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By Nicola Nasser

President Mahmoud Abbas and the Fatah movement, which he commands, have unleashed a media campaign against Hamas and the resistance. If pressure from the Palestinian public fails to stop the campaign, Abbas may achieve politically what Israel failed to achieve militarily: forcing the Palestinian presidency to choose “peace with Israel” over national reconciliation.

It appears that President Abbas has, indeed, prioritised “peace with Israel.” He has devised plans for resuming negotiations, and is still banking on American support for such talks. This is the only explanation for the current anti-Hamas media campaign.

Abbas sent his negotiators — Saeb Erekat, Majed Faraj and Maen Erekat — to Washington, where they met with US Secretary of State John Kerry a week ago last Wednesday. US State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki described the more than two-hour meeting as “constructive”. Abbas then prepared to obtain an Arab mandate, which seems guaranteed in advance, for his plans from the 142nd session of the Arab foreign ministers conference, held in Cairo this week.

However, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power poured cold water over the Palestinian Authority (PA) president’s bid to obtain US backing for his plan, which he intends to put before the UN Security Council and UN General Assembly. The proposal would end the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza within three years, during which period negotiations would resume within three months with the occupying power over its borders with the Palestinian state.

“We don’t think there are shortcuts or unilateral measures that can be taken at the United Nations or anyplace else that will bring about the outcome that the Palestinian people most seek,” Power said in a press conference last week. “To think that you can come to New York and secure what needs to be worked out on the ground is not realistic.”

This clearly translates into an unequivocal US “No.” The Palestinian president’s new plan has run up against the same American wall that Palestinian negotiators have faced since negotiations were adopted as a strategic approach. The Zionist route remains the only way these negotiators can access the White House and the UN Security Council.

There can be only one explanation for this plan. It is in fulfilment of a Palestinian promise not to resist the occupation and to offer the occupying power the opportunity to agree to yet another futile round of negotiations. Such negotiations will give Israel the time it needs to turn the Givaot colony into a major settler city on the 4,000 dunams of Palestinian land that it has just seized by declaring it “state land”.

The purpose of this appropriation is to separate the Hebron and South Bethlehem governorates in the West Bank. It is also a means to deflect international humanitarian pressure in reaction to Israeli war crimes in Gaza, to evade Israel’s obligations to the truce agreement with the resistance in Gaza, and to fuel internal Palestinian tensions until they reignite once more.

It was not Hamas or the resistance that described Abbas’s new plan as a “spurious process”. It was independent Palestinian figures who expressed their views in a statement read out by Mamdouh Al-Akr, general commissioner of the Independent Organisation of Human Rights, on 2 September in Ramallah. They called for an urgent meeting of the unified leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), in accordance with the Cairo agreement of 2011, so that it can serve as a frame of reference for the Palestinian will and take critical national decisions.

Activating the unified leadership framework of the PLO will put President Abbas’s call for a “single Palestinian central authority”, uniquely empowered to “determine matters of war and peace”, into its concrete national context. Only this context can confer legitimacy on a Palestinian leadership that does not derive its authority from resisting the occupation in all forms.

Moreover, the currently missing “electoral legitimacy” is no longer sufficient in and of itself to allow Palestinian decisions on war and peace to remain in the hands of a leadership that is the product of elections that were held with the approval of the occupation power and in the framework of agreements signed with it.

The Palestinian presidency has dropped the available option of resistance from the lexicon of its negotiating strategy, let alone the option of war, which is not available. The PA, in coordination with the occupation’s security apparatus, has become “the security proxy for the occupying power, rather than an instrument to end the occupation and establish the state,” as Palestinian analyst Hani Al-Masri wrote on 26 August.

As a result, the occupying power, alone, holds the keys to the decision of war, which it continues to repeat, and to the decision of peace, which it still refuses to take.

It appears that President Abbas is working against the tide of Palestinian public opinion, as voiced in a recent survey conducted by the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) in Ramallah. According to this poll, only 22 per cent of respondents supported a resumption of negotiations, while 53 per cent said they regarded resistance as “the more effective way” to realise the creation of a Palestinian state.

The results of the PCPSR poll contradict all the charges levelled by the president and Fatah against the resistance and Hamas. Of those polled, 79 per cent believe that the resistance emerged victorious from the recent war, while 86 per cent support the defensive use of rockets.

Respondents gave very low ratings to the performance of the Palestinian president, the PA, the national unity government and the PLO, while the approval rating for Hamas was 88 per cent.

What is the substance of this media campaign against Hamas? It ranges from blaming Hamas for prolonging the war and for the consequent loss of lives and material damage, to adopting the Israeli narrative regarding a Hamas-engineered “coup attempt” against the president in the West Bank and the existence of a “shadow government” in Gaza that prevents the national unity government from functioning.

Then there are the charges of keeping Fatah members under “house arrest”, of “opening fire on civilians”, and of “selling emergency relief on the black market.” On top of these come the accusation that Hamas has violated “the law that defines the colours and dimensions of the flag.”

President Abbas’s instructions to create a “committee to hold a dialogue” with Hamas to discuss the “fate of the national unity government,” as announced by Amin Maqboul, secretary of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, does little to encourage optimism. The national unity government, national reconciliation, the Cairo agreement of 2011, the unified leadership framework that it stipulated, and the reactivation of the PLO, all stand at a crossroads.

This is because of the confrontation stirred by the systematic smear campaign that President Abbas and the Fatah movement are waging against Hamas and the resistance. The campaign has created a media smokescreen behind which the occupation authority can conceal its foot-dragging in carrying out its obligations under the truce agreement, which will probably be echoed in Israeli procrastination on continuing with truce talks due to be held in Cairo.

It should also be stressed that to accuse the resistance and Hamas of prolonging the war is to exonerate the occupation power of responsibility. The Israeli media was quick to capitalise on this, further proof of the extensive coverage the campaign has received.

Indeed, Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev virtually reiterated it verbatim when he said that the Egyptian initiative was on the table from 15 July and that while the Arab League and Israel had approved the initiative, Hamas rejected it, only to turn around and agree to it a month later. “If [Hamas] had agreed then to what it agrees to now” it would have been possible “to avoid all that bloodshed,” he said.

The investigatory commission appointed by the UN Human Rights Council will most likely cite the president’s charges to strengthen the claims of the occupying power, as these charges would be regarded as “testimony of a witness from the other side.”

Abbas says that while the “final toll” from the most recent war in Gaza was 2,140 dead, “if added to the number of dead in previous wars, and those who died during the period of the Shalit problem, the number would be 10,000 dead and wounded, in addition to the 35,000 homes that were totally or partially destroyed.”

When Abbas says that “it would have been possible” to avert the human and material losses of the recent conflict he is effectively blaming the resistance, not the occupation, for the last war on Gaza and the two wars since 2008 that preceded it.

The spectre of discord once again hovers over Palestinian unity, with Palestinian opinion divided over a programme of negotiations versus a programme of resistance. This is the breach through which Arab and non-Arab “axes” penetrate into the Palestinian interior, deepening rather than mending Palestinian rifts.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (nassernicola@ymail.com).

