A senior Iraqi military commander says Kurdish Peshmerga forces have seized heavy weapons and military equipment in Kirkuk governorate.
Lieutenant Abdul Amir al-Zaidi said on Sunday that the Kurdish forces attacked military bases and disrupted the security situation in Diyala and Kirkuk.
This comes after the president of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) said on Friday that the KRG will not return the oil-rich hub of Kirkuk to Baghdad.
Masoud Barzani’s comments sparked angry reactions from some Iraqi politicians who warned of an armed conflict with the Kurds in the near future. Also, some lawmakers have accused the Kurdish forces of having relations with Israel.
Kurdish security forces took control of Kirkuk after Iraqi troops entered a battle with the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) earlier this month.
The latest developments come as tensions rise between the Kurdistan’s regional leaders and the central government in Baghdad.
The Iraqi government has repeatedly slammed the Kurdistan region for exporting oil without Baghdad’s consent.
Baghdad says it has the sole right to export the country’s crude, but the Kurds say they are entitled to market the resources of their own region
The regional government has recently used a pipeline to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan for crude oil exports.
A spokesman for the regional government says the money has been deposited in Turkey’s Halkbank.
Most refineries are reluctant to get involved in the trade which the Iraqi central government has called smuggling.
Baghdad has also opened arbitration against Turkey for allowing and facilitating the sales and has threatened to pursue buyers.
While the Iraqi army struggles to contain the ISIS advance in the country’s northwest, the Kurds have been successful at heading off the Sunni insurgents. Israel has now openly stated that an independent Kurdish state is a “foregone conclusion.”
“Iraq is breaking up before our eyes and it would appear that the creation of an independent Kurdish state is a foregone conclusion,” Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told US Secretary of State John Kerry as the two discussed the Iraqi crisis in Paris on Thursday.
Israeli President Shimon Peres had a similar message for US President Barack Obama. “The Kurds have, de facto, created their own state, which is democratic. One of the signs of a democracy is the granting of equality to women,” Peres said on Wednesday.
While forces from the Islamist State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS or ISIL) were advancing towards the capital Baghdad, the Iraqi army abandoned the city of Kirkuk. The Kurds have seized on the chaos to expand their autonomous northern territory to include the strategic city.
Besides being considered by Kurds as their historical capital, Kirkuk sits on vast oil deposits – a stable financial base for any possible statehood.
“Kirkuk will finally produce oil for the Kurds,” Muhama Khalil, the Kurdish head of the economic committee in Iraq’s national parliament, told the Guardian.
“For 70 years oil has been used to buy weapons to kill us. Finally we have our own oil and it will only be for the Kurds,” he said.
The Kurds now control the oil hub, and there were numerous reports that they sold a tanker full of oil to Israel – a country that their Arab neighbors maintain a boycott of crude sales to.
Israel keeps quiet about its ties with the Kurds, allegedly at the request of the latter. Israel’s Foreign Ministry said there were currently no formal diplomatic relations with the Kurds, but Eliezer Tsafrir – a former Mossad station chief in Kurdish northern Iraq – told Reuters that “we’d love it to be out in the open, to have an embassy there, to have normal relations. But we keep it clandestine because that’s what they want.”
The Israelis may see the Kurds as a natural ally in the Arab-dominated region where both feel they are threatened minorities.
In an interview to CNN, Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani also commented on the possibility of an independent state, saying that “The time is here for the Kurdistan people to determine their future and the decision of the people is what we are going to uphold.”
In a reverse to decades of mistrust, the Kurds might find another country supporting their independence – Turkey. It now has a 50-year deal to send Kurdish oil by pipeline to Ceyhan and has been investing in Iraq’s increasingly autonomous Kurdish region in recent years.
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan voiced support for the Kurds’ right to self-determination. “The Kurds of Iraq can decide for themselves the name and type of entity they are living in,” Erdogan said last week.
Meanwhile, the US urges Kurdish leaders to support Baghdad in its fight against ISIS. Washington also assured the Kurds they would participate in the next Iraqi government.
For thousands of years, the majority of Kurds – who are an Iranian people – have lived in the Kurdistan region, an area along the border of four Middle Eastern countries. Now the Kurdish population is scattered between northern Iraq, eastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and western Iran. They total up to 40 million people – making the Kurds one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without its own state.
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby which is based in Washington, has begun a lobbying campaign to stop US lawmakers from cutting military aid to Egypt.
The group already said in public that it wanted aid to Egypt to continue flowing.
“In light of the treaty’s achievements and resilience,” AIPAC said in a March 27 memorandum, “The United States should continue its strong support for the treaty and back Egypt as it works with Israel to combat the threats of extremists within its borders who would seek to undermine it.”
On Tuesday, an amendment from Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. was defeated in the House of Representatives. The amendment called for a cut in US military assistance to Egypt by $300 million – from $1.3 billion down to $1 billion.
Tuesday’s vote was partly due to pressure by AIPAC, Schiff said as reported by Al-Monitor.
“I didn’t know that AIPAC was weighing in at all on this until after the vote,” Schiff said. “But members did communicate to me after the vote that they had been persuaded by AIPAC not to support this.”
According to the report, Israel was a main topic of discussion during the debate of Schiff’s amendment as part of Tuesday’s markup of the State and Foreign Operations spending bill for FY2015.
