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The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, welcomed the initiative taken by Mexico and Uruguay for a national dialogue and reaffirmed his willingness for a dialogue with all political sectors.

“I have seen that two Latin American governments have taken an initiative, which seems to me, must be the path. A diplomatic initiative, initiative for dialogue. The governments of Mexico and Uruguay have proposed what is believed to be an international initiative to promote a dialogue between parties in Venezuela for searching a negotiation, a national consensus,” he declared.

“To the governments of Mexico and Uruguay, I say, I am in agreement for a diplomatic initiative for a national dialogue in Venezuela. I am ready for a dialogue, a negotiation, for consensus”, he stated from the headquarters of the Supreme Court of Justice.

During the start of the judicial year 2019, he stressed that this dialogue must respect the Constitution of the Republic, and all political sectors of national life will participate in it.

He specified that Venezuela is now within a historical battle for international law in the face of coup attempt of the USA. “Interventionism is not the way,” declared Maduro.

Also, he thanked the governments of the world like Turkey, Russia, China among others, who have ratified their support for the sovereignty of Venezuela.

http://www.avn.info.ve/contenido/presidente-maduro-acepta-propuesta-mediadora-méxico-y-uruguay-para-diálogo-nacional

Translation by Sandeep Banerjee

25 January 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents.org

• Maduro endorses dialogue call by Mexico, Uruguay
• China and Russia extend support to Maduro
• Regional allies Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua reiterate support Maduro and reject US-led intervention
• Over 70 Experts call for US to stop interfering in Venezuela

On-going imperialist intervention in Venezuela is making situation tense. Imperialism is organizing provocative hostile acts to deteriorate situation in Venezuela. Following update has been prepared based on media reports:

In the face of on-going imperialist intervention and unlawful acts of the United States, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro ordered Thursday the closing of the embassy and consulates of his country in the United States, a day after breaking diplomatic relations with Donald Trump’s government.

Speaking from the Supreme Justice Court (TSJ), Maduro said that the international strategy’s objective is to intervene in Venezuela through a puppet president.

“There’s a great provocation, led by the U.S. empire, happening now in Venezuela. There’s no doubt in the world that it’s President Donald Trump who wants to impose a de facto, unconstitutional government. It’s a coup in Venezuela against the people and democracy,” said Maduro.

The crisis between the two governments escalated this week when the White House backed the swearing in of opposition lawmaker Juan Guaido as “interim president” against the constitution and international law. The Venezuelan president also gave the U.S. delegation until Sunday to leave the country.

Following Guaido’s self-swearing in, President Maduro called on the Venezuelan people to defeat what he termed a “coup attempt.”

“They want to break the republic, the nation, they want to declare an unconstitutional president … Their imperial lord Mike Pompeo organized this, it was him who gave the order,” Maduro said speaking of the attempted parliamentary coup against his elected progressive government.

He also explained that problems that the two countries had should have been resolved through diplomacy, without having to interfere in foreign countries issues.

“Imperialism was playing ahead. Since January 2018 it said: We won’t recognize any presidential election called in Venezuela,” he said.

Maduro said to be in favor of the call for dialogue made to the country as a whole by the governments of Uruguay and Mexico. “I can face the worst difficulties because I know I have the strength of the people.”

He also congratulated the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) for their support and recognition to the Bolivarian government

“The military power has spoken and it’s sticking to the Constitution, the homeland and the people. What the opposition right wing did was a false move, improvised, full of manipulation and lies. They can’t deal with the legitimate government,” he said.

Putin’s support to Maduro

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin pledged his support for the elected government of Venezuela during a phone call with President Maduro.

Putin criticized the “destructive external meddling” to which Venezuela has been exposed.

The Russian president has expressed his support to the legitimate authorities of Venezuela in this time of political crisis, which he said was caused by a “destructive external interference that grossly violates the most basic norms of the international law.”

Putin and Maduro also agreed to continue cooperation between the countries “in various fields.”

Russia, China, Iran and NATO-member Turkey condemned US interference in Venezuela’s domestic crisis, however, saying it could further complicate the situation.

Franco-Anglo imperialists

France and Britain joined the US-led chorus on Thursday. London claimed that Maduro is “not a legitimate leader” of Venezuela while Paris said that Maduro’s election was “illegal” and “Europe supports the restoration of democracy.”

Venezuela has endured a prolonged period of economic instability and hyperinflation, worsened by the gradually mounting external pressure. Maduro’s opponents blame the crisis on the socialist government, which, for its part, claims that the dissent is deliberately stirred up by the US and other foreign powers.

The US has greatly expanded its economic sanctions against Venezuela. The sanctions, however, have mainly hit the country’s citizens, many analysts argue.

The White House said on Thursday that it was ready to provide more than $20 million in humanitarian assistance to Venezuela, but Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said the money should go to the “legitimate” Guaido-led government, despite the fact that Guaido was not elected by the Venezuelan people and assumed the role of interim president in what his critics say was an unconstitutional act. Bolton said the Trump administration was focused on cutting Maduro off from all sources of revenue.

Imperialists waging economic war

Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino accused the United States of waging “economic war” on his country and warned a coup was underway after the US recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as interim president.

In a televised message on Thursday, Padrino insisted that elected president Nicolas Maduro was the only “legitimate” president. “I warn the people that there is a coup underway against our democracy and our president Nicolas Maduro,” he said.

Padrino recalled a failed coup attempt by the Bush administration in 2002, saying, “those of us who lived through the coup of 2002 have it etched into our minds, we never thought we’d see that again, but we saw it yesterday.”

Violence organized

The capital city of Caracas and several other Venezuelan cities saw scenes of violence Wednesday night, with reports of explosions and gunfire in multiple locations.

Clashes took place in the Jose Felix Ribas sector of Petare, the largest popular neighborhood of Caracas, with armed groups taking on different state security organs in close quarters. Local residents reported heavy gunfire and detonations, while a journalist for Colombian NTN24 reported that protesters launched a grenade under a bridge connecting Petare to Palo Verde in eastern Caracas.

There were likewise reports of barricades being set up, and clashes between armed groups and security forces in several neighborhoods of Caracas. Footage circulating on Twitter showed a group of masked youths hijacking and trying to take down a police truck in San Martin, which was later reportedly burned.

Graphic footage also appeared on social media showing a youth killed in the working class neighborhood of San Agustin, also in Caracas. The victim has been identified as 25-year-old Frank Correa, with local witnesses pointing the finger at FAES, the special forces of the Bolivarian National Police.

Clashes between protesters who set up barricades and security forces, who responded with water tanks, lasted into the early hours of Thursday. But it is unclear whether Correa’s death was related to these clashes or not.

Linares argues that there is a concerted effort to generate violence in popular neighborhoods, as opposed to the middle-class areas of Caracas where the “guarimba” protests mostly took place in 2014 and 2017.

The goal is to have these mercenary commando types, backed by the right-wing, generating chaos in popular neighborhoods.

Clashes between authorities and armed groups were also reported in the western Caracas sector of Boqueron in Sucre Parish, with special forces being deployed after police and National Guard personnel were forced to retreat.

Violence was also reported in other parts of the country, with witnesses denouncing attacks against public institutions in Anzoategui and Portuguesa States. In Yaracuy, 18-year-old Daniel Veliz was killed by a gunshot during an opposition protest, but no more details are known at this time.

In the central state of Barinas, local residents reported the murder of 30-year-old Gustavo Ramirez, nephew of former higher education minister Edgardo Ramirez, who was struck by a bullet to the head. Ramirez reportedly was not taking part in any demonstration but walked near an armed confrontation between opposition groups and security forces. Two other people have been reported dead in Barinas as a result of these clashes.

In the western state of Merida, reports emerged that a government supporter was shot dead and burned by masked people following an anti-government march. Witnesses identified the victim as Cohen German, who allegedly had a mental disability. A press conference to offer further details on the investigation has been set for Friday.

Different NGOs have put the number of casualties so far between 14 and 26, but several cases have yet to be confirmed and responsibilities ascertained.

Armed forces stand by Maduro

Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino Lopez issued a statement Wednesday evening voicing support for President Nicolas Maduro as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

On Thursday morning, the top general gave a press conference, vowing, “The events of 2002 will never be repeated,” referring to the short-lived US-backed coup against former President Hugo Chavez in April 2002.

Padrino went on to reaffirm the National Bolivarian Armed Forces’ commitment to upholding the constitution in opposition to foreign meddling.

A few minutes earlier, the commanders of the eight Integral Strategic Defense Regions (REDI), responsible for the deployment of troops in each region of the country, also hosted a press conference from different locations, declaring “loyalty and absolute subordination” to President Maduro.

Guaido under pressure

On Wednesday evening, high-ranking Chavista figure and President of the National Constituent Assembly Diosdado Cabello revealed on his TV show “Con el mazo dando” that he had held a meeting with Guaido the day before.

“Guaido asked for a meeting yesterday, and I went because I’ll meet with anyone for the peace of this country,” Cabello stated.

Cabello claimed that Guaido had pledged to do one thing but had done the complete opposite and that the opposition lawmaker had sent him a message claiming he was “under pressure” to proclaim himself president. Despite not presenting any evidence, Cabello challenged Guaido to deny the events.

