and selling it to civilians at exorbitant prices. Again, Western military forces target civilians – with a view to killing and/or demoralizing them—for “strategic” purposes. Vanessa Beeley decodes the intentional misrepresentation of the Madaya psy op. by listing investigative questions that should have been asked to find the truth, but were not.
War crimes perpetrated by the West are always dressed in mantles of respectability. MSM spokespeople, all of whom have conflicts of interest, paint civilian murders as “collateral damage”. Some commentators use the phrase “collateral murder”, but more accurately the military doctrine of slaughtering civilians is mass murder. The 9/11 wars are all pre-meditated, the false pretexts are carefully manufactured by State Departments, Public Relations agencies, and intelligence agencies, and the mass murder is intentional. The 9/11 wars generate unforeseen developments, but the invasions and occupations were not and are not “mistakes”, as some commentators would have us believe.
NATO destroys, loots, and creates chaos so that it can impose its hegemony. Again, it’s an inversion of the ridiculous lie of “spreading democracy”. The destruction also serves to create waves of refugees that serve to destabilize other countries — Europe is arguably being destabilized with a view to keeping the EU subservient to the U.S oligarch interests. Interestingly, countries not being “sacrificed” include Israel and Wahhabi Saudi Arabia – and neither country is accepting refugees/imperial crime victims either.
All of these pre-meditated invasions point to a larger picture. Humanity is being sacrificed for the illusory benefit of the criminal 1% transnational oligarch class. If Western populations were to awaken to the barbaric crimes being perpetrated in their names, they would rightly bow their heads in shame.
The shame would be a strong foundation for shaking off the shackles of lies and war propaganda, and for withdrawing our consent to these crimes against humanity.
‘Staggering’ is how the UN has described the depth and nature of civilian suffering in post-war Iraq; citing over 18,000 civilians having been killed in the space of just this last year-and-a-half.
According to the report, conducted by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, an approximate 3.2 million people have also been displaced internally over this same period of time.
The UN report confirms the brutality of the so-called ‘Islamic State’ group, with its unprecedented levels of gruesome, rampant violence and criminality. But contrary to popular portrayal, the violence in Iraq isn’t limited to ISIS/ISIL, but includes various crimes committed by Iraqi troops, militiamen and Kurdish forces, as recorded in the UN report.
The UN also acknowledges that the recorded 18,802 civilians killed (and 36,245 wounded) between the beginning of 2014 and the end of 2015 could be much higher; the figures will logically be higher, because there are multiple no-go areas for journalists and activists, where crimes can’t be investigated.
Among the most brutal of the many brutal crimes committed by the foreign-backed ‘ISIS/ISIL’ was an incident in Mosul where victims were forced to lay down in front of a crowd while a bulldozer was driven over them, and the militants executing 19 women for refusing to submit to sex with ISIL fighters. Up to 900 children have also been reported abducted in Mosul and subjected to forced indoctrination and military training. The report also highlights the extent to which women and children have been subjected to sexual violence, and highlights the plight of some 3,500 people, mostly women and children from the Yazidi community, currently being held as slaves.
Read also, the UN Report on the Protection on Civilians in the Armed Conflict in Iraq, May – October 2015.
And yet for all the instability and horrors of Iraq, some 245,000 desperate Syrians have reportedly crossed into Iraq to escape the horrors of neighbouring Syria; Syrians too have been paying the price for the invasion of Iraq and the destabilisation of the entire region. These horrors are inter-related, as is what is happening in Libya.
All of the horrors highlighted in the report, however, are simply from the passed year or so. The suffering of the Iraqi people and the humiliation and destruction of Iraqi society had already been going on a long time before this and before even the rise of the horrendous, foreign-funded ISIS/ISIL proxy army.
The governments of the US/UK and NATO essentially already committed genocide against the Iraqi people between 1990 and 2012, killing an estimated3.3 million, including 750,000 Iraqi children through either sanctions or war.
The illegal invasion and occupation from 2003 is estimated to have led to approximately 189,000 direct war deaths, but this doesn’t also include the hundreds of thousands more who died over the course of the invasion and occupation in general. This includes victims of displacement, victims of terrorism, and the many, many Sunni victims of the US-backed Shia ‘Death Squads’, and of course the many subsequent victims of the Sunni ‘ISIS/ISIL’, which many regard as a direct response to those US-backed Shia militias.