Pro-Israel representatives argued the new government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi was doing a better job fighting Israel’s “enemies,” the report said.
“The aid we provide for the military also provides for Israel’s security,” said Rep. Kay Granger, R-Texas, the chairwoman of the State and Foreign Operations panel.
The launch of two major wars by the US government had two major beneficiaries, one domestic and one foreign. The three major weapons manufacturers, Lockheed Martin (LMT), Northrop Grumman (NOG) and Raytheon (RTN) have delivered record-shattering returns to investors, CEOs and investment banks during the past decade and a half.
The Israeli regime has expanded its territory and increased its power and influence in the Middle East. Israel’s territorial dispossession of Palestinians, was aided and abetted by the US invasion and destruction of the Palestinian’s Iraqi allies. Washington destroyed Iraq’s armed forces and fragmented its society and state.
The cost in US physical and mental casualties runs in the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who at one time served in the war zones. The financial costs run in the trillions of dollars and counting. Both the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel power configuration continue to wield a major role in keeping Washington on a wartime footing.
For the weapons manufactures there are no peaceful economic activities that can yield a comparable return – hence the need to continue to pressure for new wars to sustain weapons spending. For the pro-Israel power configuration, peace agreements would put an end to land grabs, reduce or curtail new weapons transfers and undermine pretexts to sanction or bomb countries (like Iran) opposing Tel Aviv’s vision of “Greater Israel”.
Yet the political and financial costs of almost a decade and a half of warfare weigh heavily on the US Treasury and electorate. The wars themselves were dismal failures if not outright defeats. New conflicts have emerged in Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine in which the military-industrial complex and the pro-Israel lobbies hope to capitalize for profits and power.
Yet the cumulative costs of past and continuing wars hangs over the launch of new costly military interventions. Political discontent among the US public with past wars also weighs heavily against new wars for profits and Israel.
War Profits
The power and influence of the military-industrial complex in promoting serial wars is evident in the extraordinary rates of return over the past fifty years. Stocks in military-industries have risen 27,699% versus 6,777% for the broad market according to a recent study by Morgan Stanley (cited in Barron’s, 6/9/14, p. 19). Over the past three years, Raytheon has returned 124%, Northrup Grumman 114% and Lockheed Martin 149%.
The Obama regime talks of reducing the military budget and makes a show of doing so via the annual appropriation bill, and then, uses emergency supplemental funds to pay war costs… which actually increases military spending and fattens the profits for the military-industrial complex.
War profits have soared because of multiple military interventions in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia. The lobbyists for the industry use their influence over Congressional and Pentagon decision-makers to join forces with the pro-Israel lobby to pressure for greater direct US military involvement in Syria, Iraq and Iran. The growing ties between Israeli and US military industries reinforce their political leverage in Washington by working with liberal interventionists and neo-conservatives. They criticize Obama for not bombing Syria and for withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan. They call for sending troops to Iraq and the Ukraine. Obama argues that proxy wars do not require heavy US military expenditures. Responding to Wall Street pressure to reduce the budget deficit the Obama regime argues that retreating from Iraq and Afghanistan was necessary to reduce US financial and military losses. But withdrawal also reduces profits for the weapons makers and angers Israel and its supporters in Congress.
The Fight over the Military Budget: Veterans versus the Complex and the Lobby
In the face of rising pressure to reduce the deficit and cut the military budget, the military-industrial complex and its Zionist accomplices are heavily engaged in retaining their share of the military budget, by reducing the amount allocated for the medical programs of active and retired soldiers. Disability costs are soaring and will continue for decades. The cost of health care is expected to double to 15% of the defense budget in five years and according to the financial press “that is bad news for defense stocks” (Barron’s, 6/9/14, p. 19).
In response the military-industries are pressing to close Veterans Administration hospitals and reduce benefits, claiming fraud, incompetence and inferior service. The same corporate warlords and lobbyists who pressed the Government to send American soldiers to wars, in which they lost lives, limbs and mental health, are now in the forefront of the fight to reduce spending on their recovery and health. Economists point out that the less the percentage of the military budget spent on veteran’s health, the greater the share allocated for missiles, warships and war planes. The long term costs for VA medical and disability spending resulting from the Afghan and Iraq wars are at present $900 billion and rising.
The corporate warlords are pressuring Congress to increase co-pays, enrollment fees and deductibles for veterans enrolled in public health plans.
The fight is on over Pentagon expenditures: for soldiers health or weapons programs that fatten the profits of the military industrial complex.
For as long as we can remember, Netanyahu has insisted that “time is running out” on preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, despite the fact that Iran has no nuclear weapons program.
In July 2013, he declared that Iran is “getting closer and closer to the bomb.” A few months before that, in a speech to the AIPAC, the leading Israel lobby in Washington, he said Iran “is running out the clock” and “has used negotiations, including the most recent ones, to buy time to press ahead with its nuclear program.”
The year before that, in an interview with Fox News’ Greta van Susteren, Netanyahu addressed his decade-and-a-half obsession, stating that a nuclear-armed Iran “was a lot further away 15 years ago when I started talking about it. It was a lot further away 10 years ago. It was a lot further away five years. It was a lot further away five months ago. They are getting there, and they are getting very, very close.”
