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Friday, November 7, 2014
The Vicious Politico-religious Sunni-Shi’ite Civil War that the U.S. Government has Ignited in Iraq and in Syria
October 14, 2014
PERSONAL EULOGY of
EMERITUS PROFESSOR RONALD IAN McKINNON,
Stanford University
Friday, August 15, 2014
Bill Clinton’s Three Crucial Neocon-inspired Decisions that Led to Three Major Crises in our Times
Friday, July 11, 2014
The Blundering Obama Administration and its Apparent Incoherent Foreign Policy
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Ukraine: A Classic “False Flag” Operation to provoke an armed “Coup d'état” ?
Friday, March 7, 2014
The Bush-Obama's Neocon Foreign Policy of Isolating Russia and of Expanding NATO is a Dismal Failure
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Friday, November 7, 2014
The Vicious Politico-religious Sunni-Shi’ite Civil War that the U.S. Government has Ignited in Iraq and in Syria
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and
[There] “is a memo [at the Pentagon] that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”
General Wesley Clark, former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO (1997-2000), (March 2, 2007)
"I don't want to just end the [Iraq] war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place."
Presidential candidate Barack Obama, (January 31, 2008)
“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”
Abraham Lincoln (1809—1865), 16th President of the United States (1861-65)
When the U.S. government of George W. Bush (2001-2009) decided to illegally invade militarily the country of Iraq and overthrow the Sunni government of Saddam Hussein, against the advice of many thinking persons, it opened a “Pandora Box” of woes that is still spewing out its calamities today, and probably will for many years to come. This is the first and foremost cause of the current quagmire prevailing in Iraq and in Syria today.
In 2009, the Barack Obama administration thought that it could wash its hands and walk away from the “biggest mistake in American military history” and let local Iraqi politicians sort things out and form an “inclusive” government in Baghdad. Here is what President Obama said on February 27, 2009:
“Let me say this as plainly as I can: by August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end... Through this period of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government [negotiated by the previous Bush administration], I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”
Well, as it should have been expected by anybody who has any knowledge of history in that part of the world, Iraq was far from being a stable “democracy”. Instead, the Shi’ite-led and paranoid Malaki government was everything but “inclusive” of the Sunni minority. Indeed, the Shi’ite-controlled Iraqi government was bent on taking revenge on the Sunnis for the suffering Shi’ites endured under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Using the sophisticated military gear supplied by the U.S., it tracked down Sunni opposition and dissenters to the regime, many were killed, and it excluded prominent Sunni politicians from the government.
There lies the second cause of the Sunni revolt that has helped create the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State militia (IS), [also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)], whose fighters are often foreign volunteers, at least in Syria. Some are ethnic Chechens, and many come from western countries such as the U.K. —When one sows terrorism, one should expect to reap terrorism. And that’s what the U.S. government and some other western countries have got in Iraq and Syria. In the U.S. case, it is for invading the former militarily and for reneging on its obligations to behave as a responsible occupying power under international law.
Added to that ill-thought and improvised U.S. policy in Iraq was the incoherent and misguided American policy of destabilizing the neighboring Syria by supporting and arming Islamist rebelsagainst the established Assad government, in association with the Sunni governments of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. These three countries had political and economic reasons of their own to oppose the Syrian Assad government, but not the United States. Many of these American-supported “moderate” Islamist terrorist organizations have since been absorbed by the rabidly terrorist ISIL organization. One can hardly think of a more flawed policy.
Last year, while the religious totalitarian terrorist IS organization was gaining strength both in Iraq and in Syria, and U.S. ambassadors in those countries were sounding the alarm, the Obama administration’s attention was concentrated on overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine and on overthrowing the Assad regime in Syria. Now, the IS militiaare well entrenched in many cities and well armed with sophisticated American-supplied weapons that they have used to terrorize, torture and slaughter thousands of people who oppose their lunatic views, both in Iraq and Syria. That’s a total mess.