Former U.N. expert: U.S. attempted coup is against international laws

Alfred de Zayas, a former United Nations expert who visited Venezuela in 2017 as a U.N. representative, said that the United States is conducting an illegal coup in the country, which is against international laws.

“It is an attempted coup d’état. Now, we all believe in democracy… Now, there’s nothing more undemocratic than a coup d’état, and also boycotting elections,” Zayas commented.

“The mainstream media has been complicit in this attempted coup. … This reminds us of the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003,” the U.N. expert told Democracy Now.

When Zayas visited Venezuela as a rapporteur, he told the opposition members “you simply cannot topple the government, and Maduro is not simply going to roll over. I mean, there are 7, 8, 9 million Venezuelans who are committed Chavistas, and you have to take them into account. What are you going to do with them if you topple the government through a coup d’état?”

The U.N. expert also took a dig at the mainstream media who through fake news made the people believe that the U.S. intervention in Venezuela is good for the people of the country. He denounced the media campaign against the South American country, which has been termed to have a humanitarian crisis. “And, of course, there was no humanitarian crisis,” said Zayas.

He also compared the current situation with Chile’s Salvador Allende. An economic war was waged against Allende for three years. When the economic war was not successful in ousting Allende, a coup d’état by General Augusto Pinochet toppled Allende’s regime bringing 17 years of dictatorship.

“If the opposition really considers itself democratic, it has to play the democratic game, and it has to participate in the elections. They have chosen to boycott the elections over the last years,” he commented.

Stop Interfering in Venezuela: Experts say to US

Noam Chomsky, Alfred de Zayas, Sujatha Fernandes, Boots Riley, John Pilger and many others oppose US interventionism in Venezuela. The statement is worth the read.

The United States government must cease interfering in Venezuela’s internal politics, especially for the purpose of overthrowing the country’s government. Actions by the Trump administration and its allies in the hemisphere are almost certain to make the situation in Venezuela worse, leading to unnecessary human suffering, violence, and instability.

Venezuela’s political polarization is not new; the country has long been divided along racial and socioeconomic lines. But the polarization has deepened in recent years. This is partly due to US support for an opposition strategy aimed at removing the government of Nicolás Maduro through extra-electoral means. While the opposition has been divided on this strategy, US support has backed hardline opposition sectors in their goal of ousting the Maduro government through often violent protests, a military coup d’etat, or other avenues that sidestep the ballot box.

Under the Trump administration, aggressive rhetoric against the Venezuelan government has ratcheted up to a more extreme and threatening level, with Trump administration officials talking of “military action” and condemning Venezuela, along with Cuba and Nicaragua, as part of a “troika of tyranny.” Problems resulting from Venezuelan government policy have been worsened by US economic sanctions, illegal under the Organization of American States and the United Nations ― as well as US law and other international treaties and conventions. These sanctions have cut off the means by which the Venezuelan government could escape from its economic recession, while causing a dramatic falloff in oil production and worsening the economic crisis, and causing many people to die because they can’t get access to life-saving medicines. Meanwhile, the US and other governments continue to blame the Venezuelan government ― solely ― for the economic damage, even that caused by the US sanctions.

Now the US and its allies, including OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro and Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, have pushed Venezuela to the precipice. By recognizing National Assembly President Juan Guaido as the new president of Venezuela ― something illegal under the OAS Charter ― the Trump administration has sharply accelerated Venezuela’s political crisis in the hopes of dividing the Venezuelan military and further polarizing the populace, forcing them to choose sides. The obvious, and sometimes stated goal, is to force Maduro out via a coup d’etat.

The reality is that despite hyperinflation, shortages, and a deep depression, Venezuela remains a politically polarized country. The US and its allies must cease encouraging violence by pushing for violent, extralegal regime change. If the Trump administration and its allies continue to pursue their reckless course in Venezuela, the most likely result will be bloodshed, chaos, and instability. The US should have learned something from its regime change ventures in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and its long, violent history of sponsoring regime change in Latin America.

Neither side in Venezuela can simply vanquish the other. The military, for example, has at least 235,000 frontline members, and there are at least 1.6 million in militias. Many of these people will fight, not only on the basis of a belief in national sovereignty that is widely held in Latin America ― in the face of what increasingly appears to be a US-led intervention ― but also to protect themselves from likely repression if the opposition topples the government by force.

In such situations, the only solution is a negotiated settlement, as has happened in the past in Latin American countries when politically polarized societies were unable to resolve their differences through elections. There have been efforts, such as those led by the Vatican in the fall of 2016, that had potential, but they received no support from Washington and its allies who favored regime change. This strategy must change if there is to be any viable solution to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela.

For the sake of the Venezuelan people, the region, and for the principle of national sovereignty, these international actors should instead support negotiations between the Venezuelan government and its opponents that will allow the country to finally emerge from its political and economic crisis.

US orders non-essential diplomatic staff: Leave Venezuela

The US has ordered all of its “non-essential” diplomats and embassy staff to leave Venezuela “for security reasons”.

The US has also warned US citizens in Venezuela that they should “strongly consider” leaving the country, after Maduro said the US should pull their staff out of Caracas “if they had any sense.”

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza has accused the US – and President Donald Trump personally – of fomenting a coup in Caracas while Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino accused it of waging “economic war” on his country.

Washington is setting dangerous precedent: Correa

Washington’s reckless push for regime change in Venezuela might set a dangerous precedent, former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa told RT.

A situation, in which a man “declares himself an ‘interim’ president” and immediately gets recognition from 11 Latin American countries and the US, is “unseen,” Correa said, commenting on the latest developments in the crisis-ridden Venezuela and referring to the opposition head Juan Guaido.

Correa also said that the opposition head “ignored the constriction, laws, election … procedures” in his self-manifestation as “nothing of this sort is in the constitution.”

However, those pushing for the coup were apparently not very much concerned about the legal formalities but were instead focused on their own interests, according to Correa, who said the development set a dangerous precedent for such an approach to be extended on any other country, whose “government the US does not like,” regardless of whether it is democratic or not.

One can talk about a new Operation Condor now,” Correa said, referring to the infamous campaign of state terror and purges of alleged Communists conducted by US-backed South American dictatorships beginning in 1975.

“This is an impressive blow,” the ex-president said, referring to the development in Venezuela. “They avoid resorting to the military [action], assassinations or kidnappings for now because they do not need it. One cannot rule out that they could still resort to such methods” in the future, Correa warned.

WikiLeaks warns

The US President’s decision to recognize Guaido as the county’s “interim president” may set off a “possible civil war” in the oil-rich nation, WikiLeaks has warned.

Trump’s move on recognizing Guaido as the “interim president” of Venezuela might prove disastrous for the country, which has endured years of instability, and spark an open full-blown conflict, the whistleblowing organization WikiLeaks tweeted.

It could lead to a “possible civil war in the country with the largest proven oil reserves,” it said.

25 January 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Tom Engelhardt

As I approach 75, I’m having a commonplace experience for my age. I live with a brain that’s beginning to dump previously secure memories — names, the contents of books I read long ago (or all too recently), events, whatever. If you’re of a certain age yourself, you know the story.

Recently, however, I realized that this experience of loss, like so much else in our world, is more complex than I imagined. What I mean is that such loss also involves gain. It’s turned my mind to, and made me something of an instant expert on, one aspect of twenty-first-century America: the memory hole that’s swallowed up parts of our all-too-recent history. In fact, I’ve been wondering whether aging imperial powers, like old men and women, have a tendency to discard what once had been oh-so-familiar. There’s a difference, though, when it comes to the elites of the aging empire I live in at least. They don’t just dump things relatively randomly as I seem to be doing. Instead, they conveniently obliterate all memory of their country’s — that is, their own — follies and misdeeds.

Let me give you an example. But you need to bear with me here because I’m about to jump into the disordered mind of a man who, though two years younger than me, has what might be called — given present-day controversies — a borderline personality. I’m thinking of President Donald Trump, or rather of a particular moment in his chaotic recent mental life. As the New Year dawned, he chaired what now passes for a “cabinet meeting.” That mainly means an event in which those present grovel before, fawn over, and outrageously praise him in front of the cameras. Otherwise, Trump, a man who doesn’t seem to know the meaning of advice or of a meeting, held a 95-minute presidential ramble through the brambles in front of a Game of Thrones-style “[Iran] Sanctions Are Coming” poster of… well, him. The media typically ate it up, even while critiquing the president’s understanding of that HBO TV series. And so it goes in the Washington of 2019.

Excuse me if I seem to be wandering off subject (another attribute of the aging mind), but I’m about to plunge into history and our president is neither a historian, nor particularly coherent. Read any transcript of his and not only does he flip from subject to subject, sentence by sentence, but even — no small trick — within sentences. In other words, he presents a translation problem. Fortunately, he’s surrounded by a bevy of translators (still called “reporters” or “pundits”) and, unlike the translators in the president’s meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, we have their notes.