15 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Paul Craig Roberts

The new sanctions against Russia announced by Washington and Europe do not make sense as merely economic measures. I would be surprised if Russian oil and military industries were dependent on European capital markets in a meaningful way. Such a dependence would indicate a failure in Russian strategic thinking. The Russian companies should be able to secure adequate financing from Russian Banks or from the Russian government. If foreign loans are needed, Russia can borrow from China.

If critical Russian industries are dependent on European capital markets, the sanctions will help Russia by forcing an end to this debilitating dependence. Russia should not be dependent on the West in any way.

The real question is the purpose of the sanctions. My conclusion is that the purpose of the sanctions is to break up and undermine Europe’s economic and political relations with Russia. When international relations are intentionally undermined, war can be the result. Washington will continue to push sanctions against Russia until Russia shows Europe that there is a heavy cost of serving as Washington’s tool.

Russia needs to break up this process of ever more sanctions in order to derail the drive toward war. In my opinion this is easy for Russia to do. Russia can tell Europe that since you do not like our oil companies, you must not like our gas company, so we are turning off the gas. Or Russia can tell Europe, we don’t sell natural gas to NATO members, or Russia can say we will continue to sell you gas, but you must pay in rubles, not in dollars. This would have the additional benefit of increasing the demand for rubles in exchange markets, thus making it harder for speculators and the US government to drive down the ruble.

The real danger to Russia is a continuation of its low-key, moderate response to the sanctions. This is a response that encourages more sanctions. To stop the sanctions, Russia needs to show Europe that the sanctions have serious costs for Europe.

A Russian response to Washington would be to stop selling to the US the Russian rocket engines on which the US satellite program is dependent. This could leave the US without rockets for its satellites for six years between the period 2016 and 2022.

Possibly the Russian government is worried about losing the earnings from gas and rocket engine sales. However, Europe cannot do without the gas and would quickly abandon its participation in the sanctions, so no gas revenues would be lost. The Americans are going to develop their own rocket engine anyhow, so the Russian sales of rocket engines to the US have at most about 6 more years. But the US with an impaired satellite program for six years would mean a great relief to the entire world from the American spy program. It would also make difficult US military aggression against Russia during the period.

Russian President Putin and his government have been very low-key and unprovocative in responding to the sanctions and to the trouble that Washington continues to cause for Russia in Ukraine. The low-key Russian behavior can be understood as a strategy for undermining Washington’s use of Europe against Russia by presenting a non-threatening face to Europe. However, another explanation is the presence inside Russia of a fifth column that represents Washington’s interest and constrains the power of the Russian government.

Strelkov describes the American fifth column here: http://slavyangrad.org/2014/09/12/we-will-not-allow-for-russia-to-be-ripped-asunder-and-ruined/

Saker describes the two power groups inside Russia as the Eurasian Sovereignists who stand behind Putin and an independent Russia and the Atlantic Integrationists, the fifth column that works to incorporate Russia in Europe under US hegemony or, failing that, to help Washington break up the Russian Federation into several weaker countries that are too weak to constrain Washington’s use of power. http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com.br/2014/09/strelkov-from-swimming-with-piranhas-to.html

Russia’s Atlantic Integrationists share the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines with Washington. These doctrines are the basis for US foreign policy. The doctrines define the goal of US foreign policy in terms of preventing the rise of other countries, such as Russia and China, that could limit Washington’s hegemony.

Washington is in a position to exploit the tensions between these two Russian power groups. Washington’s fifth column is not best positioned to prevail. However, Washington can at least count on the struggle causing dissent within the Eurasian Sovereignists over Putin’s low-key response to Western provocations. Some of this dissent can be seen in Strelkov’s defense of Russia and more can be seen here:

The New Round of Sanctions—The Pre-War Period

Russia, thinking the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, opened herself to the West. Russian governments trusted the West, and as a result of Russia’s gullibility, the West was able to purchase numerous allies among the Russian elites. Depending on the alignment of the media, these compromised elites are capable of assassinating Putin and attempting a coup.

One would think that by now Putin’s government would recognize the danger and arrest the main elements of the fifth column, followed by trial and execution for treason, in order that Russia can stand united against the Western Threat. If Putin does not take this step, it means either than Putin does not recognize the extent of the threat or that his government lacks the power to protect Russia from the internal threat.

It is clear that Putin has not achieved any respite for his government from the West’s propaganda and economic assault by refusing to defend the Donbass area from Ukrainian attack and by pressuring the Donetsk Republic into a ceasefire when its military forces were on the verge of a major defeat of the disintegrating Ukrainian army. All Putin has achieved is to open himself to criticism among his supporters for betraying the Russians in eastern and southern Ukraine.

The European politicians and elites are so deeply in Washington’s pocket that Putin has little chance of courting Europe with a Russian show of good will. I have never believed that this strategy could work, although I would be pleased if it did. Only a direct threat todeprive Europe of energy has a chance of producing within Europe a foreign policy independent of Washington. I do not think Europe can survive a cutoff of the Russian natural gas. Europe would abandon sanctions in order to guarantee the flow of gas. If Washington’s hold on Europe is so powerful that Europe is willing to endure a major disruption of its energy supply as the price of its vassalage, Russia will know to cease its futile attempts at diplomacy and to prepare for war.

If China sits on the sidelines, China will be the next isolated target and will receive the same treatment.

Washington intends to defeat both countries, either through internal dissent or through war.

Nothing said by Obama or any member of his government or any influential voice in Congress has signaled any pullback in Washington’s drive for hegemony over the world.

The US economy is now dependent on looting and plunder, and Washington’s hegemony is essential to this corrupted form of capitalism.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.

15 September, 2014
Paulcraigroberts.org

 

By Peter Symonds
The Obama administration is rapidly putting together a “coalition of the willing” to ramp up its new war of aggression in the Middle East. Using the pretext of “degrading and destroying” Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militias, Washington has revived its plans, put on hold last year, directed at ousting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and also aimed against Syria’s backers, Iran and Russia.

Since Obama announced his war plans last Wednesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry has been criss-crossing the Middle East to drum up support for military action in Iraq and Syria and the arming and training of pro-Western militia inside both countries. France has already indicated its willingness to participate in air strikes in Iraq. Yesterday, the Australian government announced the dispatch of eight strike fighters and associated military aircraft, as well as 600 troops to the Middle East.

The latest barbaric ISIS beheading of British aid worker David Haines has proven very convenient for the British government, which last year was forced to pull out of the planned US-led air war against Syria. Amid widespread public opposition and divisions in ruling circles, British Prime Minister David Cameron lost a parliamentary vote authorising air strikes.

Just as Obama has exploited the ISIS murder of two American journalists to sway public opinion, temporarily at least, behind a new war in the Middle East, Cameron is attempting to do the same. Denouncing ISIS as “monsters” and the “embodiment of evil,” he declared that Britain would proceed with the US and its allies to “dismantle and ultimately destroy ISIL [ISIS] and what it stands for.” The British-based Telegraph reported yesterday that Cameron could announce air strikes as early as next week after attending the UN and reconvening parliament to authorise military intervention.

