Hillary’s Foreign Policy Speech: Queen Galadriel Before Her Magic Mirror
By Gary Leupp | CounterPunch | June 6, 2016
Rachel Maddow, the famously progressive MSNBC show host, pronounced it “her greatest speech of the campaign.” Chris Matthews agreed, adding that it would “have a very strong appeal to the neocon movement.” He mentioned in particular Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor and TV commentator, as someone likely to be impressed. “A very smart man,” opined Matthews, the conservative Democrat and “Hardball” host, causing the entire cosmos to shudder.
You’d think that that war in Iraq, which Kristol had tirelessly championed, had never happened. And that its results had been anything other than horrific for the entire Middle East.
Hillary Clinton’s fiery performance last Thursday night, intended to assert her credentials as a former secretary of state (with all the positive “experience” that’s supposed to entail), framed by no fewer than seventeen U.S. flags, was a strident reassertion of U.S. “exceptionalism” without apologies or even reflections on the recent past and her bloody role in it.
It was billed as a “major foreign policy address,” the sort of thing you might expect of a sitting president. And it was designed, of course, to make her look presidential, and to underscore her campaign’s declaration that she has the Democratic nomination all sewed up. But it was not in fact a foreign policy speech at all; Donald Trump is quite right to call it “a political speech” directed at him.
Maddow has occasionally shown signs of critical reasoning in her coverage of the U.S.’s imperialist wars. One has to wonder what she finds admirable in the speech. Because actually, Clinton said nothing new.
However unsubstantial, it was all over the news the next morning, competing with the stories about new fencing at the Cincinnati Zoo and Prince’s autopsy results. Meanwhile the networks systematically ignore the ongoing wars in Iraq and Syria generated by the invasion of Iraq 13 years ago, and the European refugee crisis sparked by the regime-change wars in those countries as well as in Afghanistan and Libya. Like the monkeys adorning the Nikko Shrine, they see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.
Some takeaway lines from the Clinton speech: “Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program.” It’s true that Trump is an uninformed blowhard and that Hillary in contrast knows a lot. She knows, for example, that the entire U.S. intelligence community, in two separate National Intelligence Estimates after 2003, concluded that Iran does not have a military nuclear program. She knows that the whole issue was hyped at the demand of the Israeli leaders who continuously demanded that the U.S. bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities (that in fact date back to the period of the Shah’s reign and supported by the U.S.’s “Atoms for Peace” program).
She also knows from experience the value of the Big Lie in obtaining mass acceptance for real or threatened military action.
Clinton has generally avoided specifics in discussing her plans for more war with one conspicuous exception: she has continuously stated that she strongly advocates a “no-fly zone and humanitarian corridors” in Syrian air space and on the ground in that country beset by civil war pitting a secular regime, mainly against terrorist and terrorist-aligned Islamist opponents.
For Hillary, Syria is the ideal battlefield: one that pits her vision of U.S. hegemony against both Russia (Syria’s patron and her main target) and the nebulous evil of Islamist terrorism in the world—on behalf of an imaginary middle force of democrats who will stay cozy with the U.S. and end support for armed groups opposing Israel.
Her plans are as much a recipe for war as the bogus humanitarian mission in Libya in 2011. They would, as estimated by former Chairman of the Join Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, require the deployment of 70,000 U.S. troops for their implementation.
In last week’s speech she was more circumspect. “We need to take out [ISIL’s] strongholds in Iraq and Syria,” she declared, “by intensifying the air campaign and stepping up our support for Arab and Kurdish forces on the ground. We need to keep pursuing diplomacy to end Syria’s civil war and close Iraq’s sectarian divide, because those conflicts are keeping ISIS alive. We need to lash up with our allies, and ensure our intelligence services are working hand-in-hand to dismantle the global network that supplies money, arms, propaganda and fighters to the terrorists.”
She didn’t mention that the money supplied to the terrorists is overwhelmingly from donors in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Gulf states closely allied with the U.S. Or that the current U.S. air campaign over Syria is, unlike that of Russia, illegal, opposed by the internationally recognized government in Damascus and lacking UN approval. Her “major foreign policy address” could not address such small details.
Hillary did not mention her own crowning achievement as secretary of state—the savage destruction of Libya involving the death of about 30,000 people, the unleashing of the ugliest forms of tribalism, and ISIL’s securing of a beachhead around Sirte—even once.
In contrast she made repeated references to NATO, well aware no doubt that most Americans aren’t clear at all about what that is but think it must be something good. Like the UN, or the International Red Cross. (I doubt that one in ten knows what the acronym stands for—the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—or realizes that it has only been deployed well outside the North Atlantic region, in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and North Africa.)
“This is someone [Trump] who has threatened to abandon our allies in NATO,” Clinton thundered (as though the peoples of Europe had ever earnestly sought, or are begging to maintain that Cold War, specifically anti-Russian, alliance).
It’s true that Trump has—on occasion and inconsistently—labeled NATO “obsolete” and opined that it should have been dissolved years ago. Whether he truly believes this is unclear. As Hillary says, his “ideas are dangerously incoherent” and he can withdraw or deny such comments at any time. But Trump’s statements about NATO, however vague, are actually the most intelligent and welcome statements he’s made in the course of his campaign.
The fact is, beginning in 1999 at her husband Bill’s orders, the NATO alliance designed as a binding military pact uniting West European countries against the Soviet Union from 1949—that should have been dissolved in 1990 when the Warsaw Pact formed in response shut down—has relentlessly expanded to encircle Russia. That’s post-Cold War Russia, with a military budget about 7% of the U.S. figure. Some NATO leaders aim to ultimately swallow Ukraine—which just happens to have been part of the Russian state from the 1670s to the Bolshevik Revolution, when it was made a soviet socialist republic until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Its economy including its munitions industry are inextricably interwoven with Russia’s; its eastern regions are peopled by ethnic Russians; it shares a 1,400 mile long border with Russia.
Does it not make sense that Moscow would see the incorporation of Ukraine, especially one headed by the current Russophobic leadership, into an anti-Russian military alliance as threatening and unacceptable?
Yet Hillary has been a ferocious advocate for the infinite expansion of the alliance, its wars that have produced dysfunctional U.S. client states (Kosovo, Bosnia-Herzegovina) in the former Yugoslavia, and its provocative moves on Russia’s doorstep. But in her speech, avoiding any reference to that expansion—the key geopolitical change of the last quarter-century—she proclaimed: “Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep.” She never explains why that doorstep has advanced (despite Reagan’s promises to Gorbachev) to include Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania to begin with. Or why it has bordered Russia itself since the inclusion of the former soviet socialist republics of Estonia and Latvia, which share a 508 kilometer border with Russia.