So here, as a start, is a much-quoted passage of his on this country’s never-ending Afghan War from that cabinet meeting, which reporters and pundits jumped on with alacrity and criticized him roundly for:

“We’re going to do something that’s right. We are talking to the Taliban. We’re talking to a lot of different people. But here’s the thing — because mentioned India: India is there. Russia is there. Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia, because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there; they should be fighting. But Russia should be fighting.

“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally, they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again, as opposed to the Soviet Union. You know, a lot [of] these places you’re reading about now are no longer a part of Russia because of Afghanistan.”

As I said, Donald Trump is no historian. So it’s true that the Red Army didn’t move into Afghanistan in 1979 thanks to a terrorist presence in Russia. And yes, every stray pen or talking head in Washington seemed to skewer the president for his ignorance of that reality, including the Atlantic’s eminent neocon pundit David Frum who basically claimed that the president was simply pushing the latest dish of pasta Putinesca our way. (“It’s amazing enough that any U.S. president would retrospectively endorse the Soviet invasion. What’s even more amazing is that he would do so using the very same falsehoods originally invoked by the Soviets themselves: ‘terrorists’ and ‘bandit elements.’ It has been an important ideological project of the Putin regime to rehabilitate and justify the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan…”)

While critics like Frum did begrudgingly admit that the Soviet fiasco in Afghanistan might have had just a teensy-weensy something or other to do with the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991, less than two years after the Red Army limped home, the president, they insisted, basically got that wrong, too. The Soviet Union bankrupted by Afghanistan? Not in your dreams, buddy, or as the Washington Post‘s Aaron Blake wrote in a piece headlined “Trump’s Bizarre History Lesson on the Soviet Union, Russia, and Afghanistan”:

“The overlap between the fall of the Soviet Union and its foray into Afghanistan is obvious. The USSR invaded in 1979 and left a decade later, in 1989. The superpower dissolved shortly thereafter in 1991. But correlation is not causation… It was perhaps among the many reasons the USSR collapsed. But it was not the reason.”

And then, of course, came the next presidential tweet, and everyone — except me — moved on with alacrity. I was left alone, still dredging through my memories of that ancient conflict, which, these days, no one but the president would even think of bringing up in the context of the ongoing U.S. war in Afghanistan. And yet here’s the curious thing when it comes to an aging empire that prefers not to remember the history of its folly: Donald Trump was right that Russia’s Afghan misadventure is a remarkably logical place to start when considering the present American debacle in that same country.

Two Empires Trapped in Afghanistan

Let me mention one thing no one’s likely to emphasize these days when it comes to the Russian decision to enter that Afghan quagmire in 1979. At the highest levels of the Carter and then the Reagan administrations, top American officials were working assiduously to embroil the Soviets in Afghanistan and would then invest staggering sums in a CIA campaign to fund Islamic extremist guerrillas to keep them there. Not that anyone in Washington is likely to play this up in 2019, but the U.S. began aiding those Mujahidin guerrillas not after the Red Army moved in to support a pro-Soviet regime in Kabul, but six months before.

Here’s how President Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, would describethe situation almost two decades later:

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahidin began during 1980, that’s to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan. But the reality, kept secret until now, is completely different: on 3 July 1979 President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And on the same day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained that in my opinion this aid would lead to a Soviet military intervention.”

Asked if he had any regrets, Brzezinski responded:

“Regret what? The secret operation was an excellent idea. It drew the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.’”

Think about that largely missing bit of history for a moment. Top U.S. officials wanted to give the Soviet Union a version of their own disastrous Vietnam experience and so invested billions of dollars and much effort in that proxy war — and it worked. The Soviet leadership continued to pour money into their military misadventure in Afghanistan when their country was already going bankrupt and the society they had built was beginning to collapse around them. They were indeed suffering from what General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev came to call “the bleeding wound.” And if that isn’t the language of disaster (or bankruptcy or, perhaps more accurately, implosion), what is? Yes, Afghanistan, that “graveyard of empires,” wasn’t the only thing that took their world down, but the way their much-vaunted army finally limped home a decade later was certainly a significant factor in its collapse.

Now, let me tax your memory (and especially elite Washington’s) just a bit more. Think again about the history that led up to the American war President Trump was fretting about in that cabinet meeting. Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Brzezinski and his successors were just a tad too successful — or, to put it another way, that they lured not one but two empires into their trap; the second being, of course, the American one.

After all, in that 10-year Afghan proxy war (1979-1989), they laid the foundations for the creation by a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden of a resistance outfit of Arab fighters. You know, “al-Qaeda,” or “the base.” They also funded other extremist Islamic figures and groups like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or the Haqqani network that would, more than a decade after the Soviets straggled home, go to war against… well, us. And through their investment in that brutal quagmire, they also helped lay the foundations for the destruction and destitution of significant parts of Afghanistan, and so for the brutal civil war that followed in the early 1990s amid the ruins. Out of that, of course, came another group whose name might still ring a bell or two: the Taliban.

In other words, Brzezinski & Co. laid the foundations for what would become a nearly 30-year American quagmire war (with a decade off between its two parts) in a land that, in 1979, few Americans other than a bunch of hippies had ever heard of. Here, then, is a small hint for the president: you might consider starting to refer to Afghanistan — and I assure you this would be historically accurate (even if you were roundly criticized for it by the Washington punditariat) — as America’s “bleeding wound.”

No matter how many years it goes on, one thing seems probable: like the Red Army, the U.S. military will finally limp out of that country in defeat and will also, in some way, bring that defeat home with them. It may not be what finally bankrupts or implodes the great(er) and far wealthier imperial power of the Cold War era, but as with Russia it will surely lend a helping hand.

There’s No Success Like Failure in Washington

In a country in which implosive elements are already being mixed into its politics, President Trump had his finger on something when he brought up the Russian war in Afghanistan. However historically and syntactically mixed up he might have been, his brain was still far more on target than those of most of the wise men and women of the present Washington establishment.

Take David Frum. Who today thinks much about his role in the history of American folly? As a speechwriter for George W. Bush, however, he was memorably ordered to produce “in a sentence or two our best case for going after Iraq.” In other words, he was to make a case for the invasion of that country in the president’s 2002 State of the Union address. At that time, with America’s superpower enemy, the Soviet Union, long gone and the U.S. seemingly unopposed on planet Earth, he somehow found three weak countries — Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — to turn into a World War II-style “axis of evil.” In doing so, he produced this memorable passage for the president:

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

Mission accomplished! No matter that neither Iraq, nor the other two countries were anywhere near having nukes.

Donald Trump has often been accused of megalomania as if that were a unique trait of his, but that’s because we’ve blotted out Washington’s other megalomaniacs of this century. I’m thinking of the neocon officials of the Bush administration with their urge to turn this planet into an American possession and their disastrous invasion of Iraq. Because of that sense of amnesia, David Frum, Mr. Axis of Evil, like the rest of his neocon companions has, a decade and a half later, risen again in Washington. Like him, many of them are now critics of the Trump administration, while others, like National Security Advisor John Bolton, are ascendant in that very administration.

In the end, when it comes to history and memory, it all seems to prove one thing: if you want to ensure your success in twenty-first-century Washington, there’s no way you can be too wrong. (The key figures in that city these days are evidently only familiar with the first of those two famed lines in Bob Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero”: “She knows there’s no success like failure/And that failure’s no success at all.”)

You now have 60 seconds (and the clock’s already ticking) to answer a question: Who, in or out of the administration, critic, pundit, or official, was against the invasion of Iraq once upon a time? I think you know the answer to that one. If you were against the single most disastrous, megalomanic foreign policy act of this century, there’s no place for you in present-day Washington, not in the administration, either party in Congress, or even in memory. You are not worth listening to, writing about, thinking about, or remembering in any way. You are the anti-Frum and have been deposited in the proverbial dustbin of history along with all those other embarrassing memories like… to mention just one more… the myriad elections in other countries that the U.S. interfered with before we were shocked (shocked!) to discover that some country might have meddled with one of ours.

Think of those neocons, the ones who have yet again made it into positions of power or influence and respect in Washington, as the gang who helped pave the way for Donald Trump to become president. Think of them as the imploders. Think of them as our domestic bleeding wound and (when it comes to taking down the system) the truest pasta Putinesca around.

What Might Have Been?

And now that I’ve left you with a completely bad taste in your mouth, let me bring up another small forgotten memory, one that might qualify — in an alternate universe of memories at least — as utopian, rather than dystopian. I’m thinking about “the peace dividend.” You don’t remember it? Well, that’s not surprising. But after the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991 (something official Washington hadn’t faintly expected and initially greeted in a kind of stunned silence), it briefly seemed as if the great-power struggles that had preoccupied history since perhaps the fifteenth century were finally over. The U.S. was the lone superpower left on planet Earth. Enemies were beyond scarce. A judgment of some sort had been rendered and, for a brief moment, even in Washington, people began talking about that most miraculous of things: a peace dividend.

The staggering sums that had gone into the Pentagon and the rest of the national security state in the Cold War years were visibly no longer necessary. So it was time to bring it all — billions and billions of dollars that had long been invested in the militarization of our American world — home. There was, after all, nothing left to build up military power against and so that money could now be put into what wouldn’t for another decade be called “the homeland.”