In reality, ISIS is a creation of the US and its allies. It emerged as Al Qaeda in Iraq amid the sectarian bloodletting unleashed by the American-led occupation of Iraq from 2003. It morphed into ISIS as part of the US-backed regime-change operations in Libya and Syria initiated in 2011. ISIS established its prominent position in Syria, not as a result of popular support by the Syrian people, but through arms, funds and fighters from American allies in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states.

The absurdity of US claims that it will train and arm “moderate” anti-Assad forces in Syria to fight ISIS is underscored by a report Friday by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights that ISIS had reached a ceasefire with “moderate and Islamist rebels.” An official from the pro-Western Syrian National Coalition, no doubt concerned that the report could jeopardise US arms and aid, vigorously denied that the Free Syrian Army (FSA) had reached anything other than a temporary truce to retrieve bodies. He noted, however, that he did not speak for the many other “moderate” and Islamist militias in Syria.

The Syrian opposition militias including ISIS, whatever their disputes and clashes, are united by their determination to oust Assad and unquestionably maintain close relations. The family of beheaded American journalist Steven Sotloff has reported that he was traded to ISIS by the “moderate” FSA for a sum of between $25,000 and $50,000. The FSA and other anti-Assad militias certainly welcome the prospect of American aid, training and arms but these will be directed primarily at the Syrian regime, not ISIS.

That is Washington’s objective as well. An article in yesterday’s New York Times based on discussions Obama held last week with senior journalists, former officials and foreign policy experts, drew attention to the way in which the war on ISIS could rapidly transform into a wider war to topple Assad.

“He [Obama] made clear the intricacy of the situation, though, as he contemplated the possibility that Mr Assad might order his forces to fire at American planes entering Syrian airspace,” the New York Times reported. “If he dared to do that, Mr Obama said he would order American forces to wipe out Syria’s air defence system, which he noted would be easier than striking ISIS because its locations are better known. He went on to say that such an action by Mr Assad would lead to his overthrow.”

Of course, as it has done in the past, the US is quite capable of fabricating such an incident, if Assad does not order the military to respond to US air strikes, which are naked acts of aggression against a sovereign state. Nor would it simply be Syrian air defences that would be wiped out. Rather the Pentagon would set in motion plans drawn up at least a year ago to target the Syrian military and industrial base, including “command and control” centres, with Assad himself at the top of the list.

The wider US aims are also evident in the composition of the conference to be convened today in Paris to map out war plans. After France indicated that Iran might receive an invitation, US Secretary of State Kerry quickly ruled out the possibility, telling the media that it “would not be appropriate, given the many other issues that are on the table with respect to their engagement in Syria and elsewhere.” The last thing that Washington wants is for the Assad regime, or its backer Iran, itself a US target, to be part of the discussions.

Saudi Arabia, which was bitterly critical of Obama’s decision to call off air strikes against Syria last year, is only backing the new war because Riyadh understands it is directed against Assad, and also arch-rival Iran. The Saudi monarchy has agreed to provide the US with facilities to arm and train Syrian “moderates.” Last week Saudi Arabia hosted a gathering of 10 Arab states attended by Kerry that agreed to support efforts to destroy ISIS, including through their military involvement “as appropriate.”

As cited in yesterday’s New York Times, a senior US State Department official stated that at least some of the Arab countries had offered to take part in air strikes, including in Syria, and have been doing so for some time.

The scope of what is being prepared goes far beyond the US air strikes that have already taken place against ISIS inside Iraq. Even that has been grossly understated. The Pentagon has focussed on the 156 airstrikes on ISIS vehicles, road blocks and other targets, but the number of sorties over the past month has been far higher—2,749 up until September 11, including reconnaissance and refuelling missiles. With France, Australia, possibly Britain and also Arab countries involved, the US is preparing a devastating air war in Iraq and Syria.

15 September, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Nile Bowie

The United States has announced its intentions to counter the Islamic State group by sending 475 additional US troops to Iraq and intensifying airstrikes against ISIS targets in coordination with Baghdad. US President Barack Obama, during his televised national address, also endorsed a cross-border extension of the US bombing campaign into Syria.

Obama called on Congress to approve a massive $500 million program intended to bolster and equip militants seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Syrian government officials have reiterated their opposition to US airstrikes, declaring that any strikes on their territory launched without the consent of Damascus would be considered an act of aggression.

Washington’s strategy implies launching airstrikes on a sovereign nation without UN authorization and openly arming non-state militants, which would constitute a major violation of international law. US officials have already conceded that the regional campaign could stretch beyond the end of Obama’s presidency.

Washington’s open-ended escalation of US military action in the region amounts to a unilateral declaration of war. It is important to note that the Obama administration has sidestepped its constitutional obligation to obtain congressional approval for its military campaign,legitimizing its authority from 2001 use-of-force authorization against al-Qaeda that the president himself endorsed repealing last year.

During his speech, the US president likened his administration’s strategy against ISIS to US counterterrorism actions undertaken in Yemen and Somalia. Obama labeled those operations as ‘successful,’ despite generating hundreds of civilian causalities and failing to eliminate al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or al-Shabaab since the campaigns were expanded after Obama came to office.

In an attempt to assuage public concern, Obama insisted that US military personnel would not be involved in ground combat. This language is misleading considering that the tone of the president’s speech obfuscates how the 1,600 US troops already in Iraq are by definition active duty soldiers and parties to an armed conflict. They will also be coordinating and launching airstrikes.

Despite Iraq being the beneficiary of extensive US military assistance, which included multibillion-dollar training programs for Iraqi Security Forces and police, the Islamic State militants were still able to overrun Iraqi army positions and capture significant quantities of military equipment provided by Washington.

It is unlikely that such a limited contingent of US forces can help the Iraqi army achieve what the previously more extensive training programs could not, which raises the likelihood that more American military personnel would eventually need to be deployed to support the operation, which sets the stage for prolonged mission creep.

The silence of various human rights groups is notable as Washington angles to spend half-a-billion dollars bolstering Syrian anti-government insurgents with training and equipment. A surge of lethal weapons into Syria will fuel bloodshed, exacerbate the already abhorrent humanitarian situation, and increase the probabilities of arms falling into the hands of groups like the Islamic State and other fundamentalist groups, such as Jabhat al-Nursa.

The Islamic State has become the most sophisticated, organized, and entrenched terrorist group in history by virtue of Western and Gulf state’s support for Syrian rebel militias, a fact that has been widely corroborated by various media organizations, investigators and independent journalists.

An exposé recently published in the Washington Post detailed how fighters trained under the auspices of covert CIA programs approved by the Obama administration have joined the ranks of the Islamic State. Western and Gulf states, according the report, knowingly armed and trained Islamist fighters with jihadist leanings and anti-Western views to fight and topple the governments of Libya and Syria.