The “military action in Ukraine” that she alludes to refers to separatists’ resistance to the U.S.-backed coup in February 2014, surely supported by Russia at some level, and surely by Russian public opinion, but you notice that the Pentagon has produced precious little evidence for large scale “military actions.” And the annexation of Crimea (Russian from 1783 to 1954, when it was transferred to the Ukrainian SSR within the old Soviet Union) was only a “military action” in that the 25,000 Russian troops stationed there by treaty were deployed to secure government buildings.
And do not expect Hillary to ever inform her audiences that Sevastopol on Crimean Peninsula is Russia’s only year-round ice-free port except Murmansk north of the Arctic Circle; that the Russian Black Sea Fleet has been headquartered there without interruption since 1783; and that the expulsion of the Russians and their replacement with NATO forces would constitute a truly existential threat to the Russian state.
It would in fact be hard to build a case convincing to the American people that all these countries need to be locked into an alliance with the U.S. and obliged to pay out 2% of their GDPs on military expenses in order to protect them from some imaginary Russian invasion. (From a rational standpoint, it would be precisely like persuading the Russian people that Moscow should head up an alliance including Canada, Mexico and Cuba to secure them against U.S. aggression.)
But the expansion of NATO to include Ukraine has been a pet project of the former Madame Secretary. Clinton chose as her Under Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a former aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, neocon and wife of the powerful neocon Republican pundit (John McCain advisor and recently declared Hillary supporter) Robert Kagan. Nuland already had a rich history of warmongering when she embarked on a plan to topple the elected government in Ukraine and replace it with one that would join NATO.
She boasted publically that the U.S. had spent $ 5 billion by 2014 in an effort to, as she put it so quaintly and dishonestly, “support Ukraine’s European aspirations.” The result was the coup in February 2014 and consequent civil war that has taken over 8,000 lives, including hundreds killed by the neo-fascist Azov Battalion which functions as a regiment of the National Guard.
The U.S. State Department echoed by the compliant media has methodically depicted these events as Russian interference, rather than the results of a U.S.-orchestrated “Color Revolution”-type regime change campaign. To anyone paying attention, the dishonesty, and the success of the propaganda prettifying the coup, is sickening.
Trump has, as Clinton notes, praised Vladimir Putin as someone to whom he’d award an A for leadership. She for her part calls him a “dictator,” a term she would never use for a U.S. ally such as Egypt’s Abdel Sisi or the Saudi king. She has compared the apparently popular president, who has deftly pushed Obama back from his 2013 threat to order a massive strike on Syria and cooperated in the conclusion of the Iran nuclear deal, to Hitler—an astonishing statement of historical illiteracy and propensity for sensationalism.
Hillary’s imperious message boils down to: We are the exceptional nation, which the world needs to maintain its “stability.”
“I believe in strong alliances; clarity in dealing with our rivals; and a rock-solid commitment to the values that have always made America great. And I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country – that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth. We are not a country that cowers behind walls. We lead with purpose, and we prevail.”
The peoples of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, know very well how “exceptional” a country the U.S. is, how seldom it “cowers behind walls,” how cheerfully and unapologetically it destroys countries using its “alliances”—even when the latter are jerry-rigged to provide a fig-leaf for what’s essentially unilateral action. Even when their member-lists are often padded with name-only participants such a tiny Pacific nations sometimes informed after the fact that they’re suscribers.
The youth of Iraq—93% of whom according to a recent poll view the U.S. as an enemy—know how U.S. “values” manifest themselves: in the form of “shock and awe” bombing, Abu Ghraib torture, Blackwater murders, and cowboy-managed “reconstruction” that in fact further divided and scourged an already ruined and humiliated country. There is nothing good that can be said about the war that Hillary so passionately supported, until it became politically impossible for her to continue to do so.
Madame Secretary looked regal Thursday night, in the worst way. She reminded me of the elfin Queen Galadriel, as played by Cate Blanchett, in The Lord of the Rings, in that scene where she stares into her magic mirror, sees a vision of the power of Sauron, and suddenly towers over Frodo, arms like dark hollows, arms flung high, and bellows:
“In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen! Not dark, but beautiful and terrible as the dawn! Treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the earth! All shall love me, and despair!”
Trump and Clinton are both servants of the enchanted ring called Capital. It is not at all clear who is more darkly and fatefully bound, or whose foreign policy, applauded by more devoted followers, would be more terrible and cause the greater despair among the people of this planet.
In response to the warrior-queen awaiting coronation, Bernie Sanders has sadly avoided the whole question of U.S. imperialism. (Among other things, he never uses the term.) It’s as though he accepts Chris Matthew’s smug pronouncement, “The American people don’t care about foreign policy.” The best Bernie could do last week was to say: “… when it comes to foreign policy, we cannot forget that Secretary Clinton voted for the war in Iraq, the worst foreign policy blunder in modern American history, and that she has been a proponent of regime change, as in Libya, without thinking through the consequences.”
Forgive me, Bernie—because I do of course hope you’ll win—but that comment was wimpish. Hillary’s Libya policy wasn’t a matter of not “thinking through consequences,” but a matter of calculated ruin of a modern state. It’s the difference from the “blunder” of accidental manslaughter and well-planned murder. (Recall how Madame Secretary cackled with hilarity after Col. Gadhafy was sodomized with a knife and assassinated in the desert by NATO’s friends.)
Like the CNN anchors who sometimes mention in passing Hillary’s “foreign policy blunders such as Libya,” Sanders cannot yet call out evil for what it is, but has to chalk it up to well-meaning mistakes lacking forethought.
But that level of criticism is the best the system can provide, the most it will allow. Mistakes were made. There were some intelligence flaws. There were blunders. To paraphrase Erich Segal’s Love Story: being the exceptional power means never having to say you’re sorry. You just acknowledge you fucked up, because hey, things like that happen. And let’s move on.
Had Bernie been the antiwar, anti-imperialist candidate throughout, rather than just repeating his (totally valid) tirade against Wall Street, he might have further sharpened his differences with Clinton. If he loses in California, and then betrays his following with a Clinton endorsement, he will be saying that more wars for regime change and more confrontation with Russia is worth some changes in party rules and some meaningless clauses on the party platform.
I would hope that any Bernie supporters (or anyone at all) who watched last night’s speech, or have read the on-line transcript, would buckle down on their opposition to this creature of Wall Street and the Democratic Party establishment. Better to vote not at all, if Clinton’s the nominee—and instead think about how best to topple whichever candidate wins.
The “billionaire class” that Bernie decries wants badly to suck you in. That’s why the party bosses praise Sanders for “bringing so many new young people into the process”—the better to eat you, my dear! They want you to love this queen, even as you despair of ever electing anybody better.