In fact, though modest cuts were made in U.S. forces and military spending in those years, they would prove to be anything but a dividend and would soon enough simply evaporate in the face of the military-industrial complex and, of course, that “axis of evil.”

In the years that followed, the very idea of a peace dividend, even the phrase itself, would simply vanish. Still, just for a moment, in a country whose infrastructure is now crumbling, whose teachers are underpaid, whose health care system is under siege, it was possible to dream about a world in which the bleeding wounds of the planet might begin to be staunched. Imagine that and think about what the future might have been.

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture.

24 January 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Farooque Chowdhury

First phase of imperialism’s direct intervention in Venezuela has started.

The US has “officially” recognized a self-proclaimed president of Venezuela as the country’s president while the rightists are trying to create chaos on Caracas streets. Guaidó, the self-proclaimed president, have been recognized by Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay and Peru, the countries collaborating with the US imperialism, followed the imperialist power within two hours of the US move. The Organization of American States (OAS) has also recognized Guaidó as president. Canada and France have extended its support to Guaidó. European Council president Donald Tusk expressed hoped the EU would “unite in support of democratic forces”. The imperial alliance is active.

Guaidó, an obscure lawmaker a few days ago and head of the National Assembly, called on the armed forces to disobey the constitutionally formed government of Venezuela. However, Venezuela’s defense minister has condemned Guaidó, a former student leader participating in protests against socialist leader Chavez.

US president Trump, in a statement, described Nicolas Maduro’s leadership as “illegitimate”. Trump’s statement said: “The people of Venezuela have courageously spoken out against Maduro and his regime and demanded freedom and the rule of law.”

Nicolas Maduro, who was sworn-in as president of Venezuela earlier this month, has declared breaking of diplomatic and political relations with the US. The measure is in response to Trump’s recognition of Guaidó. Venezuela has given the US diplomatic staff 72 hours to leave Venezuela. Maduro has declared all US diplomats persona non grata, after the imperial power recognized Guaidó as Venezuela’s president.

US secretary of state Pompeo rejected Venezuela’s move to cut ties with the US. Pompeo said the US did not recognize Maduro as leader of Venezuela. He said the US would conduct relations “through the government of interim President Guaidó” although there’s nothing like “government of President Guaidó”. Pompeo also urged Venezuela’s military to support efforts to restore “democracy”, and said the US would back Guaidó in his attempts to establish a government.

These developments are a continuation of a long drawn out imperialist intervention plan. The imperialist power, it seems, is determining issues like legitimacy and people’s representation in another country while it is passing through a government shutdown.

Maduro has accused Washington of trying to govern Venezuela from afar, and said the opposition was seeking to stage a coup. “We’ve had enough interventionism, here we have dignity, damn it!” president Maduro said in a televised address from the presidential palace while a huge assembly of people joined in solidarity to Maduro in front of Miraflores Palace, the presidential house in Caracas.

Venezuela’s foreign minister lashed out at “subordinate clowns” who he said followed the “owner of the imperialist circus”.

Bolivia declared, as tweeted by president Evo Morales, “solidarity with the people of Venezuela and brother Nicolas Maduro” in resisting the “claws of imperialism” in South America. Bolivia pledged full support to Maduro.

Mexico and Cuba also have expressed support to Maduro.

Maria Zakharova, spokesperson of the Russian foreign ministry, said the US “handpicking” of a government in Caracas perfectly illustrates the true Western sentiments toward international law, sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs of states.

Therefore, Caracas is hot with imperialist intervention. More moves that are imperialist will follow. The moves will appear originating from within Venezuela although those were seeded externally.

Already there has appeared the Venezuelan Observatory of Social Conflicts. More such organizations and “opposition voices” will be organized and heard. They will provide figures – number of wounded and death, number of incidents of looting market places, number of incidents of arson, and similar many others.

There will appear voices of “conscience”, a part of which will be comprised of elements claiming to be “left” and “progressive”. These “left-progressive” elements will turn dear friends of and reliable sources of information for the mainstream media.

Neither the mainstream nor the “progressive-lefty friends” will ever raise the following questions:

1. Who has appointed the imperial power to determine the question of legitimacy in another land?

2. Shall the imperial power allow this practice – determining the question of legitimacy related to the imperial power or a state subservient to the imperial power by another state – to others?

3. Which state shall allow another state to issue a call to the state’s armed forces to rise in rebellion?

4. Is the self-proclaimed president above constitution of Venezuela?

5. Shall this incident be cited as a precedent in cases of other countries whenever imperialists will feel that that country is moving away from its orbit?

6. Is it going to be norm/practice in the area of international relations?

It’s a dangerous precedent set by imperial powers. It’s dangerous not only for the people of Venezuela, but for other countries also; because, imperialists can arrange similar set up of opposition/demonstration/claim to the seat of power in cases of other countries trying to move in a dignified way through a road fitting to the country’s need.

The incident shows:

1. Imperialists don’t consider constitution of other countries.

2. Imperialists consider they are the guardians of political practices and norms of all countries; and they stand above all constitutions of all countries.

3. Imperialists know best – which political system is best suited for people of any country; leading imperialists claim to rights above rights of people.

Who knows when which country will face imperialist wrath? Do the “progressive” and “lefty” “friends” looking at political incidents in countries through a black or white lens know? They examine the Bolivarian revolutionary process through that black or white lens, and they turn frustrated as they fail to find “great” bourgeois “democratic” practices there. They deny looking at the reality and limitations – essentially contradictions – in the society struggling for transformation. Thus they, at times, miss imperialism’s role there as they miss in other countries while they appear great crusaders for “democracy”. But the holy hearts don’t question: Why imperialism denies targeting them, the “brave fighters”, but target Venezuela, Chavez, Maduro?

Today’s direct imperialist intervention in Venezuela has not been organized overnight. So-called democratic forces were organized, trained, financed and armed slowly and clandestinely over a long period. Simultaneously, tarnishing image of Venezuela/Chavez/Maduro/the Bolivarian Revolution was carried on unceasingly, and a negative impression was constructed among wider international audience while an economic war against the Revolution was organized. The Venezuelan people’s sufferings due to imperialist intervention were portrayed as failures of the Revolution. There are cases of cancer patients – young, promising, old, infirm – facing death due to lack of essential drugs/equipments, which was due to imperialist economic war against the Revolution. Nevertheless, those stories go missing in the MSM.

So, one of the burning questions today: Shall this imperialist intervention succeed? The broad answer: It depends on the Revolution’s capacity to mobilize the people in the land of Bolivar. To be specific: Venezuela is not Chile of the time preceding murderer Pinochet’s coup backed by the imperial power. Today is not the days of imperialism’s Libya intervention. Today is not the days of betrayer Gorbachev.

The imperial power has its own deeper and wider problems, however. This condition of imperialism may advise it to resort to provocative acts – hot intervention, which is directly sending armed persons – to divert attention of people in its country. Or, with a cautious attitude, imperialism may try to mobilize proxies to intervene in Venezuela after creating a serious bloody situation – a lot of deaths, a lot of cases of arson, use of petrol bombs and homemade firearms, a serious law and order situation.

So, now is the time to stand in solidarity with the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, handle non-hostile conditions in non-hostile way, and not to step into traps of provocations. And, it’s time to call upon the “brave, lefty, progressive friends” not to forget imperialism.

Farooque Chowdhury writes from Dhaka.

24 January 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

Slowness is in the eye of the beholder

AMERICA’S PRESIDENT knows a catchy number when he sees one. Like much of the world’s media, Donald Trump tweeted this week that China’s growth in 2018 was its slowest in nearly three decades. This, he said, ought to compel it to make a “Real Deal” on trade with America. China’s growth of 6.6% last year was indeed the weakest since 1990, and it does want to end the trade war. But a closer look at the data shows why its leaders are less panicked than Mr Trump might think.

First, the sheer size of its economy means that China’s growth last year generated a record amount of new production. Nominal GDP increased by 8trn yuan ($1.2trn), well above the 5.1trn yuan added in 2007, when it notched up 14.2%, its fastest growth rate in recent decades. The point is simple—China is now growing from a much larger base—but it was overlooked in the flurry of headlines about its slowdown.
The changing nature of China’s growth also gives it some cushioning from the trade war. American tariffs are starting to inflict pain: Chinese companies have reported a sharp drop in export orders. But for the broader economy, foreign sales matter less than they used to. Although the falling trade surplus lopped half a percentage point from the growth rate last year, domestic demand more than plugged the shortfall (see chart). Consumption accounted for three-quarters of the growth rate last year, the most since 2000.

Finally, China has made modest progress towards cleaning up its financial system. The government had sought to rein in debt, which had soared over the past decade. Critics have observed that it has failed to deliver any real deleveraging, because debt-to-GDP levels have continued to creep up. But stabilisation, rather than outright deleveraging, was China’s real goal. It has had some success: the pace of debt accumulation slowed sharply. In 2015 it took more than four yuan of new credit to generate each yuan of incremental GDP. In 2018 that multiple fell to 2.5, in line with China’s average over the past 15 years.

