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West's Confusing Foreign Policy Contradictions



Written byNeil Clark

Tuesday July 15, 2014




I'm confused. Jen Psaki, US State Department spokesperson, says that the Ukrainian government has "every right" to use air strikes against its opponents in Ukraine on the grounds that it "is defending the country."
 
Yet in 2011, alleged air strikes by Libyan government forces against its opponents were used as a reason for the imposition of a “no-fly zone” which was followed by a NATO-led military intervention against Libya. We were told that the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and had to be stopped. The deaths of over 200 people in Libya was, according to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “unacceptable”. But the Ukrainian government is killing its own people today, and despite more than 200 people being killed (as of 10th July the number of civilian deaths was 478, including seven children), western leaders do not say that the Ukrainian leader, Petro Poroshenko, has to be stopped, or that the bloodshed is “unacceptable” — nor are there any calls for a “no-fly zone” to be imposed. Why is it acceptable for the Ukrainian government to launch a military offensive, including air strikes against its own people, but unacceptable for the Libyan government in 2011 to do likewise? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
In the lead up to the US-led military intervention against Libya in 2011, western politicians and commentators couldn't stop talking about the country. These caring “humanitarians,” it seemed, had so much concern for the plight of the Libyan people. Three years on, and Libya is in chaos, with regular fighting between rebel militias. Only on Sunday it was reported at least seven people had been killed and over 30 injured in clashes between rival militias near Tripoli's international airport. But despite Libya's troubles, western politicians and leading commentators are no longer mentioning the country, in fact it seems they've forgotten about it all together. Why were they so interested in Libya and the plight of its people in 2011, but not interested today? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
In Britain, neocon pundits and politicians warn us repeatedly about the threat of radical Islam at home. We are told of alleged sinister plots by Islamic extremists to take control of our classrooms. Yet the same neocons who want us to be worried about the “threat” of radical Islam, have supported the violent overthrow of the secular Syrian government by rebels dominated by Islamic jihadists who have beheaded and blown up many people. These same neocons also backed radical Islamic fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Why are the neocons so opposed to what they regard as Islamic extremism at home, but so supportive of it in certain countries abroad? If “ Islamic extremism” really is such a bad thing, then surely it is a bad thing everywhere? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
Britons who have fought with anti-government rebels in Syria have been arrested under anti-terrorist legislation when they have returned home.
 
Yet the British government wanted us to go to war against Syria last summer and has given rebels fighting the Syrian Army financial support. Why are Britons being criminalized for fighting for a cause, i.e. the violent overthrow of President Assad, which the British government and much of Britain's political/media elite enthusiastically supports? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
At time of writing, over 160 people, including about 30 children, have been killed in Israel's latest bombardment of Gaza, and thousands of citizens have fled. In 2011 I remember lots of western political figures and media commentators telling us that the US and its allies had a “Responsibility to Protect” civilians in Libya from attack by government forces. But I haven't heard calls from the same people saying that there is a “Responsibility to Protect” people in Gaza under attack from Israeli strikes. Nor have I heard them say there is a “Responsibility to Protect” civilians in Ukraine coming under attack from Ukrainian government forces. Why does “R2P” apply to some people but not to others? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
Israel has justified its military operation in Gaza on the grounds that it is fighting terrorism. Yet in 1999 I remember the Yugoslav government using the same arguments to justify its actions in Kosovo saying it was carrying out a counter-terrorist operation against the KLA (UCK) who had been killing, among others, Yugoslav state officials. But while Israel’s “anti-terrorist” justifications are accepted by western leaders, Yugoslavia's were not, and the country was bombed for 78 days by NATO with its leader later sent to trial at The Hague for war crimes. Why is it ok for Israel to use military force in its “anti-terrorist” campaigns, but not ok for the Yugoslav government to use military force in its “anti-terrorist” campaigns in 1999? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
Before the Iraq war we were told by neocon supporters of military intervention that toppling Saddam Hussein was a crucial step in winning the “war on terror.” When the interviewer said “If we go into Iraq and we take down Hussein?” Richard Perle, chairman of the Defense Policy Board, replied: “Then I think it's over for the terrorists.” Perle also said: “There can be no victory in the war against terrorism if, at the end of it, Saddam Hussein is still in power.” But it's over eleven years now since Saddam Hussein was in power and the “war on terror” is still going on — in fact even tougher “anti-terror” security checks at our airports are being introduced. I'm confused. Can anyone help me?
 
Tony Blair says that “The starting point is to identify the nature of the battle. It is against Islamist extremism. That is the fight.” Yet this same Tony Blair led a war to topple a secular Arab leader, Saddam Hussein who was an enemy of Islamic extremist groups like Al-Qaeda and has also backed western intervention against the secular government of President Assad in Syria. The Assad government is fighting against ISIS, which also threatens the government in Iraq, yet Blair says that we must “support the Iraqi Government in beating back the insurgency.” Why should we be supporting the fight against ISIS in Iraq, but trying to topple a government which is fighting ISIS in Syria? I'm confused. Can anyone help me?

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The Coming Non-Intervention Revolution



Written byRon Paul

Tuesday April 16, 2013


As we see each new administration, regardless of claimed ideological or political differences, pursuing the same destructive policies abroad and trampling our civil liberties at home, we must now face the key issues of our time. The issues of war or peace, republic or empire, liberty at home or the encroaching police state, can no longer be ignored. We find ourselves at the edge of a precipice, where it is obvious that the failed policies of the past cannot be repackaged under a new name to solve our crisis today.
 
Many still believe each four years that if only their candidate – with the newly-minted and freshly-printed slogans – is elected, we will finally be led to a new springtime in America, to peaceful and prosperous days ahead. But regardless of party, with only cosmetic differences the same policies are being pursued.
 