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie
Better, surely, to destroy the Ring that is the rigged economy, rigged political process and murderous foreign policy that Hillary so personifies.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion.
Flawed Logic: Swedish Writer Knocks Common Sense Into NATO Supporters
Sputnik | June 6, 2016
Over the past years, ordinary Swedes have been under immense pressure from high-ranking politicians and conventional media, who advocate scrapping the country’s trusted policy of non-alignment in favor of joining NATO. However, minority opinions still persist.
One of the stalwart opponents of joining NATO is the famous writer and journalist Jan Guillou, who last week wittily trounced his antagonists in a column for the tabloid newspaper Aftonbladet.
NATO supporters habitually try to scare everyone out of their wits with a sneak attack on Russia’s part, yet somehow fail to explain why Russia should endeavor such an attack, even if it is one of their trump cards, argued Guillou.
The Russian attack is to be expected “within a few years,” threatened the Swedish army chief Lieutenant General Brännström only half a year ago. Liberal pundits and their trusted military columnists applauded.
“I was not the only one to demand an explanation. What would Russia gain by attacking Sweden? Conquer more forest and iron ore? On the other hand, what would Russia lose by such an attack?” wrote Guillou.
According to Guillou, this question is much easier to answer: the aftermath would be ruined foreign trade and a de facto state of war between Russia and the EU.
“Not a single Liberal could explain why on earth Russia would commit such an economic and political suicide, yet they continued with their saber-rattling as vigorously as before: Sweden should join NATO to fence off the Russian attack that would inevitably ensue if it continued outside NATO,” Jan Guillou wrote.
Of late, Sweden’s military bosses have come up with an “updated” and more nuanced threat. Now, Putin is supposedly intending to limit himself with capturing “only” the strategic island of Gotland, which lies some 100 kilometers off mainland Sweden’s coast. This scenario is part of the following theory: at some point, Russia is inevitably bound to conquer one or several Baltic states (which according to Western think-tanks is manageable in only 60 hours).
A column in the tabloid newspaper Expressen, which is one of NATO’s most keen supporters in Sweden went even on to threaten the poor islanders with Russian nuclear arms. As usual, however, the author refrained from disclosing what joy Russia would get from nuking Gotland, which is quite typical of NATO agitators.
According to Guillou, the biggest problem with a feasible NATO membership is that Sweden would have to abandon its independent foreign policy and become a cog in the US military machine.
“For the question in all its simplicity is as follows: should Sweden cede its [independent] security policy to a Washington-led system through NATO membership?” Guillou asked rhetorically.
“Considering America’s dubious track record when it comes to foolish wars in recent years, it would be a dark perspective. What about future remakes of Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? <…> As if that were not enough, Sweden would also end up in the same military alliance with Turkey, led by a war-mad dictator, and states such as Hungary and Poland, which are moving away from democracy.”
These are real questions, which incidentally are avoided at all costs by pro-NATO debaters. Instead, they go on in circles with their increasingly stale rhetoric about Russia’s “aggression.” Sweden’s NATO campaign stinks, concluded Guillou.
Jan Guillou is a popular Swedish writer and journalist. His fame in Sweden is rooted in his best-selling detective series, as well as his time as an investigative reporter. Guillou is renowned for his consequent anti-US stance and was previously known for calling Washington “the greatest mass murderer of our time.”
NATO Baltic wargames have ‘political, economic & military motives’
RT | June 5, 2016
The US strategy in Europe is aimed at strengthening its control over EU and NATO states, selling more military equipment to its European allies to make super-profits for its military-industrial complex and to isolate Russia, political author Diana Johnstone told RT.
NATO is holding major sea drills in the Baltic Sea. The BALTOPS exercises, which kicked off on Friday in Estonia and will continue until June 19, involve 15 member states of the military alliance as well as Finland and Sweden.
RT: NATO is conducting major drills across the Baltic. Is there a bigger political message here or is it just an exercise?
Diana Johnstone: Yes, they have been doing exercises like this for quite a while and the pretext changed. At least this time they are not pretending like with the missile shield that it is to protect Europe from Iran. The line has changed now, because the US is coming right out with their aggressive actions toward Russia. You have to see the political, economic and military motives for this. The economic motive is obviously to sell more US military equipment to European allies, who don’t need it and can’t afford it. But that is important for the US military-industrial complex. Politically this is the strengthening of US control of EU countries and NATO countries, and to isolate Russia – to carry out this famous [Zbigniew] Brzezinski strategy of separating Russia from Europe to promote US hegemony over the Europe and the world.
RT: A lot of people in Eastern Europe oppose this kind of strategy. The general public is not particularly happy about this, are they?
DJ: Of course those Baltic States, whose governments by the way are satellite governments of the US. The top officials studied in the West, in the US and Canada. These have gone from being Russian satellites to be American satellites. They pretty much follow the US direction. But that is not the case of the rest of Europe, which is simply ignoring this, like it is not happening. The Czechs are aware of it, so they are protesting. But for instance, here in France nobody mentions this, because frankly people wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. This is destroying defense of Europe. It is just turning into an instrument of US policy.
RT: Last week, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced plans to strengthen defenses, particularly against Russian foreign policy calling it “a defensive and proportionate response to Russia’s actions in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine.” At the same time recently he said that they strived “for a more constructive relationship with Russia.” Shouldn’t it be more talking going on, rather than deploying troops and hardware?
JS: We are used to now seeing the US – in the Middle East they say one thing and do the opposite. It’s just amazing to me that people can say things like that. It is totally absurd. Obviously there is nothing offensive about the people of Crimea going back to Russia, to which they belonged before… There is not tiny bit of an aggressive move of Russia towards the West. That is a total fiction… So these people are just lying. They cannot know that.
The Bigger Nuclear Risk: Trump or Clinton?
A U.S. government photograph of Operation Redwing’s Apache nuclear explosion on July 9, 1956.
By Robert Parry | Consortium News | June 2, 2016
Hillary Clinton made a strong case for why handing the nuclear codes over to a President Donald Trump would be a scary idea, but there may be equal or even greater reason to fear turning them over to her. In perhaps the most likely area where nuclear war could break out – along Russia’s borders – Clinton comes across as the more belligerent of the two.
In Clinton’s world view, President Vladimir Putin, who has been elected multiple times and has approval ratings around 80 percent, is nothing more than a “dictator” who is engaged in “aggression” that threatens NATO following the U.S.-backed “regime change” in Ukraine.
“Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep,” she declared. But stop for a second and think about what Clinton said: she sees Russia responding to an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine – which installed a virulently anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border – as Moscow acting aggressively “on NATO’s doorstep.”