But what does the Obama administration do? Faced with a most serious humanitarian and military crisis in Iraq and in Syria that the United States itself has ignited with its policies, President Obama, surrounded by his neocon advisers (whose real allegiance is most dubious), has appeared hesitant, confused, overwhelmed, clueless, incoherent, passive and reactive. The old saying “A stitch in time saves nine”would seem to apply here. Indeed, problems tend to pile up when solutions are postponed and delayed. The brutal monster of IS in Iraq and in Syria has been allowed to develop and grow because of the U.S. government's wishful indifference in Iraq and of its misplaced policies in Ukraine and in Syria. The result has been a Washington D.C.-made quagmire in those countries. It is not exaggerated to say that the U.S. government has blood on its hands for the savage carnage taking place in these countries.
How could the world stand still when fanatical and delusional seventh century barbaric butchers slaughter people right and left, for their ethnicity, their religion or their ideas? There is a word for that savage behavior, and that is “ethnic cleansing”. It is genocide.
The sad truth is that for the last twenty some years, there has been very weak intellectual leadership in Washington D.C., and this at the highest echelons. Ruinous wars and costly financial crises have resulted.
In the future, the Clinton-Bush-Obama years will probably be known as the “Vacuum years”, because the U.S. government of the day would have abused and de facto destroyed the international law system created after WWII, while being incapable of providing an efficient and socially and politically responsible alternative. In fact, the U.S. neocon-inspired U.S government of the last twenty years has been unable to match its world empire ambitions with concrete solutions and workable institutions. This is not a good record, far from it.
On Tuesday, November 4, American voters had their say about the U.S. elected officials who have been behind the mayhem and destruction brought to Iraq and Syria, and also Libya, by their failed policies. Indeed, the November 2014 mid-term election was dubbed a “referendum on President Barack Obama“, focusing on his competency, coherence and relevancy, but also on the weak state of the U.S. economy. The electoral results have not been very good for democratic candidates who paid a heavy price for their president's failures.
With both the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate now under firm Republican control, it is obvious that the last two years of the Obama presidency will be difficult for the embattled “lame-duck” president.
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PERSONAL EULOGY of
EMERITUS PROFESSOR
RONALD IAN McKINNON,
Stanford University
by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, October 14, 2014
My wife Carole and I were in Europe celebrating our 50th anniversary when we received the tragic news of Professor McKinnon's tragic accident at SFO and his untimely death on October 1st.
Our first thoughts were for Margaret, their children Neil, Mary and David, and for all their grandchildren. We share with them our deepest sorrow at their husband's and father's unexpected death.
Only a few months before, Ron and Margaret visited us in our home in Vaudreuil, Quebec, near Montreal. We had no inkling that this would be the last time we would see Ron. Carole has known the McKinnons since 1962-63, when she was a student at Stanford-in-France and Ron was her economics professor. Little did she expect that those two semesters of economics classes were preparing her for a life, like Margaret, with a professor of economics! Each visit with the McKinnons and the sight of Ron's boyish smile brought back fond memories of France V.
During their visit last June, Ron and I exchanged books and articles, discovering that we were still on the same wave lengths on so many issues. Indeed, back nearly 50 years ago, when I did my doctoral studies at Stanford, Ron was one of the pillars of advisers I had the privilege of working with. The others were Lorie Tarshis, Ed Shaw, John Gurley, and Emile Despres, the latter was known then as an "economists' economist".
Professor Ronald McKinnon was an innovative applied economist and a realist economist. Some would say he was a 24/7 economist. He had economics for breakfast, lunch and dinner! When he visited us last summer, he had Thomas Piketty's huge tome about capitalism and inequalities under his arm. To the chagrin of our wives, I discussed with him the intricacies of why the rate of return of capital tends to be higher than the rate of economic growth over time, and how that leads to economic inequalities, and in what circumstances and for what reasons.
Professor McKinnon did path-breaking work in government-induced distortions in financial markets, economic development, monetary and financial systems, optimum currency areas,optimum currency areas, financial repression, and the importance and functioning of the dollar system. He was often travelling to conferences all over the world. Over the last twenty years, he made frequent trips to China, a country he developed a special affection for, and where he could work with many of his former students. No other economist in the US and in the world knew more about the Chinese economy and its financial system than Professor McKinnon.