Those disgusted by the wars pursued by the Bush Administration, based on lies and manipulation, eagerly waved signs welcoming "change" and voted for new management. But the new manager turned out to be just as bad as the previous one, and in many cases even worse.
 
The festering wound called Guantanamo Bay has not been closed even as most of its dehumanized prisoners have been cleared for release. Those left there, most of whom not found guilty of anything, are resorting to secret hunger strikes in the hopes of perishing in peace rather than being forced to endure the misery.
 
The current administration has taken its predecessor's flirtation with the use of drones to kill anonymously anywhere it chooses and turned it into the cornerstone of US foreign policy.
 
In Pakistan alone, this administration has killed nearly four thousand people, many of them civilians, with drone strikes. By some estimates, including a recent study by Stanford University, as many as 50 civilians are killed by drones for every terrorist. The administration uses "signatures" to determine who to kill, but these behavior patterns are not at all defined and most often encompass the normal day-to-day activities of farmers and others in Pakistan and elsewhere.
 
When the administration was forced recently to answer the question of whether it believed it had the legal right to kill Americans on American soil by drone strike, it did not, contrary to press coverage, deny that "right." Instead, it merely reassured us that it would not kill any American at home by drone who was not considered a "combatant." And who determines that? Under the precedent set by the previous Bush Administration, it is claimed the president has that imperial privilege.
 
Just a couple of years ago, Congress passed and the president signed a military spending authorization bill, the NDAA for 2012, which told the president that he has the right to indefinitely detain anyone, even Americans on US soil, indefinitely and without trial if he determines they have provided any sort of material support for terrorist groups or associated forces. What does "material" and "associated" mean? They won't tell us.
 
Congress has allowed itself to be made irrelevant, behaving like children while deferring to the president the important decisions it is required to make by the Constitution. On Iraq, Congress left it to the president to decide what to do. On Libya, when in 2011 the president launched an illegal war under false pretenses, Congress did not bother to make a sound. As the president commits the US military to acts of war -- covert and overt -- against Iran, Syria, Mali, and so on, Congress watches meekly on the sidelines.

There are exceptions, of course, including many Members I have worked closely with over the years in attempt to win our colleagues back over to the side of the Constitution. Many of these friends and former colleagues continue this struggle from inside and they should be commended and supported. I am afraid they are at present still a small minority, largely ignored by House leadership of both parties. But their ranks are growing.
 
The framers of the Constitution viewed Congress not only as a co-equal branch, but as the first among equals -- the people's branch of government. The people's branch has nearly lost all relevance today. No wonder poll after poll shows that the American people are disgusted with the whole process. According to the most recent Rasmussen survey, only eight percent of Americans believe Congress is doing a good job, and 53 percent of those surveyed do not believe either party really represents the American people.
 
We need something new.
 
We need a hard look at the key issues of our time: the future of freedom, the future of the human race, and of the United States. Neither the Republican nor the Democrat party are pro-peace. They are merely partisan. How many of our pro-peace allies during the Bush administration have disappeared now that a Democrat is in office pursuing the same policies? Also, see how many of the Bush-era hawks have questioned "Obama's wars" only for petty partisan reasons. It is about political advantage rather than principle. But this is all coming to an end. It cannot be sustained. Every day more and more come over to our camp, the non-interventionists.
 
At the hands of the warmongers millions have died for nothing. Iraq, Korea, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mali, Venezuela, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, and so on. How can we even know the full extent?
 
According to the US Special Operations Forces commander, Adm. William H. McRaven, testifying before the Senate Armed Services emerging threats subcommittee earlier this month, “On any day of the year you will find special operations forces [in] somewhere between 70 and 90 countries around the world.”
 
Why? To what end? And most importantly, where is the authorization? On whose permission does the US Special Forces Command conduct war in 70 to 90 countries at any given time? Are there stacks of hidden declarations of war somewhere that no American knows about? The constitution gives the president no power at all to make war on any given day in 70 to 90 countries, to use secret forces to undermine domestic political currents in favor of movements and politicians that the US elites judge to be "in line" with their interests. Again it is the sign of a nation that has lost its way.
 
It is time for us to stand up for peace, a peace that is intricately connected to justice, shared human values, and prosperity. A peace that leaves us safer than the empty lies of the warmongers. A peace that leaves our economic future with some glimmer of hope, that leaves our next generations with some glimmer of hope. A peace that frees up the economic resources that can prevent our children from being slaves to the impoverishing imperial ambitions of those directing our current foreign policy.
 
We are the real patriots. We believe in the United States. We believe the time is now to advance our issues as they have never been advanced before. Above all, we are the optimists. We believe in a brighter future.
 
The Cold War, as we now know, was itself largely hyped up by beneficiaries of the military build-up, but at the very least we should have expected at the end of the thousands of missiles pointed at us some sort of peace dividend. Instead, thanks to those whose careers and fortunes depended in some manner on the military industrial complex, we stumbled from the end of the war on communism to the war to control the world. This war has failed.
 
This is the agenda that we are going to advance. This is why I have decided to found my own peace institute that seeks friends and allies beyond all political, party, and ideological lines. We have a great battle of ideas ahead of us. It is time for all like-minded individuals, regardless of political, ideological, or other orientation to join this battle of ideas. We are ready to provide guidance.
 
I feel so strongly about this issue, the issue of war and peace at home and abroad, that I have for the first time given my name to an institute.
 
We do not have to agree on every single issue. We should tolerate those views that we may otherwise find objectionable -- as long as they do not contradict our main shared values: an end to the American empire overseas and the assault on our civil liberties at home. At the end of my 2008 presidential run I gathered together the candidates of the "minor" political parties to see whether we could find some common ground, to see whether there might be some momentum to push forward a new kind of program beyond the domination of the two major parties. The joint statement we came up with then can very well serve as a guideline for our shared mission to restore peace and liberty to this country. To secure a better future for coming generations.