The Washington Post’s report, which cites senior US and Arab intelligence figures and members of the Islamic State, claims that many fighters who now belong to the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra were previously trained by French, British, and American military and intelligence personnel.

Countries such as Russia, China, and Iran consistently raised objections to Western and Gulf policies in Syria throughout the duration of the conflict in that country, warning of the dangerous potential for extremists to exploit the lawless space in areas outside the Syrian government’s control. Those concerns have proven to be entirely accurate.

The Obama administration, in addition to US allies such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Jordan, and Kuwait, bear the ultimate responsibility for giving rise to the organization they are now scrambling to fight through their support for the anti-Assad insurgency. At this stage, any further support for militant groups in Syria by Western and Gulf States is a moral outrage, in addition to being a violation of international law.

Washington’s stated objective is to diminish the threat of ISIS, but in practice, renewed intervention in the region will fuel the Syrian insurgency and undermine the legitimate government in Damascus. Airpower is also needed in this scenario to safeguard US allies, as well as to protect American facilities and investment interests.

US client states in the region, mostly Sunni monarchies, are already in a vulnerable position due to the growing reach of fundamentalists. In some cases, members of the population in these countries sympathize with the Islamic State. These concerns have motivated Saudi Arabia to construct a 900km fence along its northern border with Iraq, in addition to deploying 30,000 troops to secure the kingdom’s frontiers.

The Saudi kingdom has played a key role emboldening the Islamic State through its support for radical groups in Syria. By virtue of its oil wealth, the House of Saud has spent the last three decades promoting the Salafist interpretation of Islam (labeled widely as Wahhabism throughout Western discourse) in missionaries throughout the Islamic world. Their interest is in entrenching the royal family’s power and uncontested legitimacy of the King as the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.

Countless fundamentalist jihadi groups fighting in Syria subscribe to Salafism, which seeks to revive a pure and unadulterated Islam that was practiced by the earliest generations of Muslims in seventh century Arabia. Adherents tend to endorse exclusionist and puritanical practices whereby they declare non-Muslims and even fellow Muslims as apostates or infidels, who are usually punished by death.

The United States has long tolerated the House of Saud’s management of Sunni Islam by exporting radical Salafism throughout the Islamic world, in the interest of furthering its own strategic foreign policy objectives. This fundamentalist interpretation of Islam has served as the ideological engine for radical groups that Riyadh and Washington have attempted to utilize in Syria.

The Islamic State group, though fitting into the category of a Salafist organization, differentiates itself by forcefully denying the House of Saud’s claim of authority to rule. Alastair Crooke, former British diplomat and MI6 agent, described the group as “a corrective movement to contemporary Wahhabism,” whose self-declared caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claims to be the leader of all Muslims.

In a move that borders on satire, Saudi Arabia has agreed to a recent American request that the kingdom provide a base to train so-called ‘moderate’ Syrian rebel fighters. Saudi Arabia has publically beheaded some 23 people last month alone, for drug-trafficking and petty crimes. This should raise questions about Obama’s partners in Riyadh, considering the moral outrage on display throughout the Western world over the brutal executions of James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

The United States has failed to eradicate terrorist organizations in other war theaters throughout the region, and there is no reason to believe it will be any more successful against the Islamic State group, especially when its strategy depends on disenfranchised proxy forces, such as the Western-backed rebel militias. As demonstrated elsewhere, the use of airstrikes will almost certainly create unintended consequences, such as civilian casualties that can fuel anti-US sentiment and embolden the fundamentalist cause.

Once the air campaign begins in Syria, the choice of targets will reveal the administration’s true motivations for involvement. Damascus will likely not react to strikes against ISIS targets, but if the government’s facilities or supply routes are threatened, it could be provoked to respond. Figures in the US establishment will likely endorse the rationale that the US air campaign must strike both rebel and government targets to avoid giving either side a strategic advantage. Needless to say, the next US administration will be inheriting a seemingly endless humanitarian disaster.

Nile Bowie is a columnist with Russia Today,and a research associate with International Movement for a Just World(JUST).

13 September 2014

By Noam Chomsky
On August 26th, Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) both accepted a ceasefire agreement after a 50-day Israeli assault on Gaza that left 2,100 Palestinians dead and vast landscapes of destruction behind. The agreement calls for an end to military action by both Israel and Hamas, as well as an easing of the Israeli siege that has strangled Gaza for many years.

This is, however, just the most recent of a series of ceasefire agreements reached after each of Israel’s periodic escalations of its unremitting assault on Gaza. Throughout this period, the terms of these agreements remain essentially the same. The regular pattern is for Israel, then, to disregard whatever agreement is in place, while Hamas observes it — as Israel has officially recognized — until a sharp increase in Israeli violence elicits a Hamas response, followed by even fiercer brutality. These escalations, which amount to shooting fish in a pond, are called “mowing the lawn” in Israeli parlance. The most recent was more accurately described as “removing the topsoil” by a senior U.S. military officer, appalled by the practices of the self-described “most moral army in the world.”

The first of this series was the Agreement on Movement and Access Between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in November 2005. It called for “a crossing between Gaza and Egypt at Rafah for the export of goods and the transit of people, continuous operation of crossings between Israel and Gaza for the import/export of goods, and the transit of people, reduction of obstacles to movement within the West Bank, bus and truck convoys between the West Bank and Gaza, the building of a seaport in Gaza, [and the] re-opening of the airport in Gaza” that Israeli bombing had demolished.

That agreement was reached shortly after Israel withdrew its settlers and military forces from Gaza. The motive for the disengagement was explained by Dov Weissglass, a confidant of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who was in charge of negotiating and implementing it. “The significance of the disengagement plan is the freezing of the peace process,” Weissglass informed the Israeli press. “And when you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders, and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda. And all this with authority and permission. All with a [U.S.] presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.” True enough.

“The disengagement is actually formaldehyde,” Weissglass added. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Israeli hawks also recognized that instead of investing substantial resources in maintaining a few thousand settlers in illegal communities in devastated Gaza, it made more sense to transfer them to illegal subsidized communities in areas of the West Bank that Israel intended to keep.

The disengagement was depicted as a noble effort to pursue peace, but the reality was quite different. Israel never relinquished control of Gaza and is, accordingly, recognized as the occupying power by the United Nations, the U.S., and other states (Israel apart, of course). In their comprehensive history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Israeli scholars Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar describe what actually happened when that country disengaged: the ruined territory was not released “for even a single day from Israel’s military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day.” After the disengagement, “Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might.”

Operations Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense

Israel soon had a pretext for violating the November Agreement more severely. In January 2006, the Palestinians committed a serious crime. They voted “the wrong way” in carefully monitored free elections, placing the parliament in the hands of Hamas. Israel and the United States immediately imposed harsh sanctions, telling the world very clearly what they mean by “democracy promotion.” Europe, to its shame, went along as well.

The U.S. and Israel soon began planning a military coup to overthrow the unacceptable elected government, a familiar procedure. When Hamas pre-empted the coup in 2007, the siege of Gaza became far more severe, along with regular Israeli military attacks. Voting the wrong way in a free election was bad enough, but preempting a U.S.-planned military coup proved to be an unpardonable offense.