Alongside these positives, however, there were some worrying signs. Nominal growth has slowed sharply, from an annual rate of 11.2% in the third quarter of 2017 to 8.1% in the final quarter of last year. It will slow further this year as inflation decelerates. Since nominal growth is closely correlated with corporate revenue growth, companies could be in for a tough year.

As for consumption, this year looks less promising than last. Companies have started cutting back on hiring and incomes are growing more slowly, weighing on consumer sentiment. The middle three quintiles of China’s population by income distribution saw earnings increase by only about 2% last year in real terms. Those of the richest quintile rose by 6.6%. Given that lower earners tend to spend more of their wages than the rich do, that is a poor basis for sustained growth in consumption. Sales of cars fell last year for the first time in more than two decades. Sales of mobile phones were also sluggish.

China has already pivoted towards more supportive economic policies. It has sped up spending on infrastructure, trimmed income taxes and relaxed some restraints on bank lending. This does not add up to a big stimulus package, but the direction is clear. If growth slows further, as seems likely, the government will move more boldly still.

There is no doubt that China would like to persuade Mr Trump to roll back tariffs on Chinese goods, which would both help its exporters and boost market sentiment. Bilateral talks are grinding on ahead of a March 1st deadline. Chinese negotiators are working on an offer that will satisfy their American counterparts, combining pledges to buy more American goods with reforms to treat foreign companies more fairly. But if Mr Trump truly believes what he tweets about the Chinese economy, he is at risk of overestimating the strength of America’s hand. China wants a trade deal, certainly, but it is not desperate.

24 January 2019

Source: economist.com

By Alastair Crooke

The Middle East is metamorphosing. New faultlines are emerging, yet Trump’s foreign policy ‘hawks’ still try to stage ‘old movies’ in a new ‘theatre’.

14 Jan 2019 – The ‘old movie’ is for the US to ‘stand up’ Sunni, Arab states, and lead them towards confronting ‘bad actor’ Iran. ‘Team Bolton’ is reverting back to the old 1996 Clean Break script – as if nothing has changed. State Department officials have been briefing that Secretary Pompeo’s address in Cairo on Thursday was “ slated to tell his audience (although he may not name the former president), that Obama misled the people of the Middle East about the true source of terrorism, including what contributed to the rise of the Islamic State. Pompeo will insist that Iran, a country Obama tried to engage, is the real terrorist culprit. The speech’s drafts also have Pompeo suggesting that Iran could learn from the Saudis about human rights, and the rule of law.”

Well, at least that speech should raise a chuckle around the region. In practice however, the regional faultline has moved on: It is no longer so much Iran. GCC States have a new agenda, and are now far more concerned to contain Turkey, and to put a halt to Turkish influence spreading throughout the Levant. GCC states fear that President Erdogan, given the emotional and psychological wave of antipathy unleashed by the Khashoggi murder, may be mobilising newly re-energised Muslim Brotherhood, Gulf networks. The aim being to leverage present Gulf economic woes, and the general hollowing out of any broader GCC ‘vision’, in order to undercut the rigid Gulf ‘Arab system’ (tribal monarchy). The Brotherhood favours a soft Islamist reform of the Gulf monarchies – along lines, such as that once advocated by Jamal Khashoggi .

Turkey’s leadership in any case is convinced that it was the UAE (MbZ specifically) that was the author behind the Kurdish buffer being constructed, and mini-state ‘plot’ against Turkey – in conjunction with Israel and the US. Understandably, Gulf states now fear possible Turkish retribution for their weaponising of Kurdish aspirations in this way.

And Turkey is seen (by GCC States) as already working in close co-ordination with fellow Muslim Brotherhood patron and GCC member, Qatar, to divide the collapsing Council. This prefigures a new round to the MB versus Saudi Wahhabism spat for the soul of Sunni Islam.

GGC states therefore, are hoping to stand-up a ‘front’ to balance Turkey in the Levant. And to this end, they are trying to recruit President Assad back into the Arab fold (which is to say, into the Arab League), and to have him act, jointly with them, as an Arab counter to Turkey.

The point here is obvious: President Assad is closely allied to Iran – and so is Moscow and Turkey. To be fashionably Iranophobic – as Pompeo might wish the GCC to be – simply would spoil the GCC’s anti-Turkey ‘play’. Syria indeed may be (justly) skeptical of Turkey’s actions and intent in Syria, but from President Assad’s perspective, Iran and Russia are absolutely crucial to the managing of an erratic Turkey. Turkey does represent an existential Syrian concern. And trying to lever President Assad – or Lebanon or Turkey – away from Iran, would be absurd. It won’t happen. And the GCC states have enough nous to understand this now (after their stinging defeat in Syria). The Gulf anti-Iranian stance has had ‘the burner’ turned sharply down, (except when their need is to stroke US feathers).

They can see clearly that the Master of Ceremonies in the Levant – putting together the new regional ‘order’ – is not Mr Bolton, but Moscow, with Tehran (and occasionally Ankara), playing their equal part ‘from behind the curtain’.

Presumably, America’s intelligence services know, (and Gulf states certainly are aware), that in any case, Iranian forces are almost all gone from Syria (though of course Syria’s ‘Iranian connection’ remains as firm, as ever) – even as Pompeo and Israel say the precisely the opposite: that they are pushing-back hard at the ‘threatening’ Iranian military ‘footprint’ in Syria. Few in the region will believe it.

The second notable emerging regional fault line then, evidently is the one that is opening between Turkey and the US and Israel. Turkey ‘gets it’: Erdogan ‘gets it’ very clearly: that Washington now deeply distrusts him, suspects that Turkey is accelerating into Moscow and Beijing’s orbit, and that DC would be happy to see him gone – and a more NATO-friendly leader installed in his stead.

And it must be clear to Washington too ‘why’ Turkey would be heading ‘East’. Erdogan precisely needs Russia and Iran to act as MCs to moderate his difficult relations with Damascus for the future. Erdogan needs Russia and Iran even more, to broker a suitable political solution to the Kurds in Syria. He needs China too, to support his economy.

And Erdogan is fully aware that Israel (more than Gulf States) still hankers after the old Ben Gurion ideal of an ethnic Kurdish state – allied with Israel, and sitting atop major oil resources – to be inserted at the very pivot to south-west and central Asia: And at Turkey’s vulnerable underbelly.

The Israeli’s articulated their support for a Kurdish state quite plainly at the time of Barzani’s failed independence initiative in Iraq. But Erdogan simply, unmistakably, has said to this ‘never’ (to Bolton, this week). Nonetheless, Ankara still needs Russian and Iranian collaboration to allow Bolton to ‘climb down his tree’ of a Kurdish mini-state in Syria. He needs Russia to broker a Syrian-led buffer, vice an American-Kurdish tourniquet, strapped around his southern border.

It is unlikely however, that despite the real threat that America’s arming of the Kurds poses to Turkey, that Erdogan really wants to invade Syria – though he threatens it – and though John Bolton’s ‘conditions’ may end by leaving Turkey no option, but to do it. Since, for sure, Erdogan understands that a messy Turkish invasion of Syria would send the delicately balanced Turkish Lire into free-fall.

Still … Turkey, Syria, Iran and Russia now all want America gone from Syria. And for a moment, it seemed it might proceed smoothly after Trump had acquiesced to Erdogan’s arguments, during their celebrated telephone call. But then – Senator Lindsay Graham demurred (against the backdrop of massed howls of anguish issuing from the Beltway foreign policy think-tanks). Bolton did the walk-back, by making US withdrawal from Syria contingent on conditions (ones seemingly designed not to be met) and not tied any specific timeline. President Erdogan was not amused.

It should be obvious now that we are entering a major regional re-set: The US is leaving Syria. Bolton’s attempted withdrawal-reversal has been rebuffed. And the US, in any event, forfeited the confidence of the Kurds in consequence to the original Trump statement. The Kurds now are orientated toward Damascus and Russia is mediating a settlement.

It may take a while, but the US is going. Kurdish forces (other than those linked with the PKK) are likely to be assimilated into the Syrian army, and the ‘buffer’ will not be directed against Turkey, but will be a mix of Syrian army and Kurdish elements – under Syrian command – but whose overall conduct towards Turkey will be invigilated by Russia. And the Syrian army will, in due time, clear Idlib from a resurgent al-Qaida (HTS).

The Arab states are returning to their embassies in Damascus – partly out of fear that the whipsaw of American policy, its radical polarisation, and its proclivity to be wholly or partially ‘walked-back’ by the Deep State – might leave the Gulf unexpectedly ‘orphaned’ at any time. In effect, the GCC states are ‘hedging’ against this risk by trying to reconnect a bifurcated Arab sphere, and to give it a new ‘purpose’ and credibility – as a balance against Turkey, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood (Syria’s old nemesis).

And yet – there remains still another layer to this calculus, as described by veteran Middle East journalist, Elijah Magnier:

“Indeed the Levant is returning to the centre of Middle East and world attention in a stronger position than in 2011. Syria has advanced precision missiles that can hit any building in Israel. Assad also has an air defence system he would have never dreamed of before 2011 – thanks to Israel’s continuous violation of its airspace, and its defiance of Russian authority. Hezbollah has constructed bases for its long and medium range precision missiles in the mountains and has created a bond with Syria that it could never have established – if not for the war. Iran has established a strategic brotherhood with Syria, thanks to its role in defeating the regime change plan.