[TylerDurden]

What Happened to the Malaysian Airliner?



Written byPaul Craig Roberts

Sunday July 20, 2014



Washington’s propaganda machine is in such high gear that we are in danger of losing the facts that we do have.
 
One fact is that the separatists do not have the expensive Buk anti-aircraft missile system or the trained personnel to operate it.
 
Another fact is that the separatists have no incentive to shoot down an airliner and neither does Russia. Anyone can tell the difference between low-flying attack aircraft and an airliner at 33,000 feet.
 
The Ukrainians do have Buk anti-aircraft missile systems, and a Buk battery was operational in the region and deployed at a site from which it could have fired a missile at the airliner.
 
Just as the separatists and the Russian government have no incentive to shoot down an airliner, neither does the Ukrainian government nor, one would think, even the crazed extreme Ukrainian nationalists who have formed militias to take the fight against the separatists that the Ukrainian army is not keen to undertake–unless there was a plan to frame Russia.
 
One Russian general familiar with the weapon system offered his opinion that it was a mistake made by the Ukrainian military untrained in the weapon’s use. The general said that although Ukraine has a few of the weapons, Ukrainians have had no training in their use in the 23 years since Ukraine separated from Russia. The general thinks it was an accident due to incompetence.
 
This explanation makes a certain amount of sense and far more sense than Washington’s propaganda. The problem with the general’s explanation is that it does not explain why the Buk anti-aircraft missile system was deployed near or in a separatist territory. The separatists have no aircraft. It seems odd for Ukraine to have an expensive missile system in an area in which it is of no military use and where the position could be overrun and captured by separatists.
 
As Washington, Kiev, and the presstitute media are committed to the propaganda that Putin did it,we are not going to get any reliable information from the US media. We will have to figure it out for ourselves.
 
One way to begin is to ask: Why was the missile system where it was? Why risk an expensive missile system by deploying it in a conflict environment in which it is of no use? Incompetence is one answer, and another is that the missile system did have an intended use.
 
What intended use? News reports and circumstantial evidence provide two answers. One is that the ultra-nationalist extremists intended to bring down Putin’s presidential airliner and confused the Malaysian airliner with the Russian airliner.
 
The Interfax news agency citing anonymous sources, apparently air traffic controllers, reported that the Malaysian airliner and Putin’s airliner were traveling almost the identical route within a few minutes of one another. Interfax quotes its source: “I can say that Putin’s plane and the Malaysian Boeing intersected at the same point and the same echelon. That was close to Warsaw on 330-m echelon at the height of 10,100 meters. The presidential jet was there at 16:21 Moscow time and the Malaysian aircraft at 15:44 Moscow time. The contours of the aircrafts are similar, linear dimensions are also very similar, as for the coloring, at a quite remote distance they are almost identical.”
 
I have not seen an official Russian denial, but according to news reports, the Russian government in response to the Interfax news report said that Putin’s presidential plane no longer flies the Ukraine route since the outbreak of hostilities.
 
Before we take the denial at face value, we need to be aware that the implication that Ukraine attempted to assassinate the president of Russia implies war, which Russia wants to avoid. It also implies Washington’s complicity as it is highly unlikely that Washington’s puppet in Kiev would risk such a dangerous act without Washington’s backing. The Russian government, being intelligent and rational, would obviously deny reports of an attempted assassination of the Russian president by Washington and its Kiev puppet. Otherwise, Russia has to do something about it, and that means war.
 
The second explanation is that the extremists who operate outside the official Ukrainian military, hatched a plot to down an airliner in order to cast the blame on Russia. If such a plot occurred, it likely originated with the CIA or some operative arm of Washington and was intended to force the EU to cease resisting Washington’s sanctions against Russia and to break off Europe’s valuable economic relationships with Russia. Washington is frustrated that its sanctions are unilateral, unsupported by its NATO puppets or any other countries in the world except possibly the lap-dog British PM.
 
There is considerable circumstantial evidence in support of this second explanation. There is the youtube video which purports to be a conversation between a Russian general and separatists who are discussing having mistakenly brought down a civilian airliner. According to reports, expert examination of the code in the video reveal that it was made the day before the airliner was hit.
 
Another problem with the video is that whereas we could say that separatists conceivably could confuse an airliner at 33,000 feet with a military attack plane, the Russian military would not. The only conclusion is that by involving the Russian military, the video doubly discredited itself.
 
The circumstantial evidence easiest for non-technical people to understand is the on cue news programs organized to put the blame on Russia prior to the knowledge of any facts.
 
In my previous article I reported on the BBC news report which I heard and which was obviously primed to place all blame on Russia. The program ended with a BBC correspondent breathlessly reporting that he has just seen the youtube video and that the video is the smoking gun that proved Russia did it. There is no longer any doubt, he said. Somehow the information got on a video and on youtube before it reached the Ukrainian government or Washington.
 
The evidence that Putin did it is a video made prior to the attack on the airliner. The entire BBC report aired over National Public Radio was orchestrated for the sole purpose of establishing prior to any evidence that Russia was responsible.
 
Indeed the entire Western media spoke as one: Russia did it. And the presstitutes are still speaking the same way.
 
Possibly, this uniform opinion merely reflects the pavlovian training of the Western media to automatically line up with Washington. No media source wants to be subject to criticism for being unamerican or to find itself isolated by majority opinion, which carries the day, and earn black marks for being wrong. As a former journalist for, and contributor to, America’s most important news publications, I know how this works.
 