In every respect, the so-called ‘Islamic State’ owes its existence to its foreign patrons and to the illegal invasion of Iraq. As mass graves continue to be discovered, the UN has outright accused ISIS/ISIL of ‘war crimes’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ in Iraq. Whether that means scores of individual jihadists and European teenagers are going to eventually be tried in an international court (the leader or ‘caliph’ of ISIL – the elusive Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi – will probably never be tried, as he probably doesn’t exist), it’s a fair bet that the real funders and enablers of this ultra-violent sectarian nightmare will never face charges and neither will the governments, officials and corporations whose illegal warfare has created all of this suffering and death.
Whichever way we look at it – either by American/Western incompetence or by deliberate design; and there’s a massive case to be made for both – what we now know as ‘ISIS/ISIL’ is the monster-child of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Watch this video of an Iraq War veteran, and now-activist, recounting some of the horrific behaviour of invading American troops during the war, as he openly admits “I Helped Create ISIS”. Or examine the reality of the ISIS/ISIL ‘leadership’ and see where the organisation came from.
Aside from the invasion having been entirely illegal and aside from the false pretexts under which it was carried out, at least $75 billion was made in profit by American subcontracting companies alone, including Blackwater, CACI and Titan. United States’ Vice-President Dick Cheney’s company, Haliburton, made an approximate $39.5 Billion from the Iraq War alone.
Concerning the current situation, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said the latest study “illustrates what Iraqi refugees are attempting to escape when they flee to Europe and other regions. This is the horror they face in their homelands”. Go back now and re-watch the old footage of Bush, Rumsfeld and the rest of the mafia of War Criminals/Profiteers talking about the need to invade Iraq; worse, go back and watch them smugly declaring ‘Mission Accomplished’.
Better yet, go re-watch this interview with former American ally and CIA asset, Saddam Hussein, on the eve of the invasion and listen to him talking passionately and proudly about the history, heritage, culture and unity of the Iraqi nation (no sectarian talk, no Sunni/Shia divide, no terrorism), and see if you can get through it without either goosebumps or feeling sick to the pit of your stomach for what was to follow. And for what is still following even now, all these years later.
Bret Stephens, the deputy editorial page editor who writes The Wall Street Journal’s weekly “Global View” column, is not really a bad prose stylist, and his logic is not always unsound. But his unexamined assumptions lead him astray.
His latest installment is typical. Entitled “Why the U.S. Should Stand by the Saudis Against Iran,” it begins with not one premise, but two. The first, as the title suggest, is that the U.S. should stand by Riyadh in its time of woes. The second is that if the kingdom stumbles, only one person is to blame – President Obama.
The article opens on a promising note: “There is so much to detest about Saudi Arabia,” Stephens writes. It bans women from driving, it shuts its doors to Syrian refugees, it promotes “a bigoted and brutal version of Sunni Islam,” and it has “increased tensions with Iran by executing … a prominent radical Shiite cleric,” i.e., Nimr al-Nimr.
So why continue siding with a kingdom “that Israeli diplomat Dore Gold once called ‘Hatred’s Kingdom,’” Stephens asks, “especially when the administration is also trying to pursue further opening [sic] with Tehran?”
It’s a question that a lot of people are asking especially now that the collapse in oil prices means that the Saudis are less economically important than they once were. But Stephens says it would be wrong to abandon the kingdom “especially when it is under increasing economic strain from falling oil prices.”
Get that? It would be wrong to abandon the kingdom when oil is scarce and prices are high — because that’s when we need the Saudis the most — and it’s wrong to abandon the monarchy when oil is plentiful and prices are low when we need them the least. Oil, in other words, has nothing to do with it. It’s wrong because it’s wrong.
But Stephens thinks it’s wrong for another reason as well: because Saudi Arabia “feels acutely threatened by a resurgent Iran.” Why is Iran resurgent? Because the nuclear deal that it recently concluded with the U.S. has set it free from punishing economic sanctions.