In a nauseating speech before a Joint Session of Congress on May 24, 2011, Netanyahu said, “When I last stood here, I spoke of the consequences of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Now time is running out, the hinge of history may soon turn, for the greatest danger of all could soon be upon us: a militant Islamic regime armed with nuclear weapons.”
His memory was correct. He did deliver a harrowing warning about Iran to a Joint Session of Congress in 1996. And his rhetoric was nearly identical. Here’s part of it (followed by a transcript):
Netanyahu: The most dangerous of these regimes is Iran, that has wed a cruel despotism to a fanatic militancy. If this regime, or its despotic neighbor Iraq, were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind.
I believe the international community must reinvigorate its efforts to isolate these regimes, and prevent them from acquiring atomic power. The United States and Israel have been at the forefront of this effort, but we can and must do much more. Europe and the countries of Asia must be made to understand that it is folly, nothing short of folly, to pursue short-time material gain while creating a long-term existential danger for all of us.
Only the United States can lead this vital international effort to stop the nuclearization of terrorist states. But the deadline for attaining this goal is getting extremely close.
Sound familiar? Yes, naturally. The script has remained the same for the past two decades. So identical are the talking points, in fact, that while Netanyahu said “now, time is running out” in 2011, here’s what he said back in 1996, during his speech to Congress.
Sigh. Despite Netanyahu’s constant visibility and years of repetition on this issue, he should not be credited with introducing it. A year before his 1996 speech to Congress, then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin said much the same thing.
Yesterday at 11am, the Syrian Mission to the United Nations convened a press conference featuring people from the US who observed the recent elections.
Five minutes into the opening comments of Syrian Ambassador Bashar Al-Jaafari, the UN webcast cut off. The thousands of journalists, political analysts, and others who view UN webcasts each day from all over the world were denied the ability to watch the press conference, and hear what was said.
This is not the first time this has happened when Bashar Jaafari is speaking. This occurred on June 7th earlier this year, and on numerous occasions throughout 2013. Reporters at Inner City Press reported that this is not accidental, but was ordered by Michele DuBach, Acting Deputy Director-News & Media Operations.
This comes in the context of other UN harassment of Syria. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon has met with Ahmad Jarba, a leader of violent insurgent groups in Syria, but has refused to meet with Bashar Jaafari. Though Syria pays over $1 million to the UN each year, it is not being treated as an equal member state.
Watch the important, UN Press Conference about Syria, that someone obviously doesn’t want you, or anyone else, to see:
Syria’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Bashar Ja’afari says the current tumult in the Middle East, including the crisis in his country, is a scheme by the West to safeguard Israel’s interests, Press TV reports.
“This is a geopolitical plan that is not only targeting Syria exclusively, although Syria is very important for either the success or failure of this plan, but it is targeting the whole area,” said Ja’afari Wednesday in an exclusive interview with Press TV in New York.
He said the main goal of the Western plot “is to secure for a long time the interests of Israel and preventing the establishment of Palestinian state in Palestine.”
“So they need to open up a new front, a kind of deviation, from the focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Palestinian question to another focus which might be a war between Muslims and Muslims,” he added.
He further underlined that the West intends to incite divisions among Muslims under the false notion of a Sunni-Shia conflict to provoke wars between Muslim countries in the region.
The Syrian envoy went on to reiterate that the huge participation of Syrian voters in the country’s presidential election served as big “NO” message to foreign interference in their country’s internal affairs.
“Our message would be a friendly message… [that] we want to have friends and we want to have normal, bilateral relationship with everybody. We do not interfere into the American domestic affairs. Please don’t interfere into our own domestic affairs.”
According to official figures, President Bashar al-Assad won nearly 90 percent of the votes cast in Syria’s presidential race. Syria’s Supreme Constitutional Court announced that over 73 percent of the 15.8 million eligible voters had taken part in the election.
Iran’s nuclear talks with the P5+1[1] are taking place in Vienna. A “solid commitment” from Iran is needed, ensuring that its stated peaceful atomic energy programme is not a clandestine attempt to build nuclear weapons. The Iranians have found themselves needing to make a leap towards lifting the crushing international sanctions, notably those imposed by the US. It is the basis of these sanctions that MEMO has re-examined with a group of senior researchers in the field.
When Ellie Geranmayeh, Iran expert at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) spoke with MEMO, she insisted, “In the same way that any potential military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear programme needs to be explained to the United Nations, the West also needs to explain the basis of its accusations and suspicions.”
Ever since the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reported “sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activity” in Iran in 2003, the country has been under close supervision. The UN Security Council decided to impose economic sanctions for Iran’s non-compliance with its previous request to suspend enrichment activities before extending them in 2007, 2008 and 2010. According to Reuters, Washington was recently pushing for an even more severe attack on the Iranian economy, but this was rejected by the Security Council. Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, argued that the sanctions are “illegal” and imposed by “arrogant leaders”. The sanctions are devastating the Iranian economy and have been imposed despite the fact that Iran’s uranium enrichment is being held below 5 per cent, consistent with developing fuel for a civilian nuclear power plant. US pressure has led several nuclear contracts between Iran and foreign governments to fall through.