On the other hand, if we discount the pavlovian conditioning, the only conclusion is that the entire news cycle pertaining to the downing of the Malaysian airliner is orchestrated in order to lay the blame on Putin.
 
Romesh Ratnesar, deputy editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, provides convincing evidence for orchestration in his own remarks of July 17. Ratnesar’s opinion title is: “The Malaysia Airlines Shootdown Spells Disaster for Putin.” Ratnesar does not mean that Putin is being framed-up. He means that prior to Putin having the Malaysian airliner shot down, “to the vast majority of Americans, Russia’s meddling in Ukraine has largely seemed of peripheral importance to  US interests. That calculus has changed. . . . It may take months, even years, but Putin’s recklessness is bound to catch up to him. When it does, the downing of MH 17 may be seen as the beginning of his undoing.”
 
As a former Wall Street Journal editor, anyone who handed me a piece of shit like Ratnesar published would have been fired. Look at the insinuations when there is no evidence to support them. Look at the lie that Washington’s coup is “Russia’s meddling in Ukraine.” What we are witnessing is the total corruption of Western journalism by Washington’s imperial agenda. Journalists have to get on board with the lies or get run over.
 
Look around for still honest journalists. Who are they? Glenn Greenwald, who is under constant attack by his fellow journalists, all of whom are whores. Who else can you think of? Julian Assange, locked away in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London on Washington’s orders. The British puppet government won’t permit free transit to Assange to take up his asylum in Ecuador. The last country that did this was the Soviet Union, which required its Hungarian puppet to keep Cardinal Mindszenty interred in the US Embassy in Budapest for 15 years from 1956 until 1971. Mindszenty was granted political asylum by the United States, but Hungary, on Soviet orders, would not honor his asylum, just as Washington’s British puppet, on Washington’s orders, will not honor Assange’s asylum.
 
If we are honest and have the strength to face reality, we will realize that the Soviet Union did not collapse. It simply moved, along with Mao and Pol Pot, to Washington and London.
 
The flaw in Putin’s diplomacy is that Putin’s diplomacy relies on good will and on truth prevailing. However, the West has no good will, and Washington is not interested in truth prevailing but in Washington prevailing. What Putin confronts is not reasonable “partners,” but a propaganda ministry aimed at him.
 
I understand Putin’s strategy, which contrasts Russian reasonableness with Washington’s threats, but it is a risky bet. Europe has long been a part of Washington, and there are no Europeans in power who have the vision needed to separate Europe from Washington. Moreover, European leaders are paid large sums of money to serve Washington. One year out of office and Tony Blair was worth $50 million dollars.
 
After the disasters that Europeans have experienced, it is unlikely that European leaders think of anything other than a comfortable existence for themselves. That existence is best obtained by serving Washington. As the successful extortion of Greece by banks proves, European people are powerless.
 
Here is the official statement of the Russian Defense Ministry.
 
Washington’s propaganda assault against Russia is a double tragedy, because it has diverted attention from Israel’s latest atrocity against the Palestinians locked up in the Gaza ghetto. Israel claims that its air attack and invasion of Gaza is merely Israel’s attempt to find and close the alleged tunnels through which Palestinian terrorists pour into Israel inflicting carnage. Of course there are no tunnels and no terrorist carnage in Israel.
 
One might think that at least one journalist somewhere in the American media would ask why bombing hospitals and civilian housing closes underground tunnels into Israel. But that is too much to ask of the whores that comprise the US media.
 
Expect even less from the US Congress. Both the House and Senate have passed resolutions supporting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians. ...

 As a reward for its policy of genocide, the Obama regime is immediately transferring $429 million of US taxpayers’ money to Israel to pay for the slaughter.
 
Contrast the US government’s support for Israel’s war crimes with the propaganda onslaught against Russia based on lies. We are living all over again “Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction,” “Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” “Iranian nukes.”
 
Washington has lied for so long that it can’t do anything else.

[TylerDurden]

What Gaza’s Crisis Shows About Israel’s Ambitions and America’s Decline



Written byFlynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett

Saturday July 19, 2014




 As Israel’s military kills and injures hundreds of civilians in Gaza—whose population Israel is legally obligated to protect as an occupying power—people around the world, including in the United States, wonder why official Washington appears so indifferent to even the most graphic instances of “collateral damage.”
 
The primary reason is that most American policy elites still believe the United States needs to dominate the Middle East, and that Israeli military assertiveness is instrumentally useful to this end—a mindset the Israel lobby artfully reinforces.
 
Since World War II—and especially since the Cold War’s end—the US political class has seen Middle Eastern hegemony as key to their country’s global primacy. For two decades following Israel’s creation, it contributed little to this; thus, the United States extended it virtually no military or economic assistance, beyond negligible amounts of food aid.
 
Washington started providing substantial assistance to Israel only after it demonstrated a unilateral capacity, in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, to capture and hold territory from Arab states allied, for the most part, with the Soviet Union. Support for Israel grew through the rest of the Cold War; after the Cold War, US policymakers doubled down on the US-Israeli “special relationship,” calculating that facilitating Israel’s military superiority vis-à-vis its neighbours would help solidify US post-Cold War dominance over the strategically vital Middle East.
 
The instrumental nature of the “special relationship” also shaped what seems, from outside, Washington’s chronically ineffectual stewardship of the so-called Middle East peace process—especially in seeking a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Notwithstanding rhetorical professions, neither Israel nor the US has ever wanted a two-state outcome.
 
Palestinian self-determination precluded

Israel’s national security strategy has long rested on a military doctrine—which Israeli officials misleadingly label “deterrence”—requiring that Israel’s military be capable of using force first, disproportionately, and whenever and wherever in its neighbourhood Israeli politicians want. Pursuing a two-state solution seriously would ultimately curb this freedom of unilateral military initiative.
 