A new ceasefire agreement was reached in June 2008. It again called for opening the border crossings to “allow the transfer of all goods that were banned and restricted to go into Gaza.” Israel formally agreed to this, but immediately announced that it would not abide by the agreement and open the borders until Hamas released Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier held by Hamas.

Israel itself has a long history of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and holding them for lengthy periods without credible charge, sometimes as hostages. Of course, imprisoning civilians on dubious charges, or none, is a regular practice in the territories Israel controls. But the standard western distinction between people and “unpeople” (in Orwell’s useful phrase) renders all this insignificant.

Israel not only maintained the siege in violation of the June 2008 ceasefire agreement but did so with extreme rigor, even preventing the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which cares for the huge number of official refugees in Gaza, from replenishing its stocks.

On November 4th, while the media were focused on the U.S. presidential election, Israeli troops entered Gaza and killed half a dozen Hamas militants. That elicited a Hamas missile response and an exchange of fire. (All the deaths were Palestinian.) In late December, Hamas offered to renew the ceasefire. Israel considered the offer, but rejected it, preferring instead to launch Operation Cast Lead, a three-week incursion of the full power of the Israeli military into the Gaza strip, resulting in shocking atrocities well documented by international and Israeli human rights organizations.

On January 8, 2009, while Cast Lead was in full fury, the U.N. Security Council passed a unanimous resolution (with the U.S. abstaining) calling for “an immediate ceasefire leading to a full Israeli withdrawal, unimpeded provision through Gaza of food, fuel, and medical treatment, and intensified international arrangements to prevent arms and ammunition smuggling.”

A new ceasefire agreement was indeed reached, but the terms, similar to the previous ones, were again never observed and broke down completely with the next major mowing-the-lawn episode in November 2012, Operation Pillar of Defense. What happened in the interim can be illustrated by the casualty figures from January 2012 to the launching of that operation: one Israeli was killed by fire from Gaza while 78 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire.

The first act of Operation Pillar of Defense was the murder of Ahmed Jabari, a high official of the military wing of Hamas. Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz, described Jabari as Israel’s “subcontractor” in Gaza, who enforced relative quiet there for more than five years. As always, there was a pretext for the assassination, but the likely reason was provided by Israeli peace activist Gershon Baskin. He had been involved in direct negotiations with Jabari for years and reported that, hours before he was assassinated, Jabari “received the draft of a permanent truce agreement with Israel, which included mechanisms for maintaining the ceasefire in the case of a flare-up between Israel and the factions in the Gaza Strip.”

There is a long record of Israeli actions designed to deter the threat of a diplomatic settlement. After this exercise of mowing the lawn, a ceasefire agreement was reached yet again. Repeating the now-standard terms, it called for a cessation of military action by both sides and the effective ending of the siege of Gaza with Israel “opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas.”

What happened next was reviewed by Nathan Thrall, senior Middle East analyst of the International Crisis Group. Israeli intelligence recognized that Hamas was observing the terms of the ceasefire. “Israel,” Thrall wrote, “therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the ceasefire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.” In other words, the siege never ended. “Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones inside Gaza [from which Palestinians are barred, and which include a third or more of the strip’s limited arable land] were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.”

Operation Protective Edge

So matters continued until April 2014, when an important event took place. The two major Palestinian groupings, Gaza-based Hamas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank signed a unity agreement. Hamas made major concessions. The unity government contained none of its members or allies. In substantial measure, as Nathan Thrall observes, Hamas turned over governance of Gaza to the PA. Several thousand PA security forces were sent there and the PA placed its guards at borders and crossings, with no reciprocal positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus. Finally, the unity government accepted the three conditions that Washington and the European Union had long demanded: non-violence, adherence to past agreements, and the recognition of Israel.

Israel was infuriated. Its government declared at once that it would refuse to deal with the unity government and cancelled negotiations. Its fury mounted when the U.S., along with most of the world, signaled support for the unity government.

There are good reasons why Israel opposes the unification of Palestinians. One is that the Hamas-Fatah conflict has provided a useful pretext for refusing to engage in serious negotiations. How can one negotiate with a divided entity? More significantly, for more than 20 years, Israel has been committed to separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of the Oslo Accords it signed in 1993, which declare Gaza and the West Bank to be an inseparable territorial unity.

A look at a map explains the rationale. Separated from Gaza, any West Bank enclaves left to Palestinians have no access to the outside world. They are contained by two hostile powers, Israel and Jordan, both close U.S. allies — and contrary to illusions, the U.S. is very far from a neutral “honest broker.”

Furthermore, Israel has been systematically taking over the Jordan Valley, driving out Palestinians, establishing settlements, sinking wells, and otherwise ensuring that the region — about one-third of the West Bank, with much of its arable land — will ultimately be integrated into Israel along with the other regions that country is taking over. Hence remaining Palestinian cantons will be completely imprisoned. Unification with Gaza would interfere with these plans, which trace back to the early days of the occupation and have had steady support from the major political blocs, including figures usually portrayed as doves like former president Shimon Peres, who was one of the architects of settlement deep in the West Bank.

As usual, a pretext was needed to move on to the next escalation. Such an occasion arose when three Israeli boys from the settler community in the West Bank were brutally murdered. The Israeli government evidently quickly realized that they were dead, but pretended otherwise, which provided the opportunity to launch a “rescue operation” — actually a rampage primarily targeting Hamas. The Netanyahu government has claimed from the start that it knew Hamas was responsible, but has made no effort to present evidence.

One of Israel’s leading authorities on Hamas, Shlomi Eldar, reported almost at once that the killers very likely came from a dissident clan in Hebron that has long been a thorn in the side of the Hamas leadership. He added, “I’m sure they didn’t get any green light from the leadership of Hamas, they just thought it was the right time to act.”

The Israeli police have since been searching for and arresting members of the clan, still claiming, without evidence, that they are “Hamas terrorists.” On September 2nd, Haaretz reported that, after very intensive interrogations, the Israeli security services concluded the abduction of the teenagers “was carried out by an independent cell” with no known direct links to Hamas.

The 18-day rampage by the Israeli Defense Forces succeeded in undermining the feared unity government. According to Israeli military sources, its soldiers arrested 419 Palestinians, including 335 affiliated with Hamas, and killed six, while searching thousands of locations and confiscating $350,000. Israel also conducted dozens of attacks in Gaza, killing five Hamas members on July 7th.

Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in 18 months, Israeli officials reported, providing Israel with the pretext to launch Operation Protective Edge on July 8th. The 50-day assault proved the most extreme exercise in mowing the lawn — so far.

Operation [Still to Be Named]

Israel is in a fine position today to reverse its decades-old policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank in violation of its solemn agreements and to observe a major ceasefire agreement for the first time. At least temporarily, the threat of democracy in neighboring Egypt has been diminished, and the brutal Egyptian military dictatorship of General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is a welcome ally for Israel in maintaining control over Gaza.