NATO’s support for the growth of ISIS has created a bond between Syria and Iraq that no Muslim or Baathist link could ever have created: Iraq has a “carte blanche” to bomb ISIS locations in Syria without the consent of the Syrian leadership, and the Iraqi security forces can walk into Syria anytime they see fit to fight ISIS. The anti-Israel axis has never been stronger than it is today. That is the result of 2011-2018 war imposed on Syria”.

Yes. This is the third of the newly emergent faultlines: that of Israel on the one hand, and the emerging reality in the Syrian north, on the other – a shadow that has returned to haunt the original instigators of the ‘war’ to undermine Syria. PM Netanyahu since has put all the Israeli eggs into the Trump family ‘basket’. It was Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump which was presented in Israel as being the true ‘Deal of the Century’ (and not the Palestinian one). Yet when Bibi complained forcefully about US withdrawal from Syria (leaving Syria vulnerable, Netanyahu asserts, to an Iranian insertion of smart missiles), Trump nonchalantly replied that the US gives Israel $ 4.5 billion per year – “You’ll be all right”, Trump riposted.

It was seen in Israel as an extraordinary slap to the PM’s face. But Israelis cannot avoid, but to acknowledge, some responsibility for creating precisely the circumstances of which they now loudly complain.

Bottom line: Things have not gone according to plan: America is not shaping the new Levantine ‘order’ – Moscow is. And Israel’s continual, blatant disregard of Russia’s own interests in the Levant, firstly infuriated, and finally has provoked the Russian high command into declaring the northern Middle East a putative no-fly zone for Israel. This represents a major strategic reversal for Netanyahu (and the US).

And finally, it is this repeating pattern of statements being made by the US President on foreign policy that are then almost casually contradicted, or ‘conditioned’, by some or other part of the US bureaucracy, that poses to the region (and beyond) the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The pattern clearly is one of an isolated President, with officials emptying his statements of executive authority (until subsequently endorsed, or denied, by the US bureaucracy). It is making Trump almost irrelevant (in terms of the setting of foreign policy).

Is this then a stealth process – knowingly contrived – incrementally to remove Trump from power? A hollowing out of his Presidential prerogatives (leaving him only as a disruptive Twitterer) – achieved, without all the disruption and mess, of formally removing him from office? We shall see.

And what next? Well, as Simon Henderson observes, no one is sure – everyone is left wondering:

“What’s up with Secretary Pompeo’s extended tour of the Middle East? The short answer is that he is trying to sell/explain President Trump’s “we are leaving Syria” policy to America’s friends … Amman, Jordan; Cairo, Egypt; Manama, Bahrain; Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE); Doha, Qatar; Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Muscat, Oman; Kuwait City, Kuwait. Wow, even with his own jet and no immigration hassles, that’s an exhausting itinerary … The fact that there now are eight stops in eight days, probably reflects the amount of explaining that needs to be done.”

Alastair Crooke, a former top British MI-6 agent in the Middle East, is founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum and author of Resistance: The Essence of Islamic Revolution.

21 January 2019

Source: transcend.org

By Darius Shahtahmasebi

14 Jan 2019 – In an effort to circumvent US-imposed sanctions, India and Iran have reportedly ditched the US dollar and are trading oil in rupees. The reason becomes clear after considering the dynamics at play in the region.

In mid-February last year, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani visited India, and the two countries signed nine agreements signalling a strengthening of ties. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi appeared to celebrate the growing relationship, stating that it was “a matter of great pleasure” for India that an Iranian president came to India “after a gap of 10 years.”

Fast-forward a few months later, and then-UN ambassador Nikki Haley was bluntly telling India that they should rethink their relationship with Tehran.

Donald Trump’s decision to rip up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) last year, also known as the Iranian nuclear accord, was a particularly significant blow to Iran-India relations. At the time the JCPOA was formulated, Indian officials believed the deal to be the “best deal available.” After the JCPOA’s implementation in 2016, exports of Iranian oil to India increased by more than 110 percent.

Maybe the issue isn’t always that Washington wants to contain its rivals in the Middle East and Asia, but perhaps there is a chance that it also wants to keep a lid on its so-called allies as well. Right now, India is the third largest oil consumer in the world, and is expected to become the largest by the year 2040. As its domestic reserves are not meeting the needs of its rapidly expanding economy, India has been importing 80 percent of its oil supply from overseas, including and especially Iran.

Prior to Washington’s Iran-sanctions regime, Iran was India’s third largest supplier of crude oil (it is now about sixth place). It is no surprise therefore, that India’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson responded by saying that Haley had

“her views, and our views on Iran are very clear.”

He also warned that India would

“take all necessary steps, including engagement with relevant stakeholders to ensure our energy security.”

It does seem like the days of foreign states being bullied into adopting a dangerous foreign policy are over. If Washington has any doubt about this, they need only turn to this exclusive Reuters report which revealed that India had begun paying Iran for its oil in rupees, according to a senior bank official, under the guise of a six-month waiver which was given to seven other countries (including China). According to the report, in a previous round of US-imposed sanctions, India settled approximately half of oil payments in rupees and the remainder in euros. However, this time around, all payments are to be made in rupees.

Furthermore, the agreement, worth $1.5 billion, reportedly hands Iran a tax break of $637 million. For its part, Iran will use its rupee supply to fund its imports of pharmaceuticals and other items from India, invest in Indian businesses and pay for Iranian missions and students in India.

Prior to this arrangement, US-led sanctions continued to decimate Iran’s ability to trade freely with its partner. Oilprice explains that in December, Indian oil imports from Iran plunged by 41 percent to just over 300,000 barrels per day (bpd). This is effectively the amount allowed under Washington’s waiver.

Insurance companies are becoming increasingly unwilling to engage in transactions involving Iran, due to the risk that sanctions attract. However, according to a separate Reuters report, Russian and Chinese shipping companies had been pitching to facilitate India-Iran trade.

It seems to me that if enough countries continue to pull together to override Washington’s sanctions, they will at some point be rendered completely ineffective. It also seems as though Washington is pushing these countries to work more closely together, whereas these countries may have been freer to explore their differences and their disagreements had they been left to their own devices.

The blunt truth is that India and Iran have too much in common for India to submit fully to Washington’s strategy of global bullying. There is also a lot of things that Iran can give India which the United States cannot, and not just free shipping, insurance and extended credit. As the Diplomat explains, India and Iran both share an interest in combating Sunni-backed extremism, especially in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They both have an interest in doing what they can to outmanoeuvre China in certain aspects.

In February last year, the two nations came to an agreement involving a lease between Iran’s Port and Maritime Organization and India Ports Global Limited, which allowed India to run part of Chabahar Port for 18 months.

The two countries released a joint statement at the time, describing the port as a “golden gateway” that will help the two countries in reaching out to Afghanistan and Central Asia. This gateway is so golden, it seems, that India has already committed over $500 million to the project, with indications that it could become a multi-billion dollar project.

The idea of the project is to improve “energy, security and regional connectivity” to reach Afghanistan. In reality, it allows India to ship supplies to Afghanistan while bypassing Pakistan. Chabahar Port in southeastern Iran is approximately 90km (56 miles) west of the Pakistani port of Gwadar, the epicentre of an enormous Chinese infrastructure program in Pakistan. This is the same location where it was rumored that China was establishing a military base.

In other words, if India is forced to join the US effort to completely isolate Iran on the world stage, it may risk losing out on a significant chunk of the regional fruits to Pakistan and China. This is not conjecture; Iran has already reached out to Pakistan and China to participate in the Chabahar project. As the all-knowing Atlantic Council summarised, if India bows to the US, it risks losing Iran to China.

India also needs Iran’s ports to complete the so-called International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC), which would ideally connect India to the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, Russia and even Europe, and would allegedly increase India’s $1 billion trade with Central Asia to a whopping $170 billion.

China already has a direct connection to Central Asia, placing India at a disadvantage by default, and its trade with Central Asian nations is already at $30 billion; well above India’s. In 2000, India, Iran and Russia signed an agreement for the purpose of developing the North-South transport corridor.

India, Iran and Afghanistan held a tripartite meeting in September last year in which they discussed the Afghanistan peace process, cooperation against terrorism, as well as Chabahar Port. It is noticeable, to say the least, that Pakistan and China were not involved in this discussion. Just last week, Iran and India held a similar meeting.

India is also currently developing two gas fields, Farzad-B in Tehran and the South Pars field located between Iran and Qatar (which is the largest gas field in the world). Trump may soon begin to realise how difficult it is to isolate these states from one another after the simple examination of a world atlas.

Even the effect of US sanctions on ordinary people that the United States consider allies appear to not have been taken into account. Most reports allege that the absence of Iranian oil makes oil market prices shoot through the roof, affecting common Indian residents who had been enjoying cheaper oil prices under the JCPOA. Does the US want the people of India to hate Iran, or to hate the enforcer of these sanctions?