Moreover, for a Zionist project with inherently religious roots, a two-state outcome would mean surrendering too much of the Jewish Biblical homeland to sustain the Jewish immigration on which Israel’s long-term future depends.
 
Likewise, the US never intended the peace process to help Palestinians achieve real self-determination—for that would inevitably constrain Israel’s exercise of military supremacy over its neighbourhood, attenuating America’s own drive for Middle Eastern dominance. The process has instead been conducted to empower Israel, to subordinate Palestinians and other Arabs into an increasingly militarised US sphere of influence, and to leverage Arab states’ buy-in to this scenario.
 
These dynamics are vividly displayed in Israeli and US approaches to Gaza. The roots of Gazans’ current trials go back to 2005, when Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from Gaza. Widely credited with having pushed Israel to take these steps, Hamas won internationally supervised Palestinian elections the following year.
 
But Gaza’s occupation was far from over. While Israel had withdrawn soldiers and settlers, it hardly let Gazans exercise anything approaching sovereignty: Israel’s military continued exerting strict control over their access to the world—whether by land, sea, or air—and over flows of food, medicine, and other essential goods into their territory. For nearly a decade, this siege has eroded living conditions for 1.7 million people.
 
After becoming the elected governors of Gaza’s population, Hamas offered Israel a long-term truce, if Israel withdrew to pre-1967 borders. Instead of negotiating with Hamas, to consolidate a sustainable and truly self-governing entity in Gaza that could ground broader conflict resolution, Israel and the US rejected Palestinians’ electoral choice and worked in multiple ways to isolate Hamas and undermine its popularity by increasing civilian suffering in Gaza—including, in 2006, 2008-2009, and 2012, through military assaults inflicting thousands of Palestinian casualties.
 
In some respects, this approach “succeeded,” for a while. By this spring, Hamas was at what even ardent supporters described as its weakest point, in terms of financial resources and regional backing, since its founding. (To be sure, Hamas contributed to this by abandoning its base in Syria and counting on Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government to become its biggest regional backer.)
 
US failure
 
But Israel’s insistence on perpetuating occupation—even without settlements—is renewing Hamas’ resistance agenda. Earlier this week, after Israel accepted an Egyptian ceasefire proposal that would have done nothing to address the ongoing siege, Hamas made its own proposal: a ten-year truce, including a comprehensive ceasefire—if Israel met a set of ten demands.
 
Among them: opening all land crossings into Gaza, lifting the naval blockade, establishing an international airport and a seaport, freeing all prisoners arrested in the Israeli military’s current campaign, and committing not to re-enter Gaza for a decade.
 
Israel, of course, is not about to accede to any of this. And so the world waits to see if a ceasefire can be brokered, or whether Israel’s military, after bombing at least 1,800 sites in Gaza since July 8, is mounting a “boots on the ground” operation there which, Israeli officials warn, could last “many months.”
 
Among this situation’s many tragic aspects, one is particularly galling: After strategically failed interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and (by proxy) Syria, it is abundantly evident that Washington’s quest to dominate the Middle East has not just failed. This quest has sapped US capacity to shape positive strategic outcomes in the region and, at least in relative terms, weakened the United States as a global player. Looking ahead, the experience of the Arab Awakening casts further doubt on the long-term plausibility of co-opting unrepresentative Arab governments into a US-led regional order that, among other things, enshrines Israel’s perpetual military ascendancy. Yet, US policy elites stick with their hegemonic script.
 
The alternatives to Washington’s failed quest for hegemony are twofold: to shift US strategy towards cultivating a stable balance of power in the Middle East and to promote greater reliance on international law and institutions as contributors to regional and global stability. Either or both would compel fundamental revision of US posture towards Israel.
 
Cultivating a stable regional balance will take serious engagement with all relevant actors, including those (Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran) that seek to constrain Israel through both hard and soft power. It will also require the United States to stop enabling Israel’s unfettered freedom of military initiative, which contributes to regional instability. Similarly, promoting international legal frameworks as strategic stabilisers is meaningless unless Washington stops shielding Israel from the political consequences of thwarting them—whether by regularly violating international humanitarian law or by opting out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and developing the region’s only indigenous nuclear arsenal.
 
Unfortunately for Gaza’s people and US interests, the US political class remains deeply resistant to these imperatives.

[TylerDurden]

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David Versus Goliath in Gaza



Written byEric Margolis

Saturday July 19, 2014




Israel is clearly winning the David v. Goliath struggle with Palestinians in Gaza.
 
Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seized on the murder in June of three Jewish teenagers from a West Bank settlement to launch Israel’s third war against Gaza in six years.
 
So far, some 230 Palestinians have been killed, 70% women and children, and one Israeli has died. Israeli bombing and shelling has made the rubble in Gaza bounce.
 
As in the two previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, it’s unclear who began the reciprocal rounds of shelling. Palestinians claim Israel broke what had been a successful, 18-month cease-fire; Israel claims Hamas fired first.
 
In fact, the latest conflict was likely begun by rockets launched against Israel by the militant Islamic Jihad movement to avenge an air attack by Israel on its members. Israel knows just how to provoke the Palestinians to violence.
 
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement, replied to Israeli air attacks by launching salvos of home-made and smuggled rockets at Israel. These unguided weapons have proven militarily useless, little better than rocks. But they gave Israel an ideal pretext to attack Gaza and try to crush the elected Hamas government, which Israel considers its bitterest foe after Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
 
The Palestinians made a grave mistake resorting to rockets and mortars. Firing back at Israel certainly makes Palestinians feel good, but doing so has allowed Israel’s powerful worldwide supporters to portray the Gaza siege as a battle between equals, rather than what it really is – Israel shooting fish in a barrel.
 