That’s the same NATO, whose job it was to protect Western Europe from the Soviet Union, that — following the Soviet Union’s collapse — added country after country right up to Russia’s border. In other words, NATO muscled its way into Russia’s face and has announced plans to incorporate Ukraine as well, but when Russia reacts, it’s the one doing the provoking.
Clinton’s neoconservative interpretation of what’s happening in Eastern Europe is so upside-down and inside-out that it could ultimately become the flashpoint for a nuclear war between Russia and the West.
While she sees Russia as the “aggressor” against NATO, the Russians see NATO moving troops up to its borders and watch the deployment of anti-ballistic-missile systems in Romania and Poland, thus making a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia more feasible. Russia has made clear that it views these military deployments, just kilometers from major Russian cities, as an existential threat.
In response, Russia is raising its alert levels and upgrading its strategic forces. Yet, Hillary Clinton believes the Russians have no reason to fear NATO’s military encirclement and no right to resist U.S.-supported coups in countries on Russia’s periphery. It is just such a contradiction of viewpoints that can turn a spark into an uncontrollable inferno.
What might happen, for instance, if Ukraine’s nationalist — and even neo-Nazi — militias, which wield increasing power over the corrupt and indecisive regime in Kiev, received modern weaponry from a tough-talking Clinton-45 administration and launched an offensive to exterminate ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine and to reclaim Crimea, where 96 percent of the voters opted to secede from Ukraine and rejoin Russia?
A President Hillary Clinton would have talked herself into a position of supporting this “liberation” of “Russian-occupied territory” and her clever propagandists would surely present this “heroic struggle” as a war of good against evil, much as they justified bloody U.S. invasions of Iraq and Libya which Clinton supported as U.S. senator and Secretary of State, respectively.
What if the Ukrainian forces then fired missiles striking Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol in Crimea, killing some of the 20,000 Russian troops stationed there and inflicting damage on Russia’s Black Sea fleet? What if Kremlin hardliners finally got their way and unleashed the Russian army to launch a real invasion of Ukraine, crushing its military, rumbling through to Kiev and accomplishing their own “regime change”?
(Photo credit: AIPAC)
How would President Hillary Clinton respond? Would she put herself in the shoes of Russia’s leaders and search for some way to de-escalate or would she get high-and-mighty and escalate the crisis by activating NATO military forces to counter this “Russian aggression”?
Given what we know about Clinton’s tough-talking persona, the odds are good that she would opt for an escalation – and that could set the stage for nuclear war, possibly starting because the Russians would fear the imminence of a NATO first strike, made more possible by those ABM bases in Romania and Poland.
Clinton’s Non-Nuclear Wars
There are other areas in the world where a President Hillary Clinton would likely go to war albeit at a sub-nuclear level. During the campaign, she has made clear that she intends to invade Syria once she takes office, although she frames her invasions as humanitarian gestures, such as creating “safe zones” and “no-fly zones.”
In other words, although she condemns Russian “aggression,” she advocates aggressive war herself, seemingly incapable of recognizing her hypocrisies and only grudgingly acknowledging her “mistakes,” such as her support for the invasion of Iraq.
So, on Thursday, even as she made strong points about Trump’s mismatched temperament for becoming Commander-in-Chief, she flashed a harsh temperament of her own that also was unsettling, although in a different way.
Trump shoots from the lip and has a thin skin, while Clinton is tightly wound and also has a thin skin. Trump lets his emotions run wild while Clinton is excessively controlled. Trump engages in raucous give-and-take with his critics; Clinton tries to hide her decision-making (and emails) from her critics.
It’s hard to say which set of behaviors is more dangerous. One can imagine Trump having free-form or chaotic diplomatic encounters with allies and adversaries alike, while Clinton would plot and scheme, insisting on cooperation from allies and demanding capitulation from adversaries.
Clinton sprinkled her speech denouncing Trump with gratuitous insults aimed at Putin and undiplomatic slaps at Russia, such as, “If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”
In short, there is reason to fear the election of either of these candidates, one because of his unpredictability and the other because of her rigidity. How, one might wonder, did the two major political parties reach this juncture, putting two arguably unfit personalities within reach of the nuclear codes?
[For more on this topic, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Yes, Hillary Clinton Is a Neocon” and “Would a Clinton Win Mean More Wars?’]
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
Libya: How to Bring Down a Nation
By Patrick Howlett-Martin | CounterPunch | May 31, 2016
More than 30,000 Libyans died during seven months of bombing by an essentially tripartite force – France, Great Britain, United States – which clearly favored the rebels. “The most successful mission in NATO’s history”, in the imprudent words of NATO Secretary General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a Dane, in Tripoli in October 2011[1].
French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s eagerness to support a military intervention with the purported aim of protecting the civilian population contrasts with the reception offered to the Libyan president, Muammar Gaddafi, when he visited Paris in December 2007 and signed major military agreements worth some 4.5 billion euros along with cooperation agreements for the development of nuclear energy for peacetime uses. The contracts that Libya seemed no longer willing to pursue focused on 14 Dassault Rafale multirole fighter jets and their armament (the same model that France sold or is trying to sold to Egypt´s General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the self-proclaimed marshal), 35 Eurocopter helicopters, six patrol boats, a hundred armored vehicles, and the overhaul of 17 Mirage F1 fighters sold by Dassault Aviation in the 1970s[2].
The major oil companies (Occidental Petroleum, State Oil, Petro-Canada…) working in Libya helped Libya pay the 1.5 billion dollars in compensation that the Libyan regime had agreed to pay to the families of the victims of Pan Am flight 103[3]. At the time, the compensation was intended to be one of the conditions for Libya to be reaccepted into the community of international relations.
The principal Libyan investment funds (LAFICO-Libyan Arab Foreign Investment Company; LIA-Libyan Investment Authority) were shareholders in many Italian and British corporations (Fiat, UniCredit, Juventus, the Pearson Group, owner of the Financial Times, and the London School of Economics, where Gaddafi was addressed as “Brother Leader” during a video conference in December 2010 and his son Saif was awarded a PhD in 2008). The New York investment bank Goldman Sachs was sued in 2014 by a Libyan fund (Libyan Investment Authority) which had lost more than 1.2 billion dollars between January and April 2008 after the American firm took a commission of 350 million dollars for investing their money in highly speculative derivatives[4].