Reportedly, a “preferential trade”agreement between Iran and India is also in the works which will come into force in the not-so-distant future. The two nations have also already signed an agreement worth $2 billion on cooperation in the railway sector. At the start of this year, Iran also announced it would invest Rs 1,500 crore to expand a refinery run by Chennai Petroleum Corp, in a move that sees Iran attempting to counter US-imposed sanctions and cement its position in India.

You won’t see this in the mainstream media, but India also quietly allowed an Iranian bank to open a branch in Mumbai just last week.

Despite undue pressure from Washington, at the end of the day India still has indicated it will abide by its sanctions and the waiver that it has been given (as far as possible).

It is therefore unclear what the US is hoping to achieve through this strategy. Yes, sanctions greatly weaken Iran’s economy and threaten the collapse of its currency, but they also push these adversarial states to consider agreements which circumvent the use of the US dollar, even with Washington’s more traditional allies. If enough countries drop the use of the dollar in bilateral trade, the dollar will no longer have the international use it once had. As of right now, Venezuela, Qatar, China, Russia, India and Iran – just to name a few – are all nations who have considered the use of alternative currencies to counter Washington’s sanctions regime.

If the ultimate aim of the US is to weaken the dollar’s status on the global markets, then it can be my guest.

Darius Shahtahmasebi is a New Zealand-based legal and political analyst, currently specializing in immigration, refugee and humanitarian law.

21 January 2019

Source: transcend.org

By Roberto Savio

After Teresa May’s defeat in the British parliament it is clear that a new spectre is haunting Europe. It is no longer the spectre of communism, which opens Marx’s Manifesto of 1848; it is the spectre of the failure of neoliberal globalisation, which reigned uncontested following the fall of the Berlin Wall, until the financial crisis of 2009.

17 Jan 2019 – In 2008, governments spent the astounding amount of 62 trillion dollars to save the financial system, and close to that amount in 2009 (see Britannica Book of the Year, 2017), According to a US Federal Reserve study, it cost each American 70,000 dollars.

Belatedly, economic institutions left macroeconomics, which were until then used to assess GNP growth and started to look at how growth was being redistributed.

And the IMF and the World Bank, (also because of the prodding of civil society studies, foremost those of Oxfam), concluded that there was a huge problem in the rise of inequality.

Of course, if the 117 trillion dollars had gone to people, that money would have led to a jump in spending, an increase in manufacturing, services, schools, hospitals, research, etc. But people were totally absent from the priorities of the system.

Under the Matteo Renzi government in Italy, 20 billion dollars went to save four banks, while in the same year total subsidies for Italian youth could be calculated at best at 1 billion dollars.

Then after the crisis of 2008-9, all went haywire. In every country of Europe (except for Spain, which has now caught up), a populist right-wing party came to life, and the traditional political system started to crumble.

The new parties appealed to the losers of globalisation: workers whose factories has been delocalised for the cheapest possible place to maximise gains; small shop owners displaced by the arrival of supermarkets; those made redundant by new technologies, by Internet like secretaries; retired people whose pensions were frozen to reduce the national deficit (in the last 20 years public debts have doubled worldwide).

A new divide built up, between those who rode the wave of globalisation and those who were its victim.

Obviously, the political system felt that it was accountable to the winners, and budgets were stacked in their favour. Priority went to towns, where over 63% of citizens now live.

The losers were more concentrated in the rural world, where few investments were made in infrastructure. On the contrary, in the name of efficiency, many services were cut, railway stations closed, along with hospitals, schools and banks.

In order to reach work, people often had to go several kilometres from home by car. A modest increase in the cost of petrol fuelled the rebellion of the ‘yellow jackets’. It did not help that out of the 40 billion that the French government obtains from taxes on energy, less than one-quarter went back into transportation infrastructure and services.

Universities, hospital and other services in towns suffered much less, were points of excellence, public transportation was available, and a new divide arose between those in towns and those from the rural world, those with studies and education and those who were far away and atomised in the interior.

A new divide had come about, and people voted out the traditional party system, which ignored them. This device brought Trump to power and led to the victory of Brexit in the United Kingdom.

This divide is wiping the traditional parties, and bringing back nationalism, xenophobia and populism. It is not bringing back the ideological right wing, but a gut right and left with little ideology …

All this should be obvious.

Now, for the first time, the system is turning its attention to the losers, but is too late. The left is paying the dramatic illusion of Tony Blair who, considering globalisation inevitable, decided that it would be possible to ride its wave. So, the left lost any contact with the victims, and kept the fight on human rights as its main identity and difference with the right.

That was good for towns, where gays and LGBTs, minorities (and majorities like women), could congregate, but it was hardly a priority for those of the interior.

Meanwhile, finance continued to grow, become a world by itself, no longer linked to .industry and service, but to financial speculation. Politics became subservient.

Governments lowered taxes on the who stashed the unbelievable amount of 62 trillion dollars in tax havens, according to the Tax Justice Network. The estimated yearly flow is 600 billion dollars, double the cost of the Millennium Goals of the United Nations.

And the Panama Papers, which revealed just a small number of the owners of accounts, identified at least 140 important politicians among them from 64 countries: the prime minister of Iceland (who was obliged to resign), Mauricio Macri of Argentina, President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, a bunch of close associates of Vladimir Putin, David Cameron’s father, the prime minister of Georgia, and so on.

No wonder that politicians have lost their shine, and are now considered corrupt, or useless, or both.

In the current economic order, Emmanuel Macron acted rationally by lowering the tax on the rich people to attract investments. But he totally ignored that for those French who have difficulty in reaching the end of the month, this was proof that they were being totally ignored. And sociologists agree that the real ‘Spring’ of the yellow jackets was their search for dignity.

Ironically, British parties, and especially the Conservative and Labour parties, should be thankful to the debate on Brexit. It is clear that the United Kingdom is committing suicide, in economic and strategic terms. With a ‘hard’ Brexit, without any agreement with the European Union, it could lose at least seven percent of its GDP.

But the divide which makes Brexit win with all towns, the City, the economic and financial sector, academics, intellectuals and all institutions has confirmed the fear of those of the interior. Belonging to the European Union was profitable for the elites, and not for them. Scotland voted against, because it has now a different agenda from England. And this divide is not going to change with a new referendum.

That the cradle of parliamentarian democracy, Westminster, is not able to reach a compromise is telling proof that the debate is not political but a clash of mythologies, like the idea of returning to the former British Empire. It is like Donald Trump’s idea of reopening coal mines.

We look at a mythical past as our future. This is what led to the explosion of Vox in Spain, by those who believe that under Franco life was easier and cheaper, that there was no corruption, woman stayed in their place, and Spain was a united country, without separatists in Catalonia and the Basque Country.

It is what Jair Bolsonari in Brazil is exploiting, presenting the military dictatorship at a time when violence was limited. Our future is the past …

So this divide – once in one way or another the United Kingdom solves its Brexit dilemma – will pass into normal politics, and will bring about a dramatic decline, like elsewhere, of the two main traditional parties.

Unless, meanwhile, populist, xenophobe and nationalist parties take over government and show that they do not have the answer to the problems they have rightly identified.

In that sense, the Italian experience could be of significant help … look how the government has performed with the European Union.

Roberto Savio is the founder and president emeritus of Inter Press Service-IPS, publisher of Other News, and a member of the World Social Forum International Committee.

21 January 2019

Source: transcend.org

By Edward Curtin

As Martin Luther King’s birthday is celebrated with a national holiday, his death day disappears down the memory hole. Across the country – in response to the King Holiday and Service Act passed by Congress and signed by Bill Clinton in 1994 – people will be encouraged to make the day one of service.Such service does not include King’s commitment to protest a decadent system of racial and economic injustice or non-violently resist the U.S. warfare state that he called “the greatest purveyor of violence on earth.”

Government sponsored service is cultural neo-liberalism at its finest, the promotion of individualism at the expense of a mass movement for radical institutional change.

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous,” warned Dr. King,“than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”

How true those words. For the government that honors Dr. King with a national holiday killed him. This is the suppressed truth behind the highly promoted day of service. It is what you are not supposed to know. It is what Thomas Merton, as quoted by James W. Douglass, called The Unspeakable: “It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and officials declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his service.”

The word service is a loaded word; it has become a smiley face and vogue word over the past 35 years. Its use for MLK Day is clear: individuals are encouraged to volunteer for activities such as tutoring children, painting senior centers, or delivering meals to the elderly, activities that are good in themselves but far less good when used to conceal an American prophet’s radical message. After all, Martin Luther King’s work was not volunteering at the local food pantry with Oprah Winfrey cheering him on.

The Assassination

King was not murdered because he had spent his heroic life promoting individual volunteerism. To understand his life and death – to celebrate the man – “it is essential to realize although he is popularly depicted and perceived as a civil rights leader, he was much more than that. A non-violent revolutionary, he personified the most powerful force for a long overdue social, political, and economic reconstruction of the nation.” Those are the words of William Pepper, the King family lawyer, from his comprehensive and definitive study of the King assassination, The Plot to Kill King, a book that should be read by anyone concerned with truth and justice.