He then goes on to list all the bad things Iran has done thanks to the power that the Obama administration has just handed it on a silver platter. “Despite fond White House hopes that the nuclear deal would moderate Iran’s behavior,” Stephens says, “Tehran hard-liners wasted no time this week disqualifying thousands of moderate candidates from running in next month’s parliamentary elections, and an Iranian-backed militia appears to be responsible for the recent kidnapping of three Americans in Iraq.”
Loaded Dice
Scary, eh? Yes – until one considers how Stephens has loaded the dice. His statement about Iran’s hardliners is accurate as far as it goes. But he might have pointed out that while Iran’s theocratic rulers certainly hobble democracy, they at least allow some sort of parliamentary elections to take place whereas Saudi Arabia, the regime he is now leaping to defend, allows exactly none. (Sorry, but last month’s meaningless municipal-council elections don’t count.)
In the Saudi kingdom, political parties, protests, even seminars in which intellectuals get to sound off are all verboten. Since March 2014, Saudis have been expressly forbidden to do anything that might undermine the status quo, including advocating atheism, criticizing Islam, participating in any form of political protest, or even joining a political party.
Stephens’s statement about the three kidnapped Americans is equally misleading. While Iran does indeed back such militias, Reuterscited U.S. government sources saying that “Washington had no reason to believe Tehran was involved in the kidnapping and did not believe the trio were being held in Iran.”
Plus, to follow Stephens’s logic, if Iran is responsible for specific actions like these, then Saudi Arabia is responsible for specific actions of the Sunni Salafist forces that it funds in Syria, which include lopping off the heads of Shi‘ites and committing many other such atrocities.
Stephens says that the U.S.-Iranian accord “guarantees Iran a $100 billion sanctions windfall,” a figure that the Council on Foreign Relations, no slouch when it comes to Iran bashing, describes as roughly double the true amount. He says Iran now enjoys “the protection of a major nuclear power” thanks to Russia’s intervention in Syria and agreement to supply Tehran with high-tech weaponry.
As a result, “Iranian proxies are active in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen, and dominate much of southern Iraq. Restive Shiite populations in Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province and neighboring Bahrain provide further openings for Iranian subversion on the Arabian peninsula.”
Possibly so – except that Stephens might have noted that Saudi proxies, up to and including Al Qaeda, are active in the same countries and that Shi‘ites in Bahrain and the Eastern Province might be a little less restive if Saudi repression were a little less savage.
Obama’s Fault
Then Stephens gets to his main point, which is the nefarious role of Obama:
“Add to this an American president who is ambivalent about the House of Saud the way Jimmy Carter was about the Shah of Iran, and no wonder Riyadh is acting the way it is. If the administration is now unhappy about the Saudi war in Yemen or its execution of Shiite radicals, it has only itself to blame.
“All this means that the right U.S. policy toward the Saudis is to hold them close and demonstrate serious support, lest they be tempted to continue freelancing their foreign policy in ways we might not like. It won’t happen in this administration, but a serious commitment to overthrow the Assad regime would be the place to start.”
In other words, if the Saudi monarchy chops off the heads of dissident Shi‘ites and sentences liberal blogger Raif Badawi to a thousand lashes, it’s because Obama doesn’t show enough love. Ditto Yemen. If Saudi air raids have killed some 2,800 civilians according to the latest UN estimates, including more than 500 children, it’s because Obama has allowed his affections to flag for the Saudi royals. If only he would hug the Saudi princes a little closer, they wouldn’t feel so lonely and bereft and would therefore respond more gently to their neighbors in the south. No blame should be cast on the Saudi leaders. Their behavior can’t be blamed on the contradictions between their playboy lifestyles and the ascetic extremes of Wahhabism or the baleful effects of raking in untold oil riches while doing no work in return. No, everything’s the fault of Obama and his yuppie ways.
What can one say about reasoning like this? Only that it makes Donald Trump and Ted Cruz seem like paragons of mental stability. But given that The Wall Street Journal has long filled its editorial pages with such swamp gas, why dwell on the feverish exhalations of just one right-wing columnist?
The answer is that Stephens speaks not just for himself, but for an entire neocon establishment that is beside itself over the mess in the Persian Gulf and desperate to avoid blame for the chaos (which is now spreading into Europe). So, talking points must be developed to shift responsibility.