“Israel has the right to defend itself,” goes the pro-Israel mantra – one even repeated by US President Barack Obama.
 
It matters not that Israel is violating US law – the Arms Control Export Act – by using US weapons against Gaza’s civilians. Nor that the assault on Gaza violates international law and the Geneva Convention. Or that much of the world sees the assault on Gaza as a crime against humanity. US elections are on the horizon and the US/Canadian government and media have taken Israel’s side.
 
Hamas rejected the fraudulent US/Israeli engineered truce presented by Egypt, Israel’s new best friend. On Thursday night, Israel launched a major ground offensive into Gaza, strongly backed by Washington. Palestinians have been starved and denied basic materials for years by the Israel-Egyptian siege of Gaza. The 1.7 million Gaza inhabitants live in a giant open air concentration camp on the verge of malnutrition.
 
The current Israeli attacks have shut down Gaza’s sewage, water and power grid, a tactic the US used in Iraq in 1991 that caused the deaths, according to the UN, of 500,000 Iraqi children. These attacks are designed to break the will of Gaza’s people, and cause them to overthrow Hamas.
 
It’s worth recalling that Israel helped give birth to Hamas. Israel security forces turned a blind eye to Hamas activities, and may have secretly funded it, in hopes the Islamic movement would split the Palestinians (it did) and rival the PLO. This was, of course, before PLO chief Yasser Arafat was murdered and the current PLO leadership brought under US and Israeli control.
 
Today, Israelis can’t even say the word "Hamas” without scowling and making a spitting sound…hhhhhhhhhhhamas.
 
Hamas has played right into Israel’s hands by launching its rocket barrages, which have proven worse than useless. Israel will now receive a half billion dollars more from the US to acquire more of its excellent Iron Dome anti-missile systems.
 
Meanwhile, PM Netanyahu has managed to portray Palestinians as rabid terrorists with whom no negotiations are possible. Any Palestinian state next to Israel, warns Netanyahu, would become another Gaza, shooting rockets into peaceful Israel.
 
Netanyahu used the Gaza crisis to repeat he would never accept even a Palestinian mini state on the West Bank. Israel must forever control the eastern border of Palestine – the Jordan River Valley. Palestinians will be left with self-governing tribal reservations. To many Israelis, Palestinians are simply wild animals who must be caged up.
 
By again attacking Gaza, Netanyahu has made any Israeli-Arab peace deal all the more impossible. He has also shown that his patron, the United States, has little say in the matter. Ever-timid President Obama offered to mediate between Israel and the PLO (not Hamas) while the world was waiting for him to order Israel to cease fire.
 

[TylerDurden]

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US Foreign Food Aid Hurts the Poor



Written byJames Bovard

Thursday July 17, 2014



The U.S. government loves to preen about its generosity to the world’s downtrodden. However, a long series of presidents and their tools have scorned the evidence that their aid programs perennially clobber recipients. Nowhere is this clearer than in the sordid history of U.S. food aid.

Food for Peace was devised in 1954 to help dump abroad embarrassingly huge crop surpluses fomented by high federal price supports. The primary purpose of Public Law 480 (in which the program is embodied) has been to hide the evidence of the failure of other farm programs. Although PL-480 sometimes alleviates hunger in the short run, the program disrupts local agricultural markets and makes it harder for poor countries to feed themselves in the long run.

The Agriculture Department (USDA) buys crops grown by American farmers, has them processed or bagged by U.S. companies, and pays lavishly to send them overseas in U.S.-flagged ships. At least 25 percent of food aid must be shipped from Great Lakes ports, per congressional mandate. Once the goods arrive at their destination, the Agency for International Development (USAID) often takes charge or bestows the food on private relief organizations.

In the 1950s and 1960s massive U.S. wheat dumping in India disrupted India’s agricultural market and helped bankrupt thousands of Indian farmers. In 1984 George Dunlop, chief of staff of the Senate Agriculture Committee, speculated that American food aid may have been responsible for the starvation of millions of Indians. The Indian government generated fierce hostility from the U.S. government because of its pro-Soviet leanings in the Cold War. In a secret White House tape in 1971, Richard Nixon declared, “The Indians need — what they really need is a mass famine.” (The story behind Nixon’s deprecation is told in a new book, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide, by Gary Bass.) A 1975 General Accounting Office report noted that massive U.S. food aid to India and Indonesia in the 1960s
 restricted agricultural growth in those countries by allowing the governments to (1) postpone essential agricultural reforms, (2) fail to give agricultural investment sufficient priority, and (3) maintain a pricing system, which gave farmers an inadequate incentive to increase production.
 Making matters worse

In 1976 an earthquake hit Guatemala, killing 23,000 people and leaving more than a million homeless. But just prior to the disaster the country had harvested one of the largest wheat crops on record and food was plentiful. Yet the United States dumped 27,000 metric tons of wheat on the country. The U.S. “gift” knocked the bottom out of the local grain markets and made it harder for villages to recover. The Guatemalan government finally had to forbid the importation of any more basic grains.

In 1977 Congress responded to the carnage that Food for Peace wreaked abroad by enacting a requirement (sponsored by Sen. Henry Bellmon of Oklahoma) that compelled USAID and the USDA to certify that food aid would not devastate farmers or destabilize markets in recipient countries. But whom does Uncle Sam entrust to ensure that donations won’t pummel local farmers? In most cases, a foreign government or private relief organization hoping to gain a tremendous free-food windfall from Washington. Cornell professor Christopher Barrett, in his book Food Aid after Fifty Years, noted that “recently a senior U.S. government official remarked privately that ‘Bellmon Analyses are sheer fraud…. No one believes them.’”