The United States Enrichment Corporation (USEC)[2], meanwhile, has used its official website to “call for action” to change the course of its declining share of the global enrichment market, underscoring the need to “limit the spread of enrichment technologies to rogue states”. This controversial Western centric use of the phrase “rogue states” demands a thorough investigation, according to many experts.
Furthermore, the West’s foundation for these claims against Iran has too many fault lines “to begin to even list them,” claims historian and Iran nuclear expert Dr Gareth Porter. The single biggest factor pushing “the elite’s obsession over Iran as a threat and as an enemy,” he says, “is that the basic premise was laid down early at the end of the Cold War.” His ground-breaking work recently received the annual Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism from the London-based journalists’ Frontline Club. MEMO spoke to Porter about the trajectory of the “imminent Iranian nuclear threat” and its construct by a handful of powerful actors with a particular political agenda and documents “with little reliability” that the media over the last decade have had no qualms about accepting and sharing as (unauthenticated) “evidence”.
1) “The laptop documents”
One of the main anomalies in America’s porous trajectory on Iran is the pseudo-crucial “laptop documents”. Presented by the US to the Security Council, these 1,000 pages are alleged to contain research on nuclear weapons-related activities, stolen from the computer of an Iranian scientist or engineer who was, it is claimed, involved in the programme. “This was a trick to cover the truth,” said Porter. He recapped how the documents were passed to Germany’s intelligence agency by a member of the Mujahideen-E-Khalq (MEK) an Iranian terrorist organisation in exile, which has been a client of Israel’s Mossad spy agency for several years. German intelligence and many other government officials, including ex-US Secretary of State Colin Powell, warned that the US and EU should not make the mistake of basing policy on this information.
2) Redesigned Iranian missile
Another central anomaly is the “discovery” that the Iranian missile re-entry vehicle is depicted in the documents as being redesigned to accommodate a nuclear payload. “This was one that had been discarded by Iran at least two years before the drawings were said to have been made,” Porter argues, “not according to Iranian sources, but an authoritative Western source: the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).”
3) Technical errors
“The discovery that the same drawings of an alleged effort to redesign the re-entry vehicle of the Shahab-3 missile contained numerous technical errors,” Gareth Porter contends, “indicated again that they had not been done by those involved in Iran’s missile programme.”
4) Codename (5.15)
This was given to one of the sub-projects in the alleged nuclear weapons research programme that was, in truth, the number assigned to a contract with the civilian atomic energy organisation of Iran or an ore processing facility and was signed two years before the supposed covert research programme was even said to have begun.
Israel’s position
Last week, at the Herzliya Conference, Israel’s platform for the articulation of national policy, Global Jewish News Source reported major Israeli politicians with strong beliefs in this propaganda. “What is at stake is not merely Israel’s position in the Middle East,” argued Likud’s Yuval Steinitz, “what is at stake is the fate of the entire world… Iran is a nuclear threshold state. It just hasn’t created the weapons yet.”
Lina Khatib of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think-tank explained to MEMO how Israel has been trying to push the US to take military action against Iran to stop its nuclear enrichment programme. Further, the government in Tel Aviv has also been engaging in “clandestine intelligence operations to halt Iran’s nuclear developments, for example through cyber-attacks,” she warned. In response, America pushed back against Israel’s request for military strikes against Iran, and is not likely to include Israel as a formal partner in the Vienna negotiations over the nuclear file, “though the US will ensure that Israeli interests are represented during the talks”.
“Overwhelming” evidence exists, according to Dr Gareth Porter, that it was Israel’s Mossad that produced the falsified documents that have propelled the “manufactured crisis” forward, “not just once, but twice”. First came the “laptop documents” that surfaced in 2004 followed in 2008-2009, two years into his research, when a series of intelligence reports and allegedly Iranian documents were given to the IAEA directly by the Israelis, “resulting in more accusations following the November 2011 IAEA report”.
According to Porter, Israeli’s pressure on the Obama administration to make demands of Iran will ensure that the talks fail. “Thus far that Israeli strategy has succeeded, because the Obama administration has demanded a cut in Iranian centrifuges that makes it difficult to envision a final compromise.” Basing any military action on false dossiers would be as irresponsible as the invasion of Iraq in 2003; the world witnessed what consequences that had, when soldiers on the ground had no clue about what was going on.
Current talks
Iran has been talking separately with most of the members of the P5+1 group in advance of the formal meetings week. Although reports have been modestly positive about the potential outcome, the final accord date set as July 20 is already predicted to be given a six-month extension by government officials from most of the countries involved.
Porter remains “very worried” that the talks will fail because of America’s “hard-line” refusal to tolerate any Iranian enrichment of uranium to support even its present nuclear reactor, “much less future reactors”. He recently interviewed Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who has not given up hope of renewed and extended diplomatic flexibility on behalf of the US. Even so, he indicated that statements had been made in the talks, as well as to the media, that were “posturing”. He implied that this was politically dangerous because it would make later adjustment in the US negotiation stance very difficult.
According to Lina Khatib, we will see the lifting of some sanctions, but a comprehensive deal will take time to be made and implemented. However, as Iran’s nuclear programme is primarily, she says, “aimed at giving Iran political weight in the Middle East and international recognition as a major regional player, rather than at preparing to conduct a nuclear attack,” there might be more “muscle-flexing” involved than seen so far.