The Lost Saudi Cause
But the Saudis may be beyond saving. With Iran preparing to put a million more barrels on the world oil market per day, prices – down better than 75 percent since mid-2014 – can only go lower. The Saudis, hemorrhaging money at the rate of $100 billion a year, know that when the foreign currency runs out, their power runs out too. Hence, they fear winding up as yet another failed Middle Eastern state like Syria.
“Islamic State and other jihadist groups would flourish,” Stephens observes, this time correctly. “Iran would seek to extend its reach in the Arabian peninsula. The kingdom’s plentiful stores of advanced Western military equipment would also fall into dangerous hands.”
It’s not a pretty picture, which is why the neocons are pointing the fingers at others, Obama first and foremost. As Jim Lobe recently observed, all the usual suspects are pitching in in behalf of their Saudi friends – Elliott Abrams, Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and so on. All are furious at what Obama administration has done to their beloved petro-sheiks.
As neocon theorist Max Book put it at the Commentary Magazine website: “The American policy should be clear: We should stand with the Saudis – and the Egyptians, and the Jordanians, and the Emiratis, and the Turks, and the Israels [sic], and all of our other allies – to stop the new Persian Empire. But the Obama administration, morally and strategically confused, is instead coddling Iran in the vain hope that it will somehow turn Tehran from enemy into friend.”
Something else is also at work, however – the I-word. As Lobe notes, neocons have done an about-face with regard to the Saudis. Where Richard Perle once called on the Bush administration to include Riyadh on his post-9/11 hit list, the neocons are now firmly on the Saudis’ side.
Why? The reason is Israel, which has decided since tangling with Hezbollah in the 2006 Lebanon War that the Shi‘ites are its chief enemy and the Sunni petro-monarchies, comparatively speaking, its friend. Like Communists responding to the latest directive from Moscow, the neocons have turned on a dime as a consequence, churning out reams of propaganda in support of Arab countries they once loathed.
A Saudi Makeover
In the neocon domain, Saudi Arabia has undergone a wondrous makeover, transformed from a bastion of reaction and anti-Semitism to a country that is somehow peace-loving and progressive. Formerly an enemy of Washington – or at best a distasteful gang of business associates supplying lots of oil and buying lots of guns – Saudi Arabia has been re-invented as America’s dearest friend in the Arab world.
People like Bret Stephens have done their bit in behalf of the cause, turning out article after article whose real purpose is hidden from view. Where neocons formerly scorned anyone who spoke well of the Saudis, they now denounce anyone who speaks ill.
The funny thing is that Obama is to blame for the disaster in the Middle East, not because he disregarded the latest diktat from the Washington neocon-dominated foreign-policy establishment, but because he has accepted its priorities all too dutifully. He stood by as Qatar steered hundreds of millions of dollars to Salafist jihadis in Libya and while the Saudis, Qataris, and other Gulf states did the same to Sunni fundamentalists in Syria.
Obama’s response to Saudi Arabia’s repression of Arab Spring protests in Bahrain was muted, he refused to condemn the beheading of al-Nimr — the best the State Department could come up with was a statement declaring that the execution risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced” — and Obama has even given military support to the kingdom’s air assault on Yemen.
Yet now the neocons blame him for not doing enough to keep the Saudis happy.
As noted by numerous commentators on the Middle East, the situation in Yemen remains very grave. The country has been devastated by the armed conflict being waged between the Houthis and the troops of ousted President Mansour Hadi, which in turn are being heavily supported by the air forces of the so-called Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia.
The ongoing airstrikes claim civilians lives, leave districts in ruin, and destroy the country’s infrastructure. Earlier this month at least three people were killed in an air raid on the hospital of Doctors Without Borders in the governorate of Saada. It’s been reported that hospitals are closing their doors, unable to operate under the current circumstances.
This is not the first medical facility to be bombed in Yemen – the so-called Arab coalition has even destroyed the Center for Care and Rehabilitation of the blind in the Yemeni capital Sana’a. Moreover, the international Human Rights Watch organization reported that the coalition was using cluster bombs to destroy certain facilities in Sana’a back in January.
One should note that massive civil unrest began in Yemen in 2011 as the direct result of so-called the Arab Spring, orchestrated by the US and its allies. In 2014, Shia tribesmen that are known today as the Houthis started fighting government forces and consequently managed to capture a significant part of the country due to the massive support that was shown for them by the Yemeni population. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia launched its first airstrikes against the Houthis, which were, according to various human rights organizations, badly coordinated and resulted in massive civilian casualties.