The Palestinian unity government, as noted earlier, is placing the U.S.-trained forces of the Palestinian Authority in control of Gaza’s borders, and governance may be shifting into the hands of the PA, which depends on Israel for its survival, as well as for its finances. Israel might feel that its takeover of Palestinian territory in the West Bank has proceeded so far that there is little to fear from some limited form of autonomy for the enclaves that remain to Palestinians.

There is also some truth to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s observation: “Many elements in the region understand today that, in the struggle in which they are threatened, Israel is not an enemy but a partner.” Akiva Eldar, Israel’s leading diplomatic correspondent, adds, however, that “all those ‘many elements in the region’ also understand that there is no brave and comprehensive diplomatic move on the horizon without an agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and a just, agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem.” That is not on Israel’s agenda, he points out, and is in fact in direct conflict with the 1999 electoral program of the governing Likud coalition, never rescinded, which “flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river.”

Some knowledgeable Israeli commentators, notably columnist Danny Rubinstein, believe that Israel is poised to reverse course and relax its stranglehold on Gaza.

We’ll see.

The record of these past years suggests otherwise and the first signs are not auspicious. As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in 30 years, almost 1,000 acres. Israel Radio reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish teenagers by “Hamas militants.” A Palestinian boy was burned to death in retaliation for the murder, but no Israeli land was handed to Palestinians, nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered 10-year-old Khalil Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron on August 10th, while the most moral army in the world was smashing Gaza to bits, and then drove away in his jeep as the child bled to death.

Anati was one the 23 Palestinians (including three children) killed by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank during the Gaza onslaught, according to U.N. statistics, along with more than 2,000 wounded, 38% by live fire. “None of those killed were endangering soldiers’ lives,” Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reported. To none of this is there any reaction, just as there was no reaction while Israel killed, on average, more than two Palestinian children a week for the past 14 years. Unpeople, after all.

It is commonly claimed on all sides that, if the two-state settlement is dead as a result of Israel’s takeover of Palestinian lands, then the outcome will be one state West of the Jordan. Some Palestinians welcome this outcome, anticipating that they can then conduct a civil rights struggle for equal rights on the model of South Africa under apartheid. Many Israeli commentators warn that the resulting “demographic problem” of more Arab than Jewish births and diminishing Jewish immigration will undermine their hope for a “democratic Jewish state.”

But these widespread beliefs are dubious.

The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is integrating into Israel. That should avoid the dreaded “demographic problem.”

The areas being integrated into Israel include a vastly expanded Greater Jerusalem, the area within the illegal “Separation Wall,” corridors cutting through the regions to the East, and will probably also encompass the Jordan Valley. Gaza will likely remain under its usual harsh siege, separated from the West Bank. And the Syrian Golan Heights — like Jerusalem, annexed in violation of Security Council orders — will quietly become part of Greater Israel. In the meantime, West Bank Palestinians will be contained in unviable cantons, with special accommodation for elites in standard neocolonial style.

These basic policies have been underway since the 1967 conquest, following a principle enunciated by then-Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinians. He informed his cabinet colleagues that they should tell Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, “We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.”

The suggestion was natural within the overriding conception articulated in 1972 by future president Haim Herzog: “I do not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter… But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner.” Dayan also called for Israel’s “permanent rule” (“memshelet keva”) over the occupied territories. When Netanyahu expresses the same stand today, he is not breaking new ground.

Like other states, Israel pleads “security” as justification for its aggressive and violent actions. But knowledgeable Israelis know better. Their recognition of reality was articulated clearly in 1972 by Air Force Commander (and later president) Ezer Weizmann. He explained that there would be no security problem if Israel were to accept the international call to withdraw from the territories it conquered in 1967, but the country would not then be able to “exist according to the scale, spirit, and quality she now embodies.”

For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which the world was to ultimately come to accept. It has been a highly successful policy. There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies, not an idle dream by any means.

Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor emeritus in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

09 September, 2014
TomDispatch.com

 

By Sara Flounders

There is an elephant in the climate debate that by U.S. demand cannot be discussed or even acknowledged. This agreement to ignore the elephant is now the accepted basis of all international negotiations on climate change.

It is well understood by every possible measurement that the Pentagon, the U.S. military machine, is the world’s biggest institutional consumer of petroleum products and the world’s worst polluter of greenhouse gas emissions and many other toxic pollutants. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.

Ever since the Kyoto Accords or Kyoto Protocol negotiations in 1998, in an effort to gain U.S. compliance, all U.S. military operations worldwide and within the U.S. have been exempt from measurement and from agreements on reduction. The U.S. Congress passed an explicit provision guaranteeing U.S. military exemptions. (Interpress Service, May 20, 1998)

The complete U.S. military exemption from greenhouse gas emissions calculations includes more than 1,000 U.S. bases in more than 130 countries around the world, its 6,000 facilities in the U.S., its aircraft carriers and its jet aircraft. Also excluded are its weapons testing and all multilateral operations such as the giant U.S.-commanded NATO military alliance and Africom, the U.S. military alliance now blanketing Africa. The provision also exempts U.S./U.N.-sanctioned activities of “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian ­relief.”

After gaining this giant concession, the U.S. government still refused to sign the Kyoto Accord, thus sabotaging years of international effort to forge an ­agreement.

The provisions of the Kyoto Protocol nevertheless became the basis of all future proposed international meetings on a climate treaty, including Copenhagen 2009, Cancun 2010, Durban 2011, Doha 2012 and the United Nations upcoming 21st Conference of the Parties on Climate Change meeting in Paris in 2015.

In all past international conferences it was again and again the U.S. government that sabotaged the meetings and refused to be bound by any treaty. The Obama administration on Aug. 27 again confirmed that at the U.N. meeting in New York in September to prepare for the 2015 Paris meeting, only a nonbinding agreement could be put forward.

Role of grassroots activists

Unless the climate activists at the grassroots level challenge this exemption of the U.S. military and begin to focus a laser light on the most dangerous source of global warming and climate change, the movement will become lost in vague generalities, utopian hopes and toothless accords.

The only hope that the mass outpouring in September in New York City will have an impact is if independent voices can begin to consciously challenge the greatest global polluter.

Exposing the horrendous social costs of U.S. militarism must also be part of the challenge. Washington’s military role acts to constantly reinforce at every level the repressive state apparatus.

For decades, and at an accelerated pace since 2001, the military has provided an endless stream of free war equipment to local city and state police, National Guard units and sheriffs’ offices. Youth of oppressed nations within the U.S. become targets of a vastly expanded police state. The fresh images of tanks and armored police in Ferguson, Mo., confirmed for millions the results of this racist policy.

Exposing the devastation of U.S. wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya is essential. These U.S. wars have spread hundreds of tons of radioactive waste from depleted uranium missiles. They have contaminated the soil and water of vast regions under U.S. occupation with benzene and trichloroethylene from air base operations and perchlorate, a toxic ingredient in rocket propellant.