Professor McKinnon was not only a superb international economist and a prolific author who made huge contributions in economics, he was also an extremely well-liked and most appreciated personality. His regretful demise will be mourned all over the world by all professional economists and by his grateful former students. He will be sadly missed.
Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay
Emeritus professor of economics,
University of Montreal,
and former Minister of Industry in the
Quebec government,
Former president of the
North American Economics and Finance Association
(NAEFA)
Email: rodrigue_tremblay@yahoo.com
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Friday, August 15, 2014
Bill Clinton’s Three Crucial Neocon-inspired Decisions that Led to Three Major Crises in our Times
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“In 1936, I declared that it was not the Covenant of the League that was at stake, but international morality...The Charter of the United Nations expresses the noblest aspirations of man: abjuration of force in the settlement of disputes between states; the assurance of human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion; the safeguarding of international peace and security.“
Haile Selassie (1892-1975), address to the United Nations, Oct 6, 1963.
“The beauty of the Glass-Steagall act, after all, was its simplicity: banks should not gamble with government insured money. Even a six-year-old can understand that...”
Luigi Zingales (1963- ), (A Capitalism for the People, 2014).
“Today, Congress voted to update the rules that have governed financial services since the Great Depression and replace them with a system for the 21st century...This historic legislation will better enable American companies to compete in the new economy.”
Lawrence H. Summers (1954- ), U.S. Treasury Secretary, November 12, 1999.
"We are aware that NATO membership for a unified Germany raises complicated questions. For us, however, one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east."
Hans-Dietrich Genscher (1927- ), the German foreign minister,
(February 10, 1990, promising Russia that NATO would not expand to Eastern Europe.)
"I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever...It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong."
George F. Kennan, (1904-2005), U.S. diplomat and Russia specialist,
(in 1998, after the U. S. Senate voted to extend NATO to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.)
An eye-popping new book has alleged that U.S. President Bill Clinton had his White House phones tapped in real time, for the benefit of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The book also reveals how the Israeli Prime Minister could have used taped conversations of the American president regarding Mr. Clinton’s 1990s sexual scandal in the White House, to exert pressure on him to release from prison a convicted Israeli spy, Jonathan Pollard, who had been arrested in 1985, for espionage against the United States. In fact, the Israeli surveillance activities in the United States may be very widespread.
I suspect that such illegal activities and the fact that an American president (and other members of the U.S. administration) could have been placed under electronic surveillance and could have been potentially blackmailed by a foreign country will not go down well with ordinary patriotic Americans, if this becomes widely known. This comes after it has been discovered that the CIA, which works closely in tandem with the Israeli Mossad, has been illegally and unconstitutionally spying on U.S. senators.
These revelations can also encourage us to cast a second look at some crucial decisions made by the Clinton administration, fifteen years ago, because the consequences of such decisions are very much with us today.
Indeed, the fuses of three major crises still smoldering were lit during the U.S. Clinton administration (1992-2000), especially during Clinton’s second term (1996-2000). People tend to forget such matters while they concentrate their attention solely on current events. However, it often happens that what we are witnessing in current times has been years in preparation, long after the initiators have left the political scene. What the George W. Bush administration did and what Barack Obama is doing have been a continuation of policies that the Bill Clinton administration initiated in the first place.
What are these three crises that one can trace back to “innovations” introduced by the Bill Clinton administration in the late 1990s?
1- First, there is the Clinton Kosovo Precedent of wars for “humanitarian” reasons.
The current crisis of multiple wars being waged today around the globe, in direct violation of the United Nations Charter, originates largely in that precedent initiated by Bill Clinton.
The Preamble solemnly establishes the main objective of the 1945 U.N. Charter when it says “We the Peoples of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…” and to this end, “armed force(s) shall not be used, save in the common interest…”
As the current United Nations Secretary General, Mr. Ban Ki-Moon reminded the world last year, according to the U.N. Charter, agreed by all the member countries, “the use of force is only legal when it is in self-defense [against an armed attack] or with a [formal] U.N. Security Council authorization.”