Concerned by the grave state of affairs in Yemen, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad al Hussein announced at a meeting of the UN Security Council back in December that it is the so-called Arab coalition that is responsible for the absolute majority of attacks on residential areas and civilian targets in Yemen. According to Reuters, the UN High Commissioner announced that he:
“observed with extreme concern heavy shelling from the ground and air in areas of Yemen with a high concentration of civilians and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools.”
It is curious to note that in pursuit of its criminal goals in Yemen, Saudi Arabia has been using weapons that were bought from the UK in 2012. Moreover, it keeps on restocking its supply of deadly British-made weapons. For this reason, at the end of last year, leading British diplomats and lawyers warned David Cameron that he was running the risk of facing an international tribunal for war crimes due to the fact that the weapons that his government supplies to Saudi Arabia are being extensively used against civilian targets in Yemen.
“Advisers to Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, have stepped up legal warnings that the sale of specialist missiles to the Saudis, deployed throughout nine months of almost daily bombing raids in west Yemen against Houthi rebels, may breach international humanitarian law…
… thousands of Yemeni civilians have been killed, with schools, hospitals and non-military infrastructure hit. Fuel and food shortages, according to the United Nations, have brought near famine to many parts of the country.
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other NGOs, claim there is no doubt that weapons supplied by the UK and the United States have hit Yemeni civilian targets. One senior Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) legal adviser told The Independent: “The Foreign Secretary has acknowledged that some weapons supplied by the UK have been used by the Saudis in Yemen. Are our reassurances correct – that such sales are within international arms treaty rules? The answer is, sadly, not at all clear.”
Yet, The Guardian notes that Saferworld and Amnesty released a legal opinion from Professor Philippe Sands QC and a number of other lawyers, according to which the sales of British arms to Saudi Arabia in the light of its military intervention and bombing of Yemen violate national, European and international laws. The lawyers are pointing out that in the period of 9 months before July 2015 the UK supplied 9 million pounds worth of rockets and bombs, while in the next three months this number hit a staggering one billion pounds. Additionally, there’s clear evidence that those weapons were used against hospitals, schools, markets, warehouses, ports, and camps for displaced persons, turning Yemen into a nightmare. The Saferworld human rights organization is convinced that there’s a direct link between the increase in sales of ammunition and bombings in Yemen.
Many British observers, including those from The Guardian, have been pointing out that days after David Cameron’s statements about his attempt to “initiate a political process in Yemen,” and remarks that “there could be no military solution in Yemen,” the data released by the government showed that UK officials approved the sale of a billion pounds worth of bombs to Saudi Arabia.
Under these circumstances the only natural question is: Will international human rights organizations and the international community as a whole, all those who failed to say a resounding “NO” to Western military interventions in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, that were only profitable for arms sellers, carry on watching silently the destruction of Yemen? How many Yemenis do we need to see die before we start solving conflicts within a political framework? How many lives should be spared? Do we ever bring to justice those responsible for such massacres? Or will we rather allow politicians, the likes of Cameron, to call for peace, while selling huge amounts of deadly weapons behind our backs with impunity?
Martin Berger is a Czech-based freelance journalist and analyst.
Almost two dozen people, including civilian rescuers and an ambulance driver from an MSF-affiliated hospital, have reportedly been killed after Saudi-led coalition planes carried out repeated airstrikes on the same target in Sa’ada province, Yemen.
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) confirmed the fatal air raids in Sa’ada, saying the “planes went back to bomb areas already hit.”
“An ambulance driver from an MSF hospital [was] killed,” the NGO wrote, explaining that the first responders at the scene had been trying to help those wounded in the first round of strikes.
The ambulance had just picked up the victims when a direct strike killed everyone inside it, said the director of the Jumhuriya Hospital in Sa’ada province, according to the New York Times.
Yemen’s Health Ministry has strongly condemned the coalition’s actions as a “heinous massacre” that first targeted a residential building in Sa’ada, Saba news agency reports, citing ministry spokesperson Dr. Nashwan Attab.