Muammar Gaddafi had been received with full honors by the major powers some months earlier: in addition to the reception in grand style in Paris, where he was a guest for five days in 2007, he was received in Spain in December 2007, in Moscow in October 2008, and in Rome in August 2010, two years after accepting the Italian gift of 5 billion dollars as compensation for the Italian occupation of Libya from 1913 to 1943. And also of note are the five trips to Tripoli in three years by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a paid senior advisor to the investment bank JPMorgan Chase[5]. Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was received in Tripoli in July 2007, where he announced the beginning of a partnership for the installation of a nuclear power plant in Libya. The European Union was ready to facilitate access to the European market for Libyan agricultural exports[6]. Libya was invited by the NATO Chiefs of Defense to the Maritime Commanders’ Meeting (MARCOMET) in Toulon on May 25-28, 2008.
A policy that recalls the one towards the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. The Iraqi leader was invited to Paris in June 1972 and September 1975; an agreement was signed in June 1977 for the sale to Baghdad of 32 Mirage F1 combat aircraft. A coincidence that didn’t do either of them any good in the long run.
Arab military leaders (veterans of Afghanistan and members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, with ties to Al-Qaeda) helped overthrow Gaddafi. One of the principal military leaders of the rebellion, Abdel Hakim Belhadj (a.k.a. Abu Abdullah al-Sadik), then Tripoli Security Chief and today the main leader of the conservative Islamist al-Watan Party had been arrested in Bangkok in 2004, tortured by CIA agents, and delivered to Gaddafi’s Abu Salim prison. He is now the main ISIL leader in Lybia. Jaballah Matar was kidnapped from his home in Cairo by the CIA in 1990 and then handed over to Libyan officials[7] Documents seized after the death of Gaddafi reveal close cooperation between Libyan, American (CIA), and British (MI6) intelligence services[8].
Under Gaddafi, Islamic terrorism was virtually non-existent. Prior to the U.S. led bombing campaign in 2011, Libya had the highest Human Development Index, the lowest infant mortality and the highest life expectancy in all Africa. Today Lybia is a wrecked state.
In January 2012, three months after the end of hostilities, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, reported the widespread use of torture, summary executions, and rape in Libyan prisons. At the same time, the organization Doctors Without Borders decided to withdraw from the prisons in Misrata because of the ongoing torture of detainees[9].
The NATO intervention in Libya, involving most member countries under a humanitarian pretext, set an unfortunate precedent for efforts to resolve the Syrian crisis: the attack by French and British warplanes on the Warfallah tribe, who remained faithful to Muammar Gaddafi, and on the convoy carrying the Libyan leader and one of his sons, leading directly to Gaddafi’s death under deplorable circumstances. The images by videographer Ali Algadi and journalist Tracey Sheldon provide a graphic account of the Libyan leader being dragged from a drain pipe on October 20, 2011 and killed shortly thereafter. These circumstances belie the pseudo-humanitarian nature of the military intervention and tarnish the image of the “Libyan Spring”[10].
The death of U.S. Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens and one of his aides in a fire set in the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi in September 2012, revealing the breadth of CIA activities, in which the Consulate served as a façade. The recruitment by the CIA on its Benghazi base[11] of combatants from the city of Derna for the conflict in Syria, fief of the Islamists (Al-Bittar brigade), against President Bashar al-Assad, has inescapable parallels with the recruitment in 1979, again by the CIA, of the mujahedeen against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, with all the consequences that we are well familiar with, and particularly the birth of Sunni jihadism.
The car bomb attack on the French Embassy in Tripoli in April 2013; the escape of 1,200 detainees from the Benghazi prison; the murder of the human rights lawyer Abdel Salam al-Mismari in July; and the attack on the Swedish Consulate in Benghazi in October 2013 all highlighted the inability of the authorities to gain control over the security situation in Libya as it was overrun by heavily armed militias. In July 2013, Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan threatened to bomb Libyan ports in the Benghazi region that were in the hands of militias who were profiting by exporting the oil now under their control. In October, the Prime Minister was kidnapped by 150 armed men in the center of Tripoli and held for six hours to protest the abduction on Libyan soil of Abu Anas al-Libi in a secret American airport operation. Al-Libi was accused of being one of the leaders of Al-Qaeda and later died while in custody in the United States.
The year 2015 began with Libya bereft of all institutions. It is ruled by a motley group of coalitions vying for power, based in Tripoli (Farj Libya, which controls the central bank), Benghazi (Shura Council, consisting of Ansar al-Sharia, facing off against the Libyan National Army of the renegade general Khalifa Hiftar), and in Tobruk-Bayda (offshoot of the National Transition Council, enjoying international diplomatic recognition after the June 2013 elections).
The security and health situation for the civil population is near disastrous. When I visited the country in 1994 it was a model for public health and education, and boasted the highest per capita income in Africa. It was clearly the most advanced of all Arab countries in terms of the legal status of women and families in Libyan society (half of the students at the university of Tripoli were women). The aggression against the presenter Sarah Al-Massalati in 2012, the poet Aicha Almagrabi in February 2013, and the women’s rights activist Magdalene Ubaida, now in exile in London, bear grim testimony to their legal status in post-Gaddafi Libya. The city of Benghazi is now semi-destroyed; schools and universities are mostly closed[12].
It is the theatre of fratricidal clashes between rival factions financed and armed by a series of sorcerer’s apprentices A general who has been stationed in the United States for 27 years commands a motley coalition with military backing from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia while Islamist groups claiming allegiance to ISIL and well entrenched in Sirte and Derna are able to spread their influence thanks to the institutional crisis. and, Qatar, Turkey, and Sudan supporting Farj Libya on the other.
Gaddafi, leader of the Libyan revolution, the Jamahiriya, in power from 1969 to 2011, gave a warning to Europe in an interview with French journalist Laurent Valdiguié of the Journal du Dimanche on the eve of the NATO intervention, in words that now seem prophetic:
“If one seeks to destabilize [Libya], there will be chaos, Bin Laden, armed factions. That is what will happen. You will have immigration, thousands of people will invade Europe from Libya. And there will no longer be anyone to stop them. Bin Laden will base himself in North Africa […]. You will have Bin Laden at your doorstep. This catastrophe will extend out of Pakistan and Afghanistan and reach all the way to North Africa”[13].
Libya has become a hub for illegal trafficking, particularly of African emigrants under conditions reminiscent of the slave trade. According to Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, the refugee smuggling market in Libya was worth 323 million dollars in 2014. In the first five months of 2015, more than 50,000 undocumented immigrants have reached Italy from sub-Saharan Africa via Libya; 1,791 of them lost their lives at sea[14]. Prior to the initiation of hostilities, 1.5 million sub-Saharan Africans worked in Libya in generally menial jobs (oil industry, agriculture, services, public sector). Darker days at sea are still to come.
Notes.
[1] “NATO chief Rasmussen ‘proud’ as Libya mission ends”, BBC News, October 31, 2011.