The threat of an ISIS take-over of major Iraqi cities near the border with Iran has collided with the current negotiations on the country’s nuclear programme and arguably paved the way for an indirect willingness to reach an agreement with America. The pace of events means that Iran, which in the 1980s fought former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein for eight years, may be willing to cooperate with Washington to bolster Iraq’s Shi’ite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said that he will consider such cooperation, if the US takes action in Iraq.
However, a US official cautioned against reading too much into the latest talks: “No one should expect that all of a sudden, overnight, even if we resolve the nuclear agreement, that everything will change. It will not. The fundamentals remain exactly as they are. Until we resolve the nuclear issue there cannot be any kind of fundamental change in this relationship.”
Footnotes
[1] Iran has had meetings with China, France, Germany, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. These six are known as the P5+1 (the permanent five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) or alternatively as the E3+3, used by European countries. These meetings are intended to resolve concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme.
[2] USEC: the American corporation that contracts with the United States Department of Energy to produce enriched uranium for use in nuclear power plants.
Ralph Nader wrote a very perceptive essay in the wake of the edifying defeat of the despicable arch-imperialist, Israel Firster and reliable servant of Wall St. Banksters, Eric Cantor, at the capable hands of the libertarian leaning Professor David Brat. It was titled “Can Progressives Learn From Eric Cantor’s Defeat”? Can they? Yes. Will they? It is highly doubtful. It is difficult to learn anything if you think you have nothing more to learn.
But here we are interested only in the lessons of Cantor’s electoral humiliation at the hands of Brat for the progressive antiwar, anti-Empire movement. (For the significance of the Brat victory beyond the matter of war, see this.) And by “progressive” we do not mean “Left.” “Progressive” for some is merely a brand change adopted by long ago to escape the abuse poured on “liberalism.” One looks in vain for a self-described liberal these days only because they have donned a new costume which they have already badly soiled.
Here are two relevant quotes from Nader’s essay:
“(The Brat victory) has several takeaways for progressives besides envy and shame over why they do not directly take on the corporate Democrats.”
“Unfortunately the driving energy of progressives, including the dissipating Occupy Wall Street effort, is not showing up in the electoral arena. The political energy, the policy disputes and the competitive contests are among the Republicans, not the Democrats…”
In summary, why are the progressives not taking on the corporate (and hawkish) Democrats in the electoral arena? And what does that mean for the next presidential year, 2016? Certainly it is desirable to have antiwar candidates in primaries of both major parties – and even better to have them win the nomination. Thus, there are two electoral tasks for the broad antiwar movement in the rapidly approaching election year of 2016:
1. On the Democratic Side. The progressives must field a candidate to take on the bloodthirsty Hillery to make good on Nader’s challenge. Otherwise, she could well be “the first woman” – to start a world war. So far there is no one – and the undependable Bernie Sanders is not that person, as even a cursory reading of the late Alexander Cockburn’s denunciations of Sanders over the years makes clear. Nor is that great American Indian, my Senator, Elizabeth Warren who ran for Senate as a hawk on Iran, a credible peace candidate.
2. On the Republican Side. Antiwarriors here must make sure that there is an antiwar Republican running in the primaries and hopefully winning the nomination. That person is Rand Paul. And Brat’s victory over the establishment’s candidate bodes well for Paul’s success. So the forces of peace are making headway in the GOP even though they face an uphill battle.
That leaves the Democrats without any anti-Empire voice. Progressive Democrats of America (PDA) will not do the job of challenging Hillary. From Norman Solomon to Medea Benjamin they are notorious by now for putting Party over principle. Other progressives operating outside the Dem Party, and few in number, are well defended, claiming that elections are for naught. But history argues against this. Truman, the architect of the unpopular Korean War was defeated in the New Hampshire primary, paving the way for an Eisenhower victory due in part to a pledge to end the war, a pledge he kept promptly. Lyndon Baynes Johnson, the inheritor of a very unpopular war from JFK was also undone in New Hampshire, by the principled Eugene McCarthy, not the most “liberal” Democrat and a bit of a libertarian. From that point on despite the best efforts of both Humphrey and Nixon to prolong it, the Vietnam War was over. Primary challenges have an effect. Ron Paul built a very powerful movement, especially among the young, with his 2008 and 2012 runs.
Other progressives will tell you that street actions like Occupy are the way forward despite the inability of Occupy to so much as articulate a platform, program or strategy. And they are bereft of even a shadow of ideology and consistency having long ago abandoned the more traditional left precepts. Most notably the decade of wars went largely unmentioned in their gatherings, in great part because they are now Obama’s wars. Nader kindly describes Occupy as “dissipating.” Strangely, some of these Occupiers find refuge in the Green Party, which is dedicated to electoral action. The Green Party itself is a resounding failure. Its perennial presidential candidate is a very pleasant, organized and well meaning person but is entirely too solicitous of “progressive” Dems to make an impact. And she has not been able to win even a State House seat in very progressive Massachusetts, although she has tried.
Picasso said he became a Communist, because the Communists were for the peasants and he was for the peasants. Often it is as simple as that. What are people to do if they are for peace and the only viable force for peace is the libertarians, as was true in 2012? Then they will become libertarian Republicans. And we see that happening with many young people. If “progressives” cannot accomplish a challenge to Hillary, they will be finished for the foreseeable future, probably a generation at least. And that seems to be the way things are headed.