More than 1,000 military sites in the U.S. are contaminated with these toxins. Military bases top the Superfund list of contaminated sites. The poorest communities, especially communities of color, are the most severely impacted by this continuing military poisoning.

It is essential to connect the Pentagon exemption from international negotiations to its primary role as the protector and expander of corporate power on a global scale. The most powerful and profitable corporations are the oil and military corporations. These are the other primary polluters.

Pentagon admits climate change

Unlike the right-wing fanatics and climate change deniers in Congress, the Pentagon does not deny the devastating impact that climate change will have on every aspect of life on the planet.

Its own published studies confirm the danger. But the U.S. officer corps is committed to what they call “full spectrum dominance.” So every study of climate change by the military planners is based on evaluating how to take advantage of the future crisis to more firmly entrench U.S. corporate power and protect the irrational capitalist system that has created this crisis that threatens all humanity.

The Pentagon studies are not on plans to deliver emergency aid in the face of climate disasters such as floods, droughts, famines, epidemics, typhoons, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, water shortages and damage to infrastructure. The plans of their war colleges and think tanks are on how to extract political concessions on docking rights and future military access during a besieged country’s hour of greatest emergency need.

For example, the U.S. Department of Defense releases every four years a Quadrennial Defense Review. This is a broad outline of U.S. military strategy. (tinyurl.com/pn4awm8)

The 2014 QDR describes the threat of climate change as “a very serious national security vulnerability.” Similar to the 2010 QDR, it poses the problem of how to maintain global U.S. military hegemony in the face of ever-worsening global climate disruptions.

The military officer caste is focused on maintaining Wall Street rule and capitalist property relations during a crisis. There is concern with preserving the authority of their puppets, allies and collaborators. The report stresses the importance of developing new policies, strategies and plans.

“Climate change poses another significant challenge for the United States and the world at large. As greenhouse gas emissions increase, sea levels are rising, average global temperatures are increasing and severe weather patterns are accelerating.

“The impacts of climate change may increase the frequency, scale and complexity of future missions, including defense support to civil authorities. … The Department’s operational readiness hinges on unimpeded access to land, air and sea training.”

Military and corporate planning is callously focused on how to take advantage of the life-threatening changes.

A most frightening example is the “National Strategy for the Arctic Region.” This White House report opens by praising the Arctic as “an amazing place.” But then quickly defines the need for focusing on strategic priorities to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead.

The essence of the report is that the melting of the polar ice cap and the “new Arctic environment” means “ocean resources are more readily accessible as sea ice diminishes.” This is an opportunity to access the vast untapped oil, gas and mineral resources and increase the flow of fossil fuels. In other words, big profits for Big Oil. (tinyurl.com/cw2dvhk)

The Center for Naval Analyses has also prepared ominous reports of U.S. policy in this period of global climate crisis. Eleven retired generals and admirals came together in 2007 to examine the security implications of climate change.

In 2014, this federally funded research and development center produced a study headed by Michael Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security, and Leon Panetta, former secretary of Defense, and titled “National Security and the Accelerating Risks of Climate Change.” This report sees climate change as the source of international instability and the greatest threat to the established capitalist order.

This study, once again, is not on how to use the enormous technological ability of the U.S. military machine to provide solutions or emergency assistance. Everything is posed in terms of national security in the face of alleged potential terror threats.

“In Africa, Asia and the Middle East, we are already seeing how the impacts of extreme weather, such as prolonged drought and flooding — and resulting food shortages, desertification, population dislocation and mass migration, and sea level rise — are posing security challenges to these regions’ governments. We see these trends growing and accelerating.

“Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world. … It poses a serious threat to America’s national security.”

The report calls for “improved U.S. combat power” and “assessment of the impact on U.S. military installations worldwide due to rising sea levels and extreme weather events.” (tinyurl.com/lreswx8)

Based on these reports and on the destructive, self-serving U.S. role in every climate meeting in over 20 years, it is clear that U.S. corporate power and the monstrous military machine it has funded by expropriating more than half the federal budget every year for decades is an enemy of the people of the whole world and a threat to all forms of life on earth. This must become a focus of class-conscious climate activists. This would contribute greatly to an understanding of the source and the real solutions to this global crisis.

Sara Flounders is an American political writer and has been active in ‘progressive’ and anti-war organizing since the 1960s.

4 September 2014

Home

According to Israeli Intelligence News Source

By Michel Chossudovsky

While NATO leaders in Newport Wales debate the Atlantic Alliance’s role “in containing a mounting militant threat in the Middle East”, it is worth recalling that in 2011 at the outset of the war in Syria, NATO became actively involved in the recruitment of Islamic fighters.

Reminiscent of the enlistment of the Mujahideen to wage the CIA’s jihad (holy war) in the heyday of the Soviet-Afghan war, NATO headquarters in Brussels in liaison with the Turkish High command, according to Israeli intelligence sources, was involved in the enlisting of thousands of terrorists:

“Also discussed in Brussels and Ankara, our sources report, is a campaign to enlist thousands of Muslim volunteers in Middle East countries and the Muslim world to fight alongside the Syrian rebels. The Turkish army would house these volunteers, train them and secure their passage into Syria. (Debkafile, August 31, 2011 emphasis added).

Confirmed by Israeli intelligence News, NATO played a key role in the delivery of weapons to Al Qaeda affiliated rebels in the Aleppo region bordering onto Turkey:

NATO and a number of European governments, most significantly the UK, have started airlifting heavy weapons to the Syrian rebels poised in Aleppo to fend off a major Syrian army offensive, according to debkafile’s exclusive military sources. They disclose that the first shipments were landed Monday night, June 17 [2013], and early Tuesday in Turkey and Jordan. They contained anti-air and tank missiles as well as recoilless 120 mm cannons mounted on jeeps. From there, they were transferred to rebel forces in southern Syria and Aleppo in the northwest. (Debkafile, June 18, 2013)

“Terrorists R Us”

Ironically, President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron (who is hosting the NATO Summit in Wales), have asserted that they “will not be cowed by barbaric killers”:

“We will not waver in our determination to confront the Islamic State … If terrorists think we will weaken in the face of their threats they could not be more wrong.” (Barack Obama and David Cameron, Strengthening the NATO alliance, op ed published in the London Times, September 4, 2014, emphasis added)
But these “Barbaric Killers” were created by the Western military alliance. They are serving the strategic interests of the U.S., Britain, not to mention Israel.

[file photo]

“They are Our Terrorists“. Without the terrorists, the “Global War on Terrorism” would fall flat.

The Obama-Cameron narrative borders on ridicule. It is not only absurd, it is criminal.

What they are proposing is an all encompassing NATO mandate to “Go after Terrorist Entities” which they themselves created as part of an insidious intelligence operation to destabilize and destroy both Syria and Iraq.

British and French Special Forces have been actively training Syria opposition rebels from a base in Turkey.

Israel has provided a safe haven to Al Qaeda affiliated rebels including ISIS and Al Nusrah rebels in the occupied Golan Heights.