In the 1980s, famines and hunger in sub-Saharan Africa were continually in the world news. But few people recognized how U.S. aid programs often made the situation worse. In Somalia a report made by a USAID inspector general concluded, “Nearly all Title I [Food for Peace] food deliveries to Somalia in 1985 and 1986 arrived at the worst possible time, the harvest months, and none arrived at the best time, the critical hungry period. The consensus of the donor community was that the timing of the deliveries lowered farmers’ prices thereby discouraging domestic production.”

In Senegal the Food for Peace program in 1985 and 1986 resulted in the government’s closing down the local rice markets to force the Senegalese to buy American rice that their government had been given. The Senegalese are among the few peoples in the world who prefer broken rice to whole-grain rice, as they feel it better suits their sauces and national dishes. PL-480 does not offer broken rice. Since PL-480 proceeds went straight into the government coffers, Senegalese politicians had an incentive to prohibit the local farmers from selling their own rice in order to dump American rice on the market.

In 2008 USAID began tapping an independent consulting firm, Fintrac Inc., to recommend prudent donation levels. Nevertheless, in 2010 USAID approved sending almost three times as much rice to Liberia as Fintrac recommended. That same year the agency approved massive wheat shipments for Burundi and Sierra Leone, even though Fintrac recommended against it. The USDA is even more reckless. In 2008 it approved sending 30 times more soybean meal to Armenia than the agency’s own staff experts recommended.

“Monetizing” aid

In recent decades USAID has permitted recipients to “monetize” U.S. food aid — selling all or part of it in local markets and using the proceeds to bankroll their preferred projects. U.S.-donated food is routinely sold in local markets for much less than prevailing prices. In 2002-03 a deluge of food aid in Malawi caused local corn prices to plunge 60 percent. Mozambique wheat prices nose-dived in 2002 after USAID and the USDA simultaneously “flooded the market,” according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). Haitian farmers were similarly whipsawed after the United States and other nations bombarded the island with free food after the 2010 earthquake there.

In a speech last year USAID chief Rajiv Shah called the monetization of food aid “inefficient and sometimes counterproductive,” saying that in some cases “evidence has indicated that this practice actually hurts the communities we seek to help.” Meanwhile, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization cautions that monetization often results in “destroying local farm prices” and CARE, one of the world’s largest relief organizations, boycotts all monetization projects. The GAO concluded that “AID and USDA cannot ensure that monetization does not cause adverse market impacts because they program monetization at high volumes, conduct weak market assessments, and do not conduct post-monetization evaluations.”

Former USDA chief economist Robert Thompson observed that “U.S. farmers would scream unfair if USDA gave commodities to charitable organizations to sell into the U.S. market to generate funds to support their Hurricane Katrina recovery projects. That is exactly how farmers in developing countries see monetized food aid, but unlike American farmers, they have little political voice.”

The Obama administration proposed to end monetization and instead give more cash to foreign governments and private relief organizations to buy and distribute food locally and finance preferred projects. Shah said that the proposed reforms would allow U.S. aid to feed up to four million more people per year. The agency also touted a new program to distribute debit cards to allow refugees and others to shop for meals at local stores — similar to how the food-stamp program operates domestically. But the goal should not be to maximize the number of foreigners eating out of the U.S. government’s hand.

Most Americans have the impression that U.S. food relief goes mainly to foreign areas hit by disasters or emergencies. Actually, only a small percentage does. As one congressional staffer told me in 1984, a USAID representative goes into a country, finds an excuse for a project, and then continues it for 15 years, regardless of need or results. Many such programs feed the same people for more than a decade, thereby decreasing permanently the demand for locally produced food and creating an entrenched welfare class. The GAO notes that most “emergency food aid funding” is spent on “multiyear feeding programs” that have produced epidemics of scurvy and beriberi because of the limited food choices.

The Obama administration also proposed to slightly reduce the percentage of U.S. crops purchased and shipped overseas on U.S. flagships. Food for Peace’s cargo-preference subsidies are alleged to be justified to preserve U.S. merchant ships in case of a national emergency. But a Senate Agriculture Committee report concluded, “Rather than encouraging the development of improved U.S. vessels, the program encourages the continued use of semi-obsolete and even unsafe vessels which are of little use for commercial or defense purposes.” Rep. Virginia Smith noted, “Between 1963 and 1983, more than 350 seamen died in major accidents on old ships operating beyond their productive life.” But regardless of its waste and economic irrationality, the cargo preference generates a tidal wave of congressional campaign contributions from the ship owners and the merchant marine union. The Obama administration put little effort behind its reform proposal, which Congress scuttled without further ado.

At the same time that the United States gives food handouts to selected foreign regimes, U.S. agricultural policies since 1933 have sought to drive up world grain prices. Though it is easy for USAID bureaucrats to point to pictures of smiling Third World citizens who received free American food, no one knows how many Africans and Asians have starved to death because they could not afford to buy grains that were more expensive as a result of the U.S. policy. While the United States gave free food to a small percentage of the world’s poor, it made food more expensive for all the world’s poor.

The long history of Washington’s ignoring how food aid ravages foreign farmers proves that Congress, USAID, and the USDA cannot be trusted to intervene in foreign markets. It is time to impose a Hippocratic Oath on foreign-aid programs: First, do no harm.

[TylerDurden]

Newer >

Neocons Go Undercover



Written byJustin Raimondo

Wednesday July 16, 2014


Ben Smith

Fox News reports it’s entirely legal in many jurisdictions for criminals to change their names, citing the case of an Oklahoma man convicted of impersonating a police officer – as well as a would-be school bus driver who is a convicted sex offender. It’s a problem in Australia, too, where rapists, murderers, and "fraudsters" simply reinvent themselves in order to escape scrutiny once out of prison. This practice is now spreading to the political sphere, where the ideological fraudsters formerly known as neoconservatives are trying to transform themselves into "Freedom Conservatives."
 