Revolutionaries are, of course, anathema to the power elites who, with all their might, resist such rebels’ efforts to transform society. If they can’t buy them off, they knock them off. Fifty one years after King’s assassination, the causes he fought for – civil rights, the end to U.S. wars of aggression, and economic justice for all – remain not only unfulfilled, but have worsened in so many respects. And King’s message has been enervated by the sly trick of giving him a national holiday and then urging Americans to make it “a day of service.” The vast majority of those who innocently participate in these activities have no idea who killed King, or why. If they did, they might pause in their tracks, and combine their “service” activities with a teach-in on the truth of his assassination.

Because MLK repeatedly called the United States the “greatest purveyor of violence on earth,” he was universally condemned by the mass media and government that later – once he was long and safely dead and no longer a threat – praised him to the heavens. This has continued to the present day of historical amnesia.

Educating people about the fact that U.S. government forces conspired to kill Dr. King, and why, and why it matters today, is the greatest service we can render to his memory.

William Pepper’s decades-long investigation not only refutes the flimsy case against the alleged assassin James Earl Ray, but definitively proves that King was killed by a government conspiracy led by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, Army Intelligence, and the Memphis Police, assisted by southern Mafia figures.

The Trial

This shocking truth is accentuated when one is reminded (or told for the first time) that in 1999 a Memphis jury, after a thirty day civil trial with over seventy witnesses, found the U.S. government guilty in the killing of MLK. The King family had brought the suit and Pepper represented them. They were grateful that the truth was confirmed, but saddened by the way the findings were buried by the media in cahoots with the government.

Pepper not only demolishes the government’s self-serving case with a plethora of evidence, but shows how the mainstream media, academia, and government flacks have spent years covering up the truth of MLK’s murder through lies and disinformation. Another way they have accomplished this is by convincing a gullible public that “service” is a substitute for truth.

But service without truth is a disservice to the life, legacy, and radical witness of this great American hero. It is propaganda aimed at convincing decent people that they are serving the essence of MLK’s message while they are obeying their masters, the very government that murdered him.

It is time to rebel against the mind manipulation served by the MLK Day of Service. Let us offer service, but let us also learn and speak the truth.

“He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery,” King told us, “Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth.”

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.

19 January 2019

Source: countercurrents.org

By Pankaj Mishra

With Brexit, the chumocrats who drew borders from India to Ireland are getting a taste of their own medicine.

Describing Britain’s calamitous exit from its Indian empire in 1947, the novelist Paul Scott wrote that in India the British “came to the end of themselves as they were” — that is, to the end of their exalted idea about themselves. Scott was among those shocked by how hastily and ruthlessly the British, who had ruled India for more than a century, condemned it to fragmentation and anarchy; how Louis Mountbatten, accurately described by the right-wing historian Andrew Roberts as a “mendacious, intellectually limited hustler,” came to preside, as the last British viceroy of India, over the destiny of some 400 million people.

Britain’s rupture with the European Union is proving to be another act of moral dereliction by the country’s rulers. The Brexiteers, pursuing a fantasy of imperial-era strength and self-sufficiency, have repeatedly revealed their hubris, mulishness and ineptitude over the past two years. Though originally a “Remainer,” Prime Minister Theresa May has matched their arrogant obduracy, imposing a patently unworkable timetable of two years on Brexit and laying down red lines that undermined negotiations with Brussels and doomed her deal to resoundingly bipartisan rejection this week in Parliament.

Such a pattern of egotistic and destructive behavior by the British elite flabbergasts many people today. But it was already manifest seven decades ago during Britain’s rash exit from India.

Mountbatten, derided as “Master of Disaster” in British naval circles, was a representative member of a small group of upper- and middle-class British men from which the imperial masters of Asia and Africa were recruited. Abysmally equipped for their immense responsibilities, they were nevertheless allowed by Britain’s brute imperial power to blunder through the world — a “world of whose richness and subtlety,” as E.M. Forster wrote in “Notes on the English Character,” they could “have no conception.”

Forster blamed Britain’s political fiascos on its privately educated men, callow beneficiaries of the country’s elitist public school system. These eternal schoolboys whose “weight is out of all proportion” to their numbers are certainly overrepresented among Tories. They have today plunged Britain into its worst crisis, exposing its incestuous and self-serving ruling class like never before.

From David Cameron, who recklessly gambled his country’s future on a referendum in order to isolate some whingers in his Conservative Party, to the opportunistic Boris Johnson, who jumped on the Brexit bandwagon to secure the prime ministerial chair once warmed by his role model Winston Churchill, and the top-hatted, theatrically retro Jacob Rees-Mogg, whose fund management company has set up an office within the European Union even as he vehemently scorns it, the British political class has offered to the world an astounding spectacle of mendacious, intellectually limited hustlers.

Even a columnist for The Economist, an organ of the British elite, now professes dismay over “Oxford chums” who coast through life on “bluff rather than expertise.” “Britain,” the magazine belatedly lamented last month, “is governed by a self-involved clique that rewards group membership above competence and self-confidence above expertise.” In Brexit, the British “chumocracy,” the column declared, “has finally met its Waterloo.”

It is actually more accurate, for those invoking British history, to say that partition — the British Empire’s ruinous exit strategy — has come home. In a grotesque irony, borders imposed in 1921 on Ireland, England’s first colony, have proved to be the biggest stumbling block for the English Brexiteers chasing imperial virility. Moreover, Britain itself faces the prospect of partition if Brexit, a primarily English demand, is achieved and Scottish nationalists renew their call for independence.

It is a measure of English Brexiteers’ political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security checks along the British-imposed partition line.

The re-imposition of a customs and immigration regime along Britain’s only land border with the European Union was always likely to be resisted with violence. But Brexiteers, awakening late to this ominous possibility, have tried to deny it. A leaked recording revealed Mr. Johnson scorning concerns about the border as “pure millennium bug stuff.”

Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Businesspeople everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.

The malign incompetence of the Brexiteers was precisely prefigured during Britain’s exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in the lack of orderly preparation for it. The British government had announced that India would have independence by June 1948. In the first week of June 1947, however, Mountbatten suddenly proclaimed that the transfer of power would happen on Aug. 15, 1947 — a “ludicrously early date,” as he himself blurted out. In July, a British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was entrusted with the task of drawing new boundaries of a country he had never previously visited.

Given only around five weeks to invent the political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan, Radcliffe failed to visit any villages, communities, rivers or forests along the border he planned to demarcate. Dividing agricultural hinterlands from port cities, and abruptly reducing Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the new border to a religious minority, Radcliffe delivered a plan for partition that effectively sentenced millions to death or desolation while bringing him the highest-ranked knighthood.

Up to one million people died, countless women were abducted and raped, and the world’s largest refugee population was created during the population transfers across Radcliffe’s border — an extensive carnage that exceeds all apocalyptic scenarios of Brexit.

In retrospect, Mountbatten had even less reason than Mrs. May to speed up the exit clock — and create insoluble and eternal problems. Just a few months after the botched partition, for instance, India and Pakistan were fighting a war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. None of the concerned parties were pushing for a hasty British exit. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann points out, “the rush was Mountbatten’s, and his alone.”

Mountbatten was actually less pigheaded than Winston Churchill, whose invocation stiffens the spines of many Brexiteers today. Churchill, a fanatical imperialist, worked harder than any British politician to thwart Indian independence and, as prime minister from 1940 to 1945, did much to compromise it. Seized by a racist fantasy about superior Anglo-Americans, he refused to help Indians cope with famine in 1943 on the grounds that they “breed like rabbits.”

Needless to say, such ravings issued from an ignorance about India as intractable as that of the Brexiteers about Ireland. Churchill’s own secretary of state for India claimed that his boss knew “as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies.” Churchill displayed in his long career a similarly imperial insouciance toward Ireland, sending countless young Irishmen to their deaths in a catastrophic military fiasco at Gallipoli, Turkey, during World War I and unleashing brutal paramilitaries against Irish nationalists in 1920.

The many crimes of the empire’s bumptious adventurers were enabled by Britain’s great geopolitical power and then obscured by its cultural prestige. This is why images cherished by the British elite of itself as valiant, wise and benevolent could survive, until recently, much damning historical evidence about these masters of disaster from Cyprus to Malaysia, Palestine to South Africa. In recent years, such privately educated and smooth-tongued men as Niall Ferguson and Tony Blair could even present the British as saviors of suffering and benighted humanity, urging American neoconservatives to take up the white man’s burden globally.

Humiliations in neo-imperialist ventures abroad, followed by the rolling calamity of Brexit at home, have cruelly exposed the bluff of what Hannah Arendt called the “quixotic fools of imperialism.” As partition comes home, threatening bloodshed in Ireland and secession in Scotland, and an unimaginable chaos of no-deal Brexit looms, ordinary British people stand to suffer from the untreatable exit wounds once inflicted by Britain’s bumbling chumocrats on millions of Asians and Africans. More ugly historical ironies may yet waylay Britain on its treacherous road to Brexit. But it is safe to say that a long-cosseted British ruling class has finally come to the end of itself as it was.

Pankaj Mishra is the author, most recently, of “Age of Anger: A History of the Present.”

17 January 2019

Source: nytimes.com