Surely, what’s happening now in Iraq and Syria must serve as a final wake-up call that we have been led into a horrific situation in the Middle East by a powerful Lobby driven by the interests of one tribe and one tribe alone.
Back in 1982, Oded Yinon an Israeli journalist formerly attached to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published a document titled ‘A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties.’ This Israeli commentator suggested that for Israel to maintain its regional superiority, it must fragment its surrounding Arab states into smaller units. The document, later labelled as ‘Yinon Plan’, implied that Arabs and Muslims killing each other in endless sectarian wars was, in effect, Israel’s insurance policy.
Of course, regardless of the Yinon Plan’s prophesies, one might still argue that this has nothing to do with Jewish lobbying, politics or institutions but is just one more Israeli strategic proposal except that it is impossible to ignore that the Neocon school of thought that pushed the English-speaking Empire into Iraq was largely a Jewish Diaspora, Zionist clan. It’s also no secret that the 2nd Gulf War was fought to serve Israeli interests – breaking into sectarian units what then seemed to be the last pocket of Arab resistance to Israel.
Similarly, it is well established that when Tony Blair decided to launch that criminal war, Lord Levy was the chief fundraiser for his Government while, in the British media, Jewish Chronicle writers David Aaronovitch and Nick Cohen were busy beating the drums for war. And again, it was the exact same Jewish Lobby that was pushing for intervention in Syria, calling for the USA and NATO to fight alongside those same Jihadi forces that today threaten the last decade’s American ‘achievements’ in Iraq.
Unfortunately, Yinon’s disciples are more common than you might expect. In France, it was the infamous Jewish ‘philosopher’ Bernard Henri Levy who boasted on TV that ‘as a Jew’ campaigning for NATO intervention, he liberated Libya.
As we can see, a dedicated number of Jewish Zionist activists, commentators and intellectuals have worked relentlessly in many countries pushing for exactly the same cause – the breaking up of Arab and Muslim states into smaller, sectarian units.
But is it just the Zionists who are engaging in such tactics? Not at all.
In fact, the Jewish so-called Left serves the exact same cause, but instead of fragmenting Arabs and Muslims into Shia, Sunnis, Alawites and Kurds they strive to break them into sexually oriented identity groups (Lesbian, Queer, Gays, Heterosexual etc.)
Recently I learned from Sarah Schulman, a NY Jewish Lesbian activist that in her search for funding for a young ‘Palestinian Queer’ USA tour, she was advised to approach George Soros’ Open Society institute. The following account may leave you flabbergasted, as it did me:
A former ACT UP staffer who worked for the Open Society Institute, George Soros’ foundation, suggested that I file an application there for funding for the tour. When I did so it turned out that the person on the other end had known me from when we both attended Hunter [College] High School in New York in the 1970s. He forwarded the application to the Institutes’s office in Amman, Jordan, and I had an amazing one-hour conversation with Hanan Rabani, its director of the Women’s and Gender program for the Middle East region. Hanan told me that this tour would give great visibility to autonomous queer organizations in the region. That it would inspire queer Arabs—especially in Egypt and Iran… for that reason, she said, funding for the tour should come from the Amman office” (Sarah Schulman -Israel/Palestine and the Queer International p. 108).
The message is clear, The Open Society Institutes (OSI) wires Soros’s money to Jordan, Palestine and then back to the USA in order to “inspire queer Arabs in Egypt and Iran (sic).”
What we see here is clear evidence of a blatant intervention by George Soros and his institute in an attempt to break Arabs and Muslims and shape their culture. So, while the right-wing Jewish Lobby pushes the Arabs into ethnic sectarian wars, their tribal counterparts within George Soros’ OSI institute, do exactly the same — attempt to break the Arab and Muslims by means of marginal and identity politics.
It is no secret that, as far as recent developments in Iraq are concerned, America, Britain and the West are totally unprepared. So surely, the time is long overdue when we must identify the forces and ideologies within Western society that are pushing us into more and more global conflicts. And all we can hope for is that America, Britain and France may think twice before they spend trillions of their taxpayers’ money in following the Yinon Plan to fight ruinous, foreign wars imposed upon them by The Lobby.
Iran’s nuclear program has been a subject of obsession for Western governments and media agencies for decades, as far back as the final years of Western-backed Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s reign. But over the course of the last decade, the subject has reached new hysterical heights, propelled by mainstream media coverage mired with distortion and misinformation. Enter: Gareth Porter.
Porter, 71 years old, is a man of many trades. He is a historian, an author, a policy analyst, and of late, has made a name for himself as a successful investigative journalist.
He began his career in journalism during the US war on Vietnam, serving as the Saigon Bureau Chief for the Dispatch News Service International from 1970-71. He then decided to leave journalism for decades, working in a variety of jobs as an anti-war activist, a university teacher, and sustainable development environment work.
It was after another American war at the dawn of the 21st century, this time against Afghanistan and Iraq, that Porter found himself back into the journalistic fold, mainly writing for the InterPress Service.