—That is what international law says.
Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, indeed, formally prohibits any war that is not to maintain or restore international peace (Article 42) or that is not undertaken in individual or collective self-defense (Article 51). There are no exceptions for “preventive wars”, “so-called humanitarian wars” or any kind of war of aggression.
However, in 1998 and in 1999, the Democratic Clinton administration decided unilaterally to join the on-going Kosovo War in Yugoslavia without an explicit mandate from the U.N. Security Council, instead relying for the first time not on legality but on an extra-judicial arbitrary argument of political legitimacy for “humanitarian” motives to protect “human rights”.
This was done without even a resolution by the U.S. Congress, and with the sole reliance on the NATO alliance as an instrument of military intervention. (In that case, it was NATO air military operations.) The Kosovo War has been described as “the first war for values” and has opened the Pandora Box of wars of choice, outside of the international legal framework of the United Nations Charter.
Since the Kosovo Precedent of unilateral humanitarian intervention, war of aggression has become a matter of political will rather than of strict legality, the intervening countries using different versions of their “national interests”. In other words, the world has gone back to before 1945, before the creation of the United Nations, when powerful countries could go to war whenever they felt that it was in their national interests to do so.
The demise of the United Nations as a legal framework against war was greatly accelerated by the Bill Clinton administration’s decision to sidestep the U.N. Charter in favor of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The world is less secure now that the United Nations has been de facto sidelined in its principal mission of preventing and stopping wars.
2- Then there is the Repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999
In the 1990s, super large American banks launched a $300 million campaign of lobbying efforts to have the Roosevelt-era-Glass-Steagall act repealed. That important 1933 law had prevented American banks from gambling with government insured money by merging risky and uninsured investment banks that underwrite securities and commercial banks that take insured deposits.
However, powerful bankers, some of them having important posts within the Clinton administration, such as Robert Rubin, Treasury Secretary (1995-1999) and a previous co-chairman from 1990 to 1992 of the large investment bank Goldman Sachs, argued that things had changed and that the limitations imposed by the Glass-Steagall act on their banking activities were hindering their capabilities to “innovate” in the types of financial products they could create and sell to investors, not only in the U.S. but all over the world, thus preventing them from being competitive internationally.
Initially, the Clinton administration was reluctant to gut an act that had prevented the abuses and predatory banking practices that had preceded the Great Depression. However, after some tremendous pressure had been exerted on the Clinton administration, from outside and from within, President Bill Clinton finally signed the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, on November 12, 1999, as a bill newly renamed the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act under the names of Senate Banking Committee Chair Phil Gramm (R-Texas), House Banking Committee chair James Leach (R-Iowa), and Virginia Representative Thomas Bliley (R-Virginia).
This allowed commercial banks, investment banks, securities firms, and insurance companies to consolidate, but without giving the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), or any other financial regulatory agency for that matter, the authority to regulate large investment bank holding companies.
Largely unregulated super large banks and large insurance companies used the newly acquired liberty to engage in Ponzi finance practices, as they have often done historically and as it should have been expected.
Indeed, they proceeded with creating new financial derivative products that turned out to be very toxic and which became an important cause of the subprime financial crisis of 2007-09.
What we know, moreover, is that the 2007-2008 financial crisis has resulted in income and wealth losses of trillions of dollars by American families and of subsidies in the trillions of dollars for large banks, thus resulting in a massive wealth transfer and damaging the U.S. economy for years to come.
3- Thirdly, there is the cancellation of the Bush I-Baker promise to Russian Prime Minister Gorbachev not to expand NATO
As the German foreign minister Genscher’s quote above indicates, it is widely accepted that after the Warsaw Pact, (the Eastern Europe military alliance), was dissolved in the early 1990s, and after the German reunification, it was at the very least implicitly promised that NATO would not take advantage of the situation to encircle Russia militarily by expanding in Eastern Europe. For example, it was reported that U.S. Secretary of State James Baker in the George H. Bush administration and German foreign minister Genscher, after a meeting on February 10, 1990, had agreed that there was to be no NATO expansion to the East.