According to reports, at least 20 people were killed and another 35 wounded, in what the medics claim was a deliberate attack. Following the initial air raid in the Dhahyan district of Sa’ada, first responders rushed to the scene to care for the wounded. But the planes soon returned to strike again in an attempt to “completely eliminate the few remaining medical staff in the province,” Dr. Attab said.
WARNING! DISTURBING VIDEO, VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED!
“There are still people under the rubble and it is difficult to get them as a result of targeting by Saudi aggression of paramedics and medical personnel in the region,” he added.
Earlier this week, MSF said that the Saudi coalition continues to engage civilian targets on the ground, in particular medical treatment facilities, noting that over 100 hospitals have witnessed attacks since the Saudi-led intervention began last March.
The constant bombing of health clinics in Yemen has created conditions in which locals fear for their lives and try to avoid hospitals at all costs, MSF said. The United Nations has criticized the Saudi-led bombing campaign in Yemen for the disproportionate number of civilian deaths and the destruction of infrastructure.
The UN estimates that the violence has resulted in a dramatic increase in civilian casualties, with more than 5,800 people killed in Yemen since March.
Andrey Lugovoy, accused of being involved in the death of former Russian FSB secret service agent Alexander Litvinenko by a recent UK inquiry, says the British intelligence tried recruiting him prior to Litvinenko’s death.
On Thursday, a UK inquiry into the case of Litvinenko found his former colleagues Dmitry Kovtun and Andrey Lugovoy deliberately poisoned Litvinenko with polonium-210.
Lugovoy said during the “Evening With Vladimir Solovyov” show on the Rossiya 1 TV channel that he was likely exposed to polonium simultaneously with Litvinenko.
Lugovoy also drew a connection between the death of Litvinenko and the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6).
“Litvinenko died in November 2006, in March-April I was openly offered cooperation [by MI6] and in order to motivate me somehow, I was denied a visa, that was in May 2006. And after I called Litvinenko – I’ve said this multiple times – I was granted a visa all of a sudden. I have always connected these two events,” Lugovoy recalled.
He stressed that prior to May 2006, he had always received British visas without any problems.
“They [UK] always gave me visas, and did it with great pleasure before May 2006, when I was denied a visa after the British intelligence MI6 tried recruiting me.”
Lugovoy Plans to Stay in Russia After Release of UK Litvinenko Case Inquiry Report
Andrey Lugovoy, a former colleague of Alexander Litvinenko, does not plan to go to court to clear his name and does not intend to leave Russia in view of the recent developments in the Litvinenko case.
“I don’t care about anything they say,” Lugovoy said during the “Evening With Vladimir Solovyov” show on the Rossiya 1 TV channel.
Asked whether he plans to go to court, or clear his name somehow, Lugovoy said “I don’t intend to do that, because if I go into that, it means I will attach importance to what the British are doing, and they are trying to do everything so that we pay more attention to it [the UK inquiry], so that we react to it somehow.”
Lugovoy stressed that he has no plans of leaving Russia amid new claims related to Litvinenko’s death.
“I have not left Russia for a long time now and I do not plan to do it.”
Litvinenko moved from Russia to the United Kingdom in 2000. He died in 2006, three weeks after drinking tea with Kovtun and Lugovoy in London.
Lugovoy stated in the past that he had passed a polygraph test conducted by British experts, which proves that he was not guilty of murdering the former FSB agent.
The Russian Foreign Ministry claimed that the UK inquiry revealed on Thursday was politicized and lacked transparency and had an adverse effect on Moscow-London relations.
By Donald Neff | Washington Report On Middle East Affairs | January 1996
On January 4, 1948, Jewish terrorists drove a truck loaded with explosives into the center of the all Arab city of Jaffa and detonated it, killing 26 and wounding around 100 Palestinian men, women and children.[1] The attack was the work of the Irgun Zvai Leumi – the “National Military Organization,” also known by the Hebrew letters Etzel – the largest Jewish terrorist group in Palestine. The Irgun was headed by Revisionist Zionist Menachem Begin and had been killing and maiming Arabs, Britons and even Jews for the previous ten years in its efforts to establish a Jewish state.
This terror campaign meant that at the core of Revisionist Zionism there existed a philosophical embrace of violence. … continue
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