“It was only from the year 2000 I started writing this book on Vietnam, how the Americans went to war there. It was such an eye-opener. I realized that the problem of America’s wanton wars was not the problem of a president gone wrong or starting from the wrong values or ideas. It was a systemic problem that the war state was the real problem. That has shaped my political consciousness and my scholarship in journalism ever since then,” Porter told Al-Akhbar.
While working on the book, titled “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, which was eventually published in 2005, Porter started to write investigative journalistic articles, the first of which was on how Iraqi Kurdish groups were stealing and forging parliamentary elections at the time.
“That’s what started me on the road of becoming an investigative journalist. I never imagined it would happen but it just developed really quickly,” he said with a light laugh.
Porter started covering the Iranian nuclear issue in 2006; at first, he said, he had believed the overall narrative produced by various agencies.
One key evidence used in the allegations by the West of Iran’s attempts to militarize its nuclear program is the more than one thousand pages of documents that were supposedly acquired from the laptop of an Iranian nuclear scientist by intelligence agencies. They are known informally as the “Laptop Documents.”
But when Porter decided to examine the evidence presented against Iran, he began to discover certain anomalies.
“I went back to look at the recent history of the Iran nuclear issue, and that is when I came across a Wall Street Journal article quoting a German foreign office official, Karsten Voigt, saying this very intriguing thing: ‘Don’t rely on these documents because they came from an Iranian dissident group’ – meaning Mujihedin-E-Khalq (MEK).”
“It pushed me in the direction of questioning the narrative. As time went by I saw more and more of the pieces that didn’t fit the puzzle, particularly about these Laptop Documents,” he added.
In late 2007, Porter met with a German source in Washington DC, and asked him about the Wall Street Journal article. The German source confirmed Voigt’s statement, and thus cemented Porter’s belief that there was more to the story. He began working full-time examining the various evidence and raging debates over Iran’s nuclear program.
Many of his articles, however, have never garnered the attention of the mainstream press and traditional policy institutions within the US.
“The feedback was very weak. The biggest problem, of course, is that the news media and political elite in the US are very powerful, don’t need to respond to information and analysis that contradicts their narratives,” Porter said in regards to the reasons behind this general disinterest in his reports.
Nevertheless, his work in uncovering propaganda and unveiling uncomfortable truths about the problematic narratives regarding Iran’s nuclear program earned him the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, an annual award given by the London-based Frontline Club that celebrates courageous and ground-breaking journalism.
“The single biggest factor driving the elite’s obsession over Iran as a threat and as an enemy is that the basic premise was laid down early at the end of the Cold War,” Porter explained in terms of the reasons behind the American and European honing in on the Islamic republic.
“That the US must take a hand in constraining and preventing Iran from extending its power. It became a fundamental premise of post-Cold War US policy. It fit the interests of the national security state and the Israeli lobby together. Once that happened, and pretty quickly during the Clinton Administration, successive governments naturally followed the general lines set down.”
“Even Obama, just in the early days of office, had the NSA and Israelis come in and tell him about their plans for a cyberwar against Iran. Here he is, a guy who is allegedly planning to enter serious diplomatic engagement with Iran, was essentially conspiring with the Israelis to carry out cyberwarfare. He was going to be the first president to wage cyberwar against another country. That’s very serious,” Porter further remarked.
Overall, Porter mused, the biggest obstacles to any attempt to work out a deal with Iran and end a consideration of military action comes down to Israel.
“Even if there was a settlement of the issue that led to détente between the US and Iran, both of which I’m skeptical about, that would not change the Israeli point of view – which is they have to possess nuclear weapons to maintain superiority over every other country in the Middle East,” he said.
Porter has authored a new book entitled “Manufactured Crisis: The Secret History of the Iranian Nuclear Scare,” which recounts his journalistic work on the allegations about Iran’s nuclear program by the Americans and Israelis since 2006, and discusses in greater detail the numerous evidences and counter-evidences at play.
He recently presented a round table discussion on the topic and his book at the Issam Fares Institute (IFI) building within the American University of Beirut campus on June 9.
Below is the video of the entire talk, and subsequent discussion between Porter and the audience, posted on YouTube by IFI:
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius has once again poisoned international efforts to settle the nuclear dispute, with his latest effort to sabotage talks between Iran and the P5+1.
Negotiations between Iran and the P5+1 group – US, Britain, France Russia and China plus Germany – are due to reconvene next week in Austria with the tentative prospect of a comprehensive settlement to the long-running nuclear dispute.
A successful outcome would see Western-imposed trade sanctions on Iran being lifted. The onerous impact of these legally questionable Western sanctions on the Iranian people make that outcome long overdue.
However, this week – just days before sensitive talks re-open in Vienna – France’s top diplomat raised a new obstacle to finding a possible final agreement. Fabius is now telling French media that Iran must reduce the number of its nuclear-enrichment centrifuges, by a 10-fold factor, from a few thousand to a few hundred instruments.
Iran has already agreed to significant guarantees that its nuclear program is for peaceful civilian purposes – and not for weaponization, as the US, Britain and France have long been claiming – by agreeing to cap uranium enrichment at levels far below that required to make atomic bombs.
Fabius’ latest demand that Iran must now also drastically scale back on the number of its centrifuges used in uranium enrichment represents a new pre-condition for settling the nuclear impasse. The number of centrifuges is irrelevant given that Iran has already agreed to impose a limit on uranium enrichment – a generous concession by Iran given that it is not mandated to do so by the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That self-imposed restriction led to the interim agreement being signed between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers last November.