Moreover, this was also the understanding of Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet president at the time, when he said that there was a promise not to expand NATO “as much as a thumb's width further to the East.” In the past, Jack Matlock, the US ambassador in Moscow at the time, confirmed that Moscow was given a “clear commitment” to that effect. Therefore, Gorbachev’s mistake may have been to have taken the western politicians’ word too much at its face value instead of requesting a formal agreement.
In any case, the informal agreement not to expand NATO to encompass Russia’s former partners in the Warsaw Pact held for a few years, that is until President Bill Clinton, on October 22, 1996, saw it to his advantage during his 1996 reelection campaign to promise to enlarge NATO to include Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
In other words, in 1996, Clinton stopped enforcing the promise made by his predecessor. The rest is history, and NATO was from then on transformed from a defensive military alliance into an offensive military alliance under American control. It went on to include not only Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, but also countries such as Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Latvia, and Slovenia, among others, thus pushing its military infrastructure right up to the Russian border. Recent attempts to draw Ukraine into NATO are only a continuation of an aggressive policy of expanding NATO and of isolating Russia, initiated by the Bill Clinton administration in the late 1990s.
Under the influence of American Neocons, Clinton rejected the idea of a peace dividend to be reaped after a reduction in military expenditures due to the lessening of the Soviet threat and the end of the Cold War.
Conclusion
The geopolitical global chaos that the world has been going through in the beginning of this 21st Century, the devastating 2008 financial crisis that imposed such heavy losses on so many people, and the threatening resurgence of the old Cold War with Russia, all have causes that can be traced back to short-sighted and disastrous decisions made by the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
The failed subsequent administrations of George W. Bush and of Barack H. Obama merely followed in the path open during the Clinton era. This is something that future historians will need to consider closely when attempting to understand the thread of events that created the apparent current chaos in many fields today.
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Friday, July 11, 2014
The Blundering Obama Administration and its Apparent Incoherent Foreign Policy
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”
President Barack Obama
May 29, 2014 commencement speech at West Point
“War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly; to seek or advise its deliberate provocation is a black crime against all men.”
President Dwight Eisenhower
1947 commencement speech at West Point
"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by "a world of enemies", "one against all", that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
"...An empire is a despotism, and an emperor is a despot, bound by no law or limitation but his own will; it is a stretch of tyranny beyond absolute monarchy. For, although the will of an absolute monarch is law, yet his edicts must be registered by parliaments. Even this formality is not necessary in an empire."
John Adams (1735-1826), 2nd American President
Am I alone in having the uneasy feeling, while listening to Barack Obama's speeches, that we are witnessing an actor playing the role of an American president and carefully reading the script he has been given? As time goes by, indeed, Barack Obama seems to be morphing more and more into a Democratic George W. Bush. Those who write his speeches seem to have the same warmongering mentality as those who wrote George W. Bush's or Dick Cheney’s speeches, ten years ago.
That's probably no accident since Neocons occupy key positions in Barack Obama's administration as they did under George W. Bush when they pushed the United States into the war in Iraq, and as they have also tried to push the United States toward a military showdown with Iran and as they are now attempting toprovoke Russia into a military conflict. How Neocons can infiltrate both Republican and Democratic administrations and be trouble-makers in both administrations is the daily wonder of American politics!
But we know the Neocons’ “Grand Plan”. They have published it. Indeed, this is a plan that has been outlined in many reports published by the (now defunct) Project for a New American Century (PNAC), an organization created in 1997, and whose many founders became prominent members of the Bush-Cheney administration. They have rebranded themselves as the Foreign Policy Initiative and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and have now succeeded in becoming influential within the Obama-Biden administration, especially at the State Department as leftovers of former Secretary Hillary Clinton. They and their allies are the main force behind the disastrous and incoherent U.S. foreign policies being pursued by the United States government both in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe.