Ben Smith, writing in Buzzfeed – the neocons’ latest journalistic front – makes the case for the name-change in a piece claiming that the old categories – neocon, libertarian, tea party, hawks, etc. – are "outdated," representing "overlapping categories drawn from different eras." "Buzzfeed Ben," always in the vanguard of the New & Shiny, says "these terms don’t really fit." Why not? Well, because "there are multiple strands of antigovernment conservatism that predate the tea party movement," as well as ‘kinds of hawkishness that have little to do with the neoconservative movement."
 
Well, er, yes – there are indeed strands of antigovernment conservatism that predate the so-called Tea Party movement: the problem for Smith, however, is that none of them are extant. The Old Right of the pre-World War II era went out of existence sometime in the mid-1950s, while the "New Right" of William F. Buckley, Jr., is no longer "new" and is arguably just a memory, gone with the days when one could turn to National Review and find elegant prose. And as far as interventionist foreign policy "hawks" are concerned, the neocons have had a virtual monopoly on that corner of the spectrum since the cold war: even some of the same names crop up today –Kristol, Podhoretz – that were prominent back in the cold war era, the progeny of yesterday’s warmongers having taken on the jobs once assigned to their parents.
 
But facts don’t matter if you’re on a mission, and Smith ploughs ahead, oblivious to both history and the integrity of the English language:
 I propose replacing the messy old terminology with a simple new vocabulary, one that has evolved organically, which has deep and consistent intellectual roots, no pejorative implications, and which political leaders use effortlessly and without reflecting. The division that will define the Republican Party for the next decade is the split between Liberty Conservatives and Freedom Conservatives.
 Note the magisterial tone: the online publication that gave us the "listicle" is now presuming to define the American political lexicon for the next decade! Aside from the sheer presumptuousness, however, the key phrases in this edict are bolded for your convenience.
 
We mustn’t have any "pejorative implications," and we had best not reflect on where these implications come from – because they come from the historical record of these tendencies in American politics, and in the case of the neocons this isn’t anything to be proud of. The term "neoconservative" (or neocon, for short) has pejorative implications precisely because of the utter wrongness of the policies advocated – andimplemented – by these folks.
 
Who lied us into war in Iraq? The neocons.
 
Who said the Iraq war would be a "cakewalk"? The neocons.
 
Who confidently predicted we’d be greeted with showers of rose petals? The neocons.
 
Who said the war wouldn’t cost us a dime because it would be paid for with the profits from Iraqi oil? The neocons.
 
Who escaped responsibility for said disaster? The neocons.
 
Who are now all over the media urging us to re-invade Iraq – and bomb Iran for good measure? The neocons – i.e. the same Wolfowitzes, Perles, Feiths, and Kristols who bamboozled the nation into launching what Gen. William E. Odom rightly called the worst military disaster in American military history.
 
Names are important: they tell us who and what we are dealing with. Names identify not only individuals but families – which, translated into political-ideological terms, signifies allegiance to a given party or movement. This re-branding effort, then, is designed to wipe out the disgraceful history of the neoconservative movement, effectively removing the stigma attached to the name and enabling these all-too-familiar warmongers to start their latest agitations with a clean slate. Like any garden variety criminal who seeks to mask his dark past, the neocons want to wipe out their own history – and who can blame them for that?
 
There are some real howlers in Smith’s piece: "The divide over Liberty and Freedom," we are told, "has a good linguistic pedigree." Really? I don’t know what dictionary Smith is consulting, but in mine the words liberty and freedom are synonyms. Smith’s reinvention of the English language makes for some linguistic Orwellianisms, such as his description of "Freedom conservatives" backing "aggressive security measures" (i.e. the Surveillance State). This is true only in two places: in Orwell’s classic novel,Nineteen Eighty-Four, where "freedom is slavery," and Bizarro World, where water flows uphill.
 
The icing on the cake is Smith’s citing of leftist historian Eric Foner, who avers that freedom doesn’t mean the absence of coercion, but rather "the exercise of power of some sort." You’re scratching your head, but if we translate this into Bizarro-speak Smith’s meaning is all too clear: in the case of the neocons, this can only mean the freedom to kill large numbers of people – preferably Arabs – and destroy entire nations, as they did in Iraq.
 
George Orwell nailed Smith’s (and Foner’s) linguistic legerdemain in his classic essay on "Politics and the English Language" (1946), in which he pointed to the subterfuges ideologues of the day used to deceive their audience:
 The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different. Statements like Marshal Pétain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world, The Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with intent to deceive.
 Likewise, the phrase "Dick Cheney is a ‘Freedom Conservative’" has a distinctly Orwellian ring.
 
So whose bright idea was it to revise the political lexicon in a way that benefits neocons? Why, a neocon, of course:
 'You’re seeing skirmishes all over the place, people testing each other,’ Michael Goldfarb, a Freedom Conservative (and indeed, the guy who coined that phrase), told my colleague Rosie Gray.… Meanwhile the two sides are also using language to define each other. Liberty Conservatives call their enemies ‘neocons.’ Freedom Conservatives sling the word ‘isolationists.’ Those of us trying to write about them without taking sides need a new vocabulary.
 I love the pretense of objectivity: an attempt to wipe the historical slate clean and erase the criminal past of that noisy little sect known as the neoconservatives is here described as an attempt "to write about them without taking sides." Which brings me to my own bright idea: instead of calling them "freedom conservatives," why not define them by their most glaringly salient characteristic and call them Chutzpah Conservatives? Because they certainly have a lot of that….

[goodsamaritan]

Tyler, all these articles are just being suave about the real issues about the empire and eventually need to publish blunt direct truth to reach the minds of the masses.