That initial groundbreaking nuclear deal at the end of last year was also nearly scuppered back then by Laurent Fabius, when days before he suddenly raised the issue of “guarantees for Israeli security”. That was also seen as a mischievous intervention from Fabius, even by other Western diplomats, which in the event did not prevent the interim deal being signed on November 26.
Days before the next round of crucial talks, Fabius is up to his toxic diplomacy yet again.
Without exaggeration, no other contemporary Western diplomat has as much bad blood in his political veins than the French foreign minister.
He is currently overseeing French state-sponsored terrorism in Syria to illegally overthrow the elected government of President Bashar al Assad. Fabius is also currently overseeing the illegal French invasion of two African countries – Mali and Central Africa Republic – which has sparked the death of thousands of people from internecine violence. And yet this politician has the temerity and arrogance to hold the Iranian nation to ransom over trumped-up nuclear concerns.
But there is much more to this politician’s contaminated career. Fabius’ sinister political history has previously seen him involved in other acts of state terrorism, nuclear destruction of the environment on a massive scale, and the manslaughter of thousands of people around the world through the criminal selling of poisoned blood products.
Let’s start with the latter point first. During the 1980s when Fabius was then French prime minister, his government knowingly supplied blood transfusion products to its own citizens and those of many other countries around the world – to safeguard French commercial profits. It became known as the “blood transfusion scandal” – the biggest health controversy ever to hit France. More than 4,000 French citizens were infected by blood contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C – of which at least 40 per cent were to die. Among several countries affected by importing blood products from France was Iran. An unknown number of sick Iranian patients would also later die from these toxic
French imports.
As head of the French government between 1984-86, Fabius was subsequently charged with manslaughter relating to the scandal. He was later acquitted by a French court in 1999, along with another minister, while his former Health Minister Edmond Herve was found guilty. At least two other government officials were sent to jail for their part in the systematic crime. Angry campaigners denounced Fabius’ acquittal as an example of the French political elite being “untouchable”.
At the same time that Fabius’ government was overseeing the mass poisoning of blood patients to protect the commercial interests of French pharmaceutical companies, this same government committed one of the most audacious acts of state terrorism in recent decades.
In July 1985, French military agents carried out the bombing of a civilian ship, The Rainbow Warrior. The ship belonged to Greenpeace, the environmental campaign group, and was moored in the New Zealand port of Auckland at the time of the deadly attack, which resulted in the death of one Greenpeace activist and several others injured. French divers had mined the vessel with two explosives.
The incident brought an outpouring of international condemnation, and initially Fabius’ government denied any involvement. However, New Zealand police later arrested two French agents belonging to the foreign intelligence service, the DGSE. The pair were convicted and jailed. Fabius was then forced to come clean, in September 1985, when he made the shocking admission to world media that the French government had indeed ordered the murderous attack on a civilian vessel in a sovereign foreign territory. He famously said at the time: “The truth is cruel.”
But the background to this French act of state terrorism on the Rainbow Warrior is even more criminal. The Greenpeace ship was in New Zealand at that time to lead international protests against rampant French testing of nuclear weapons in the South Pacific. Ever since 1962, France unilaterally declared its colonial territories of Polynesia and surrounding seas to be nuclear test sites. Between 1966 and 1996, successive French governments, including that of Laurent Fabius, carried out nearly 200 test explosions on the Pacific coral reef islands of Mururoa and Fangataufa.
The nuclear explosions were carried out with air, sea and underground devices and have been responsible for radioactive pollution spreading to New Zealand, Australia and even as far away as Peru in South America. The French weapons of mass destruction have also destroyed countless natural habitats in the South Pacific.
A year before the Rainbow Warrior terror attack, the New Zealand government introduced a law designating its territorial waters a nuclear-free zone. But that legal restriction did not stop Fabius’ government from committing an act of murder against civilians – civilians who were protesting against French acts of mass extermination in the South Pacific.
This is the criminal quality of former French Prime Minister and now Foreign Minister, Laurent Fabius – who has the audacity to lecture the people of Iran about their legally entitled use of peaceful nuclear technology.
The ruthless businessman who financed coups in Central America and shaped Israeli statehood
José Niño Unfiltered | May 7, 2026
Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
Few figures in American business history wielded power as ruthlessly or as secretly as Zemurray. Born Schmiel Zmurri on January 18, 1877, to a poor Jewish family in Imperial Russia, this teenage immigrant would rise from peddling rotting bananas off railroad cars in Alabama to become the controlling force behind the United Fruit Company, the most powerful agricultural corporation on earth. Along the way he overthrew governments, bribed presidents, hired mercenaries, and played a pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the creation of the State of Israel. … continue
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Leftist commentators consistently push a shallow and economically reductive narrative that frames American foreign policy as the sole domain of greedy White capitalists while choosing to ignore the obvious Jewish power structure directing these events. When the veneer of this supposed corporate imperialism is stripped away, it becomes clear that the United States has often served as a vehicle for the specific goals of organized Jewry. The life of Samuel Zemurray stands as prime evidence of this hidden mechanism.
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