Basically, it is a plan that has little to do with the fundamental interests of ordinary Americans, and everything to do with those of some foreign and domestic entities, most prominently the state of Israel because of its influence in American domestic politics and the Sunni state of Saudi Arabia because of its crucial role in influencing the price of oil internationally. It is also a plan that fits in very well with the interests of the military-industrial complex, which needs a permanent war environment to justify huge defense budgets.
Such a plan is based on the old principle of “Divide and Conquer” (or in Latin, « Divide ut Regnes or “Divide et Impera”). This sometimes requires creating political chaoswhere stability prevails. And stirring the pot is what the Neocons want to do in order to attain their goals. In the Middle East, they do it by fanning the flames of the old sectarian conflict between Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims in order to overthrow unfriendly established governments and to disintegrate countries into smaller and more easily controlled parts, even though the human costs for the local populations are horrific.
For example, even though it may seem absurd for the Obama administration to arm and support fanatical Islamist rebels in Syria while fighting them in Iraq with drones and Marines, such a bizarre policy appears rational in the eyes of the Neocons if it results in Sunnis and Shiites killing each other and if the country of Iraq is broken down into parts.
In Europe, the Neocons have persuaded the clueless Obama administration that provoking a rekindling of the old Cold Warand re-igniting tensions between Russia and the West were necessary steps to be taken in order to solidify the U.S.’s influence on the European Union (E.U.) and to establish a reframed and enlarged NATO as an American-controlled offensive military alliance that can sidestep the United Nations, justifying military interventionism abroad.
But, because the neocon plan is often in conflict with long term economic and political American interests at home and abroad, the neocon plan to launch a string of American-sponsored wars in the Middle East and in Eastern Europe may explain why Obama’s current foreign policy appears to be so incoherent and so inconsistent. Let us elaborate.
1- First, consider the chaotic situations in Syria, in Libya, and in Iraq, where well-armed Islamic militias are well positioned to destabilize these countries’ established governments through civil wars that could easily lead to their political disintegration and economic downfall.
However, while permanent chaos in that oil-rich part of the world may serve certain political interests, especially those of Israel whose geopolitical advantage is to weaken surrounding Islamic states and even break them up into smaller entities, and those of Sunni and oil-rich Saudi Arabia whose advantage is to profit from higher oil prices and to weaken the Middle East Shiite states (Iran, Iraq and their ally Syria), such permanent military conflicts hardly serve the interests of American consumers and workers and may threaten the business interests of the large American oil companies operating in the region.
Indeed, higher oil prices are one of the causes behind the current relative economic stagnation in the United States and in Europe, while the possibility that Islamic militias can attack and take control of oil fields in those countries runs counter to the interests of American oil companies.
This partly explains why there are conflicting demands being made on the Obama administration by different political and economic interests, and it has become increasingly difficult to accommodate them all, notwithstanding how hard President Obama tries to do so. Thus, the apparent incoherence and inconsistency in that foreign policy.
Sometimes Barack Obama acts as if he accepts the neocon agenda of destabilizing most Middle East Muslim countries for the benefit of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Witness the U.S. government’s financial and military support of terrorist organizations to provoke “regime change” in Syria as it has done in Libya. Remember that last September, Obama had acquiesced to his neocon advisers’ recommendation to bomb the country of Syria, whose Assad government was deemed too close to Shiite Iran, before realizing that the entire cabal of justifications was a false flag operation.
Sometimes, however, the economic costs of such instability are considered too high and a timid Obama, to the chagrin of his neocon advisers, hesitates to implement fully the Machiavellian neocon plan. President Obama then becomes the target of theneocon media who picture him as weak, “out of touch”, inexperienced and irresolute, thus contributing to his increasing unpopularity.
2- Secondly, consider the new Cold War that the Neocons have succeeded in rekindling in Europe, with their aggressive policy of encircling Russia with missiles and hostile neighboring countries and of engineering a “regime change” in Ukraine. Who profits from these renewed tensions? Certainly not ordinary Americans and ordinary Europeans. The profiteers are the empire builders and the arms traffickers, and all those who like to fish in troubled waters.