[2]. Agence France Presse, December 11, 2007.
[3]. International Herald Tribune, March 24, 2011.
[4] Jeremy Anderson, “Goldman to reveal income linked to Libyan lawsuit”, International New York Times, November 25, 2014.
[5]. The Telegraph, March 23, 2012.
[6]. O´Globo, July 26, 2007.
[7] Souad Mekhennet, Eric Schmitt, “Libyan rebels seek to shed El Qaeda past”, International Herald Tribune, July 19, 2011.
[8]. Rod Nordland, “Files note close CIA ties with Qaddafi spy unit”, International Herald Tribune, September 5, 2011.
[9]. International Herald Tribune, January 28-29, 2012.
[10]. Borzou Daragahi, “Call for probe into Libyan Civilian Deaths”, Financial Times, May 14, 2012.
[11] Seymour Hersh, “U.S. Effort to Arm Jihadis in Syria. The Scandal Behind the Benghazi Undercover CIA Facility”, Global Research, Washington’s Blog, April 15, 2014.
[12] Abdel Sharif Kouddous, “Report from the Front: Libya’s Descent Into Chaos”, The Nation, February 25, 2015.
[13] Journal du Dimanche, March 5, 2011 (www.lejdd.fr)
[14] Source: International Organization for Migration and the European Commission.
Patrick Howlett-Martin is a career diplomat living in Paris.
Fake “Humanitarians” and Fake “Leftists” taking Canada down the wrong path
Special Envoy of the UNHCR addresses the Security Council meeting on the continuing conflict in Syria. Credit: UN Photo/ Mark Garten/ flickr
By Mark Taliano | American Herald Tribune | May 30, 2016
There’s really no excuse for supporting the NATO/terror position. We’ve seen the destruction of Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, now Syria, all built on lies, all beneath the guise of “humanitarian interventions”. Since people with any sense of historical memory can not legitimately plead ignorance, supporters of the terrorist invasion of Syria fall into the category of “fake humanitarians”. They aren’t “progressive” or “left” when they support the criminal violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
Canadian peace activist Ken Stone, recently returned from Syria, expresses similar sentiments in his newly released book, Defiant Syria|dispatches from the Second Tour of Peace to Syria. He explains,
“The point for me is to ask why otherwise intelligent people can fall for such shit (referring to a 2015 New Internationalist magazine article: “The forgotten revolution of Syria”), and not once but repeatedly. It’s not as if Syria is the very first government targeted for regime change by the USA. It’s not that people are unaware of the fact that the first casualty of war is the truth … there is never a shortage of “leftists” in the West who can be either bought or convinced through incredible naivété, warped political outlook, or Eurocentric arrogance, that the motives of Empire are good.”
People such as Ken, who have visited Syria and have seen with their own eyes the devastation wrought by Western-supported terrorists against civilization, have less tolerance for the lies, the propaganda and the “fake humanitarians” who enable it all.
Stone doesn’t mince words when he describes some of his on-the-ground observations of Homs, Syria; observations fortified by his historical memory of NATO’s imperial destruction elsewhere:
To their detriment, the fake “humanitarians” and pseudo “leftists” are shielded from such on-the-ground realities.
In a later chapter, “Palmyra: Bride Of The Desert”, Stone also bemoans the self-proclaimed “leftists” who cast the Russians as “imperialists” and as guilty as the West in the war against Syria – conveniently forgetting that Russia is legally in Syria, while NATO is not:
“It’s true,” he writes, “that Russia is unfortunately no longer a socialist country. However, it doesn’t act like an imperialist country either. Mr. Putin consistently respects the sovereignty of other countries, such as Syria, and speaks up at the United Nations for the observance of international law, which the USA, priding itself as “the exceptional country” and the “sole indispensable country”, tramples on almost every day.”
This resonates with the author’s earlier piece, “Western Hegemony vs Russian Sanity”, and the “Saker’s” observations of the differences between the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model” and the “Russian Multi-polar Model”.
Sustainable evidence demonstrates, for example, that the current Russian multi-polar model respects the rule of international law, ideological and cultural pluralism, and the use of military force as a last resort.
The illegal Western war of aggression against Syria, on the other hand, is consistent with the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model” which defies the rule of international law, negates ideological and cultural pluralism, and uses military violence as a first resort.
The West’s invasion contradicts the rule of international law: Russia is in Syria legally, whereas the West is not; it negates Syria’s ideological and cultural pluralism and seeks to replace it with a Wahhabist stooge government or an assortment of stooge governments in balkanized states; and it demonstrates the West’s propensity to use military violence as a first resort – the invasion, after all, was planned well in advance.
Given the fact of the West’s criminality, consistent with the “Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperialist Model”, and the concurrent failures of the “fake humanitarians” and the fake “left” to reconcile themselves to evidence-based findings and historical memory, Stone reiterates some concrete steps that should be taken by those of us who support foreign policy trajectories consistent with peace and the rule of international law, rather than the current reality of war and barbarism.
Important steps would include normalizing diplomatic relations with Syria, ending illegal sanctions, withdrawing from all criminal military interventions against Syria, and withdrawing from NATO.
Canada needs to assert an independent foreign policy, and it needs to reject the current barbarity implicit in its status as a vassal appendage of the Anglo-Zionist Unipolar Imperial Model. This is what Real Change would look like.
Mark is a retired high school teacher.
Poroshenko appoints former NATO chief Rasmussen ‘non-staff adviser’
RT | May 28, 2016
A former NATO Secretary General has been chosen as a new “non-staff” adviser to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, according to a decree bearing his signature. However, the document implies that the ex-chief is yet to agree to the appointment.
“Appoint Anders Fogh Rasmussen as adviser to the President of Ukraine outside the official staff (subject to his consent),” says the decree also published on the Ukrainian president’s official website.
Rasmussen was the twelfth Secretary General of NATO in the period from August 2009 to September 2014. He was also Danish Prime Minister from 2001 to 2009. In 2014, Poroshenko awarded Rasmussen, who still was NATO Secretary General at that time, with the Order of Freedom – the highest Ukrainian award for foreign citizens – for his “significant personal contribution to the development of cooperation between Ukraine and NATO as well as for considerable support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity.”
Rasmussen is yet to comment and either confirm or deny his appointment. Last year, US Senator John McCain, also appointed by Kiev to a similar position, eventually turned down the proposal claiming that the US constitution prohibited him from getting on board.
The assignment of the role to Rasmussen comes soon after Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council adopted a program for the reorganization of Ukraine’s defense industry as well as military in line with NATO standards on May 20.