Conclusion
It is most unfortunate that President Barack Obama has not been able to establish a coherent and credible American foreign policy of his own, with clear principles and clear objectives, and has had to rely on discredited Neocons for advice. Therefore, he has placed himself and his government at the mercy of various and contradictory influences, sometimes jerking in one direction, sometimes in another direction. That’s called a lack of vision and a lack of leadership.
It may not be too late for Barack Obama to be his own man in his second term and to stop emulating George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. For that, however, he would have to fire all the Neocons in positions of power and policy-making in his administration. If he does not have the guts to do that, he may turn out to be one of the worst American presidents ever, on a par with George W. Bush.
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Sunday, March 9, 2014
Ukraine: A Classic “False Flag” Operation to provoke an armed “Coup d'état” ?
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“All warfare is based on deception.”
Sun Tzu (c. 544 BC – 496 BC), “The Art of War”
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
“World War III will be a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation.”
Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980)
Even though all that follows is public knowledge, it is important to connect the dots if one is to understand fully what has happened in Ukraine recently. Events seem to have unfolded according to a U.S. foreign policy agenda that has been decades in the making within many administrations.
As of now, the key figure of that policy of intervention in the affairs of other nations in the Obama administration is Victoria Nuland (1961- ), an Assistant Secretary of State for European and Euroasian Affairs at the State Department. She has been at that post since May 2013, although she has previously worked with both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Nuland is the wife of historian Robert Cagan, a Council on Foreign Relations member, and one of the co-founders with William Kristol of the infamous “Project for the New American Century” (PNAC) founded in 1997. The PNAC called for, among many things, regime change in Iraq and a strategy for securing global control for the United States.
The PNAC group of neoconservative thinkers has been credited for providing the rationale behind the push for the U.S. to invade Iraq in 2003.
One of its prominent members, Richard Perle wrote, in 1996, a famous report entitled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm that called for the removal of President Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq, as well as other ideas to bring change to the region. The report was delivered to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In 1998, Richard Perle and other core members of the PNAC—Paul Wolfowitz, R. James Woolsey, Elliot Abrams, and John Bolton—were among the signatories of an open letter to President Clinton calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein.
In September 2000, the PNAC published an even more controversial 90-page report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century. The report listed as Project Chairmen Donald Kagan and Gary Schmitt. They expressed “the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces.”
The “New Pearl Harbor” Controversy
Section V of the 2000 Rebuilding America’s Defenses, entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force”, included a key sentence that reads as follows:
“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event––like a new Pearl Harbor”.
By coincidence or not, exactly one year later, the authors got their “new Pearl Harbor” with the attacks of September 11, 2001, when 3,000 Americans and foreigners were killed.
Their main proposal was for the U.S. to bypass the United Nations, stating that “American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council”, where the U.S. must share a veto with Russia, China, France and the United Kingdom.
Instead, they proposed to enlarge the military alliance that is NATO and turn it from a defensive European alliance into a worldwide offensive military alliance controlled by the United States.
In March 2003, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney implemented that foreign affairs policy, in violation of the UN Charter and in using a fake rationale of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and other subterfuges for public consumption.
The Ukrainian Crisis of 2014
Many reports indicate that Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland has been very much involved in the coup d’état in Ukraine. Here is what she said on December 13, 2013:
“Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We’ve [the U.S. government] invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”
Nuland is famous for having issued the infamous statement “F…k the E.U.”, in a telephone interview, on February 6, 2014, with American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt.
U.S. political “investments” seem to have paid off big because anti-government protests intensified greatly in Ukraine, in early 2014, climaxing with the violent overthrow of the elected government of Viktor Yanukovich on February 28, 2014. This followed after snipers had shot protesters and policemen from rooftops in Maïdan square, an event that has resulted with over 70 deaths.
Western officials and western media, and many unaware observers, were naturally quick to condemn the ousted Yanukovich government for the snipers who fired on protesters in Kiev.