“We are beginning real reorganization of the defense and security sector in order to join NATO,” Poroshenko said at the time, commenting on this decision. He stressed that Ukraine had not been directly making steps for immediate accession to the Alliance but called the move “The Rubicon” that Ukrainian armed forces and the defense industry would have to “pass” to adapt to NATO standards, as reported by TASS.
The deputy head of the Russian parliament’s defense committee, Sergey Zhigarev, called Rasmussen’s appointment to the position of the presidential adviser a sign of the Ukrainian president’s mistrust of his own people.
“This is a very bad sign. It shows that he [Poroshenko] does not trust his own citizens that entrusted him with leading their country,” Zhigarev told Sputnik.
In the meantime, Rasmussen is not the first foreign citizen in Ukraine’s Presidential Administration as some foreigners even held ministerial posts in the Ukrainian government. In 2014, Poroshenko appointed Natalie Ann Jaresko, an American-born Ukrainian investment banker, as Ukraine’s Minister of Finance, while former Georgian Health Minister Alexander Kvitashvili took the post of the head of the Ukrainian Health ministry and Aivaras Abromavicius, a Lithuanian businessman, became Ukraine’s Minister of Economy and Trade. They held their posts till the new government was installed in April 2016.
Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland’s former deputy prime minister, now serves as Poroshenko’s representative in the Ukrainian government while former Slovakian Finance Minister Ivan Miklos is now the head of a group of Ukrainian prime minister’s advisers.
Meanwhile, former Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, wanted for trial on corruption charges at home, was granted Ukrainian citizenship so that he could take the post of the Ukrainian Odessa region.
Saakashvili was appointed as governor of Ukraine’s Odessa Region in May of 2015, after which he brought in several members of his old Georgian team, including Ukraine’s current national police chief Khatia Dekanoidze, who was Georgia’s education minister; Deputy Interior Minister Eka Zguladze, who held a similar position in the Georgian government; Deputy General Prosecutor David Sakvarelidze, who held a similar position in the Georgian government as well, and was also Saakashvili’s lawyer; and Gizo Uglava, Ukraine’s current Head of the Anticorruption Bureau and Georgia’s former deputy general prosecutor.
Nominally Populist Sweden Democrats Help Ratify NATO Deal
Sputnik – May 27, 2016
After Sweden Democrats reneged on earlier pledges to make a last-ditch effort to stall the decision, the Swedish parliament effortlessly railroaded through an agreement which essentially allows NATO to deploy forces in Sweden and brings the non-aligned Nordic country yet another step closer to the alliance.
The Swedish parliament ratified the so-called Host Nation Support Agreement (HNSA) after a proposal by the Left Party to put off the decision by one year, initially backed by Sweden Democrats, was voted down by 291 votes to 21.
The right-wing populist Sweden Democrats made an about-face ahead of the vote, abandoning plans team up with the Left Party, which argued that the hotly-debated deal posed a significant risk to the rights and freedoms stipulated in Sweden‘s constitution.
Despite earlier pledges by party leader Jimmie Åkesson to join efforts with the Left to stop the agreement he claimed posed “a threat to Sweden’s neutrality,” the Sweden Democrats had second thoughts in the eleventh hour and voted unanimously in favor of the controversial deal with NATO.
Remarkably, the party has been against closer NATO ties from the very beginning and officially stays true to its ideals.
Bizarrely, several Sweden Democrats party members claimed on Twitter and Facebook that they actually voted against the agreement, and that the parliament had published erroneous information on its website, news outlet Fria Tider reported.
The Left Party’s leader, Jonas Sjöstedt, condemned their usual antagonists’ U-turn.
“I am not at all surprised. The Sweden Democrats have been very wobbly on issues to do with freedom from alliances for some time now,” he said as quoted by the tabloid newspaper Aftonbladet.
Originally signed in September 2014, the HNSA allows the alliance to deploy helicopters, aircraft, ships and personnel across Swedish territory, but only at Sweden’s request. Since the agreement involved changes to Swedish regulation regarding privileges and immunities afforded NATO staff, a parliamentary ratification was necessary.
Additionally, public opinion in traditionally neutral Sweden, which boasts several centuries of non-alignment, has markedly shifted towards NATO in recent years. A survey by pollster Sifo, released in September 2015, marked the first time the majority of Swedes actually were in favor of NATO.
The HNSA may be seen as a major victory for Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist, who, despite formally denouncing perspectives of joining NATO, prepared a long series of agreements that would steadily increase Sweden’s involvement with the alliance.
Yesterday, the Swedish government entrusted the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency MSB with negotiating a cooperation agreement with NATO’s Center for Strategic Communications in Riga, Latvia, in order to address the “information war” on Russia’s part, Swedish television network SVT reported. Hultqvist repeatedly urged Sweden to join the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence (STRATCOM), which is charged with targeting propaganda in traditional and social media.
Despite the soothing rhetoric that such measures “would not affect non-alignment,” today Sweden has emerged as a full-fledged NATO member in all but name.
Sweden’s deliberate creeping towards NATO may set an example for its fellow neutral neighbor Finland, which has also come under immense pressure recently with respect to NATO membership.
In late April, the Finnish Foreign Ministry published an “independent” report exploring the consequences of NATO membership for Helsinki. The report’s primary conclusion was that the Nordic duo should stay together: either in both joining the alliance or declining the generous offer.
Swedish Left and Right Unite to Sink NATO Deal
Sputnik – May 24, 2016
The left and the right generally have few topics they agree upon, especially in struggling, immigrant-immersed Sweden. Surprisingly, an “unholy” alliance between the Left Party and the far-right Sweden Democrats may sink the controversial NATO deal, on which Sweden’s government has been pinning its hopes.
In most contexts, the Left Party and the Sweden Democrats regard each other as sworn enemies, yet they have recently opened up to a temporary alliance against a “greater evil,” as both intend to uphold Sweden’s time-tested policy of non-alignment. This week, Sweden’s parliament is set to decide on the so-called Host Nation Support Agreement (HNSA), which would allow NATO forces to conduct exercises on the country’s territory and come to its aid in times of crisis.
Critics of the agreement suggest that the country is simply attempting to enter the North Atlantic Treaty through the back door. Earlier, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist of the ruling Social Democratic Party, an ardent supporter of stronger ties with NATO, dismissed such opinions, calling them the “undergrowth of the debate.” Hultqvist is also known for brushing aside the public’s concern regarding NATO’s eventual deployment of nuclear weapons. “It is not Moscow that governs Sweden’s security policy,” Hultqvist said, as quoted by Svenska Dagbladet.
However, the NATO agreement’s critics fear that if it is voted through, it would represent the final nail in the coffin of Swedish neutrality and non-alignment. The government proposal clearly declared that Sweden would unequivocally support an EU country (the majority of which are NATO countries) in the event of an attack.
“International security must rest on international law, cooperation and a strong global regulatory framework under the UN leadership. The Left is strongly critical of how NATO struggles to take over a larger role at the expense of the United Nations. Instead of contributing troops to the EU’s and NATO’s forces, Sweden should prioritize enhancing the UN’s peacekeeping efforts,” Stig Henriksson of the Left Party wrote in an opinion piece in Göteborgs-Posten.
Another notable aspect of the NATO agreement is the weight that is placed on the regulatory framework for the construction of NATO bases in Sweden. This is equal to a green light to NATO’s military infrastructure, wherefrom military operations against Russia may be conducted.
“Future NATO forces stationed on Swedish territory would only increase the tensions and thus the risk of war in our region,” Stig Henriksson wrote.
Meanwhile, the NGO No to NATO has been gathering signatures to stop the controversial agreement and organizing rallies advocating non-alignment. A demonstration in central Stockholm on Saturday gathered thousands of campaigners, including high-profile politicians such as former Defense Minister Thage Petterson, a notable opponent of NATO.
“The fall of the Berlin Wall kindled hopes that we would no longer worry about a new war in Europe. One lesson we drew from the Cold War was that Sweden strengthened peace in Europe by staying outside of NATO. Now, tensions in Europe have increased, which is not something we dreamt about. Instead, we dreamt of peace and detente,” the former Social Democratic Defense Minister told the audience.
Petterson argued that Sweden’s continuous involvement with NATO would only increase tension in Europe, whereas the much-debated Host Country Agreement could serve as a springboard to full membership.
Of late, pressure on Sweden to join NATO has been intensifying due to a relentless campaign of the government and mainstream media, urging Swedes to embrace NATO as the only defense against “aggressive” Russia.Last week, NATO’s secretary general Jens Stoltenberg called the formally still neutral Finland and Sweden “NATO’s closest allies,” stressing the importance of the two countries’ contribution to the security of the Baltic Sea Region.
In July, Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist is set to join the NATO Summit in Warsaw. The idea was obviously to show that Sweden is delivering according to plan. Now there will be no fun trip to Poland.
Read more: Sweden and Finland Pretend to Fish for Russian Subs off Gotland
Why Obama Accused Russia of Showing No Interest in Nuke Reduction
Sputnik – May 23, 2016
US President Barack Obama tried to show Russia in a bad light when he said that Moscow is not doing enough to reduce its stockpile of nuclear weapons, but Russia has many reasons for not accepting Washington’s initiative, Svobodnaya Pressa asserted.
“The US president mentioned Russia, but preferred not to name other members of the official nuclear club, including China, the United Kingdom and France,” the media outlet noted, pointing out that several other nations are believed to have nuclear weapons, including India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.
Another major reason for Russia to keep its nukes intact involves Washington. The US has not ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all nuclear weapons in all environments. Moscow ratified the deal in 2000, but CTBT will only enter force when all signatories ratify it.
In addition, Moscow, according to the Svobodnaya Pressa, has to consider the funds that the US allocates for defense purposes – nearly $600 billion a year. Washington’s “gargantuan” military budget, as analyst Finian Cunningham described it, exceeds those of other big spenders, including China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, France, the UK, Germany, Japan and India.
But this is not the whole picture – alliances and affiliations also matter.”Three of these countries [France, the UK and Germany] are NATO members, while Japan has been a longtime US ally. This means that the gap [in military spending] between the US and Russia is even wider,” the media outlet explained.
Last week, Obama told Japan’s public broadcaster NHK that “we can go further” in reducing the stockpiles of Russian and US nuclear weapons “but so far Russia has not shown its self interest in doing more.”
Russian lawmaker Vyacheslav Tetekin pointed out that the US foreign policy is “disingenuous.”
“Any disarmament initiatives launched by US hawks, who are pretending to be ‘doves of peace,’ serve merely as an instrument designed to weaken their opponents. The Pentagon is making every effort to deploy its missile defense system, upgrading its nuclear weapons. Meanwhile they are offering Moscow to stop,” he said.
Earlier this month, the US-made Aegis Ashore base became operational in Romania. The site is part of a larger initiative aimed at creating a missile shield to cover the US and Europe from Iranian ballistic missiles. Russian officials have called the system a threat to the country, as well as global security.In this context, Moscow has no other option than to keep its nukes. Defense analyst Mikhail Alexandrov noted that Russia’s “nuclear weapons guarantee the country’s national security.”
Read more: Kim Jong Un Vows to Avoid Using Nukes Unless Sovereignty Violated
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New Book
The Garlic Book — 2026
Lies are Unbekoming | November 5, 2026
What The Garlic Book shows
The book is in four parts.
Part One, The Record, treats the history of garlic as evidence. From the clay garlic bulb placed in an Egyptian grave nearly six thousand years ago, through the Ebers Papyrus, through Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny and Galen, the Arab physicians under Avicenna, the medieval herbals, Culpeper, and the plague years, to the last era in which Western physicians prescribed garlic as a matter of course, which ran from 1850 to 1945. It closes with the living traditions that never stopped using it, and with the folklore of charms, vampires and the evil eye.
Part Two, The Chemistry and the Evidence, sets out what is known about why a clove has no smell until it is cut, and why the order of crush, rest and heat changes the medicine. It then reads the clinical evidence against the historical record — bacteria, blood and vessels, cancer epidemiology, metals and fatigue — and names the trials that went against garlic as directly as the trials that went for it, including the 2007 Stanford trial funded by the US National Institutes of Health which found that raw garlic, garlic powder and aged garlic extract moved LDL cholesterol no more than placebo did. It then turns to onion, garlic’s closest relative, and reads the newer evidence published since 2015, before closing with the whole of the record through the terrain lens.
Part Three, Why Medicine Set It Aside, asks the question directly. One chapter contrasts the pharmaceutical model of isolating a single active compound with the folk model of combining whole plants, and reports what the garlic evidence says about which model works better. One chapter examines the economics of research on a plant that cannot be patented. One chapter — Fire Cider — tells the story of a folk preparation whose name was taken into a United States trademark by a Massachusetts company in 2012, and won back by three herbalists in 2014 who documented forty years of prior use through Rosemary Gladstar and her students into the older tradition.
Part Four, Garlic in Practice, is the working manual — the kitchen pharmacy, traditional uses by body system, a full chapter on safety and interactions, and a complaint-by-complaint practical guide. The book closes with The Trial That Was Never Run — a one-chapter reading of the whole evidential architecture.
At the back: two appendices (a traditional list of uses, and a preparation quick-reference), a full bibliography, and a live index.
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