However, a taped phone call between EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton and Estonian foreign affairs minister Urmas Paet on February 25 would seem to suggest otherwise. Indeed, it has been alleged, from ballistic proofs on the victims, that the U.S.-backed opposition was instead responsible for hiring snipers who gunned down both protesters and policemen in Kiev and not the deposed government of Viktor Yanukovich, as the U.S. officials and U.S. media have widely claimed.
Therefore, the entire coup d’état could have been based on a classic “false flag” operation.
If confirmed, that would be another war started with false pretenses, along the Iraq war, that started in 2003 with similar fabrications.
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Friday, March 7, 2014
The Bush-Obama's Neocon Foreign Policy of Isolating Russia and of Expanding NATO is a Dismal Failure
by Rodrigue Tremblay
(Author of the books “The Code for Global Ethics”, and “The New American Empire”)
“Every state is condemned to follow a policy dictated by its geography.”
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821)
Lord Ismay, first NATO Secretary-General
"Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other."
James Madison (1751-1836), fourth American President
The hazards associated with American foreign policy since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 should appear obvious to all, because it is precisely this policy that has caused the crisis in Ukraine with all its negative consequences for the coming months and years.
President Barack Obama was candid in admitting it on Monday March 3, 2014, when he said that "we are indicating to the Russians [that] if in fact they continue on the current trajectory they’re on, then we are examining a whole series of steps — economic, diplomatic— that will isolate Russia.”
Well, it is precisely this desire to expand NATO and to isolate Russia by incorporating all the countries bordering Russia into NATO, i.e. a strategy of geopolitical and military encirclement of Russia, which has provoked that country when it felt threatened in its national security.
This is easy to understand.
For example, what would the United States do if a hypothetical Russian Empire were to incorporate Mexico or Canada into a military alliance? To ask the question is to answer it. Why is it so difficult to understand that the best way to start a war is to threaten a country's vital interests?
The truth is that NATO should have been disbanded after the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1991, and especially after the Warsaw Pact was itself dismantled. Europe should have then moved to build an expanded Europe of nations, large, democratic and peaceful, within a framework of economic and political cooperation and peace. But no! The United States wanted to take advantage of the situation and demanded that everything fell into the military-financial U.S. empire.
That is the source of many problems.
In my book “The New American Empire”, originally published in 2003, just before the onset of the Iraq war, I pointed out the dangers of the American global imperial ambition and explained the reasons. The Middle East was the first to suffer under this global policy of interventionism. And now, Europe as a whole, most unfortunately, may have to pay the price for this unbridled American hubris, under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, although that policy goes back to George H. Bush and Bill Clinton.
This is why I believe President Obama and his neocon advisers do not think beyond their nose, as was the case for the not-too-bright George W. Bush, when they adopt such a global imperialist ideology.
In 2008, it just happened that I published an article which has been translated into several languages, and in which I advanced the idea that Europe had a vital interest into disbanding that relic of another age that is NATO. Indeed, we must blame European leaders not to have understood that the fundamental interest of Europe was not to blend into the American Empire but rather to build an independent and united Europe. Because that reality has not been well understood, Europe is now running the risk of falling prey to a new Cold War with divisive and ruinous conflicts, while the United States will try to pull their chestnuts out of the fire, with the U.K as its convenient ally from within.
It may be not too late for European leaders to rectify the situation. This would, however, require wisdom and the courage to tell the American neocons who have designed American foreign policiy for a quarter of a century that they are not masters of the world and that the European Union has no intention to pursue an aggressive policy of military encirclement of Russia. That's it.
And rather, on the contrary, Russia should be invited to join an expanded Europe of nations, large, democratic and peaceful within a framework of economic cooperation and peace.
What would be needed of them, however, is a minimum of vision, of insight and a spirit of independence, which currently seems to be lacking badly in many current European governments.
But carelessness and the current European abdication in letting Washington decide European foreign policy may serve the interests of the American empire, but this could lead Europe to disaster.
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