Netanyahu has met up with jihadist leaders in the Golan Heights. The IDF top brass acknowledges that there are “global jihad elements inside Syria” supported by Israel.

Image left: Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu Shakes Hand with a wounded Al Qaeda Terrorist in occupied Golan.

Lest we forget, Al Qaeda was at the outset a creation of the CIA. Who is behind the ISIS terrorists? The mainstream media is mum on the subject, despite mountains of evidence that they are creations of the Western military alliance.

NATO’s Criminal Agenda
What we are dealing with is a criminal agenda under NATO auspices. The evidence amply confirms that the US and Britain in liaison with the Atlantic Alliance have relentlessly supported both the creation as well as development of an Islamic Terror Network which now extends from the Middle East and North Africa into sub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia.

And now Obama and Cameron, whose governments are the architects of the Islamic State, are calling upon the Atlantic Alliance as well all on the governments of the 28 NATO member states to endorse the bombing campaign on Iraq and Syria as part of “counter-terrorism” operation.

The ISIS brigades are “intelligence assets” supported by US-NATO-Israel. They will not be the object of the bombings. Quite the opposite.

What is envisaged as part of the propaganda campaign is to use the “threat of the Islamic State” as a pretext and justification to intervene militarily under a “humanitarian” “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) mandate. The civilian population will not be protected. Under this diabolical military-intelligence operation, The Islamic State (ISIS) brigades with Western Special Forces within their ranks are slated to be “protected”.

The War on Syria

From the outset of the war on Syria in March 2011, member states of the Atlantic Alliance as well as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have (covertly) supported the terrorists –including al Nusrah and the ISIS– with a view to destabilizing Syria as a nation state. These actions were implemented in liaison with NATO headquarters in Brussels.

The process of recruitment and training of mercenaries had been sub-contracted to private security companies operating out of the Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Reports point to the creation of training camps in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In Zayed Military City (UAE), “a secret army is in the making” was operated by Xe Services, formerly Blackwater. The UAE deal to establish a military camp for the training of mercenaries was signed in July 2010, nine months before the onslaught of the wars in Libya and Syria. (See Manlio Dinucci, A Secret Army of Mercenaries for the Middle East and North Africa, Il Manifesto. 18 May 2011)

Moreover, confirmed by CNN, security companies on contract to NATO member states were involved in training Syria “opposition” death squads in the use of chemical weapons:

“The United States and some European allies are using defense contractors to train Syrian rebels on how to secure chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, a senior U.S. official and several senior diplomats told CNN Sunday. ( CNN Report, December 9, 2012)

NATO Supported the Terrorists in Libya

From the outset of NATO’s 2011 “humanitarian war” on Libya, the Atlantic alliance was working in close liaison with the “pro-Al Qaeda brigades” led by “former” Libya Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) leader Abdul Hakim Belhhadj (Debka, Pro-Al Qaeda brigades control Qaddafi Tripoli strongholds seized by rebels, August 28, 2011 )

Abdul Hakim Belhhadj received his military training in a CIA sponsored guerrilla camp in Afghanistan. He constitutes a CIA “intelligence asset” operating in the Libyan war theater. A 2011 report suggested that he had some 1,000 men under his command. (Libyan rebels at pains to distance themselves from extremists – The Globe and Mail, March 12, 2011)

The US-NATO coalition is arming the Jihadists. Weapons are being channeled to the LIFG from Saudi Arabia, which historically, since the outset of the Soviet-Afghan war, has covertly supported Al Qaeda. The Saudis are now providing the rebels, in liaison with Washington and Brussels, with anti-tank rockets and ground-to-air missiles. (See Michel Chossudovsky “Our Man in Tripoli”: US-NATO Sponsored Islamic Terrorists Integrate Libya’s Pro-Democracy Opposition, Global Research, 3 April 2011)

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website.

5 September 2014
http://www.globalresearch.ca/

 

By Robert Barsocchini

Syria

The USA started carrying out coups, assassinating leaders, and sponsoring terrorism and extremists in Syria in 1948, continuing to the present moment, as everyone knows, under Obama. Examples, provided by David North:

“The Eisenhower administration was troubled by the popularity of the “progressive front,” which was backed by elements in the Syrian army led by Colonel Adnan Malki. The United States was particularly angry that Malki’s faction opposed Syrian membership in the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact, modeled on NATO, which the Eisenhower administration set up in January 1955. On April 22, 1955, Malki was assassinated while attending a soccer match by a member of the pro-US and right-wing Syrian Social National Party. An official investigation into the assassination found that the US was a major supporter and financier of the SSNP. It was well known that the SSNP had close ties with the CIA.”
“Working closely with its counterparts in British intelligence, the CIA and the British SIS developed Operation Straggle. In what appears today to be an early model of the present US-orchestrated “rebel” insurgency [in Syria]:”
“The original CIA-SIS plan appears to have called for Turkey to stage border incidents, British operatives to stir up the desert tribes, and American agents to mobilize SSNP guerillas, all of which would trigger a pro-Western coup by “indigenous anticommunist elements within Syria” supported, if necessary, by Iraqi troops. What Washington perceived as a deteriorating situation in Damascus made Straggle more and more attractive. [Little, p. 66]“
“The coup planned by the CIA was scheduled to take place on October 25, 1956. The CIA had provided $150,000 to the conspirators.”
Dr. Noam Chomsky notes (and here ): “The US at that time had three major crisis areas, according to the internal discussions, all in Islamic countries, all in oil-producers. One was Indonesia, one was Algeria, one was basically Iraq — the Iraqi region. Those were the three crises. It was made explicit in the internal meetings. In fact, Eisenhower, vociferously, according to the minutes, insisted on this: there was no Russian involvement. The enemy is indigenous nationalism. In fact, that’s true throughout the Cold War, but very explicit then, and Eisenhower did discuss it with his staff…”
The USA’s sponsorship of terrorism in Syria and everywhere in the Mid East and globally was maintained with complete continuity after the fall of the Soviet Union, exhibiting how much that empty pretext was worth. Pretexts will always be updated to pacify an uninformed public into accepting elite marauding and plunder, and even get them to naively cheer it on.
Afghanistan

Starting in the late 1970s, the USA starting supporting Islamic terrorists to carry out atrocities in Afghanistan to induce the Soviet Union to intervene to protect its client government. Obama’s mentor Zbigniew Brzezinski planned to give Russia “its Vietnam”, meaning the US wanted to start another war that would pile up millions of corpses and be costly for Russia (which Obama is trying today in Ukraine). After three official requests from the Afghan government, the Soviet Union answered and invaded, and thus the US succeeded in its goal as some two million corpses were piled up in the brutal war.
The problem in Afghanistan was that US elites wanted to control its resources and strategic space as part of their worldwide bid to direct profits into their pockets, but with the Soviet-backed government in place, they couldn’t.
Here is one of Obama’s mentors, Zbigniew Brzezinski, at the time, egging on some of the Holy Warriors who would then enter Afghanistan, telling them God is on their side, etc.:
The above Brzezinski clip always reminded me of something, and I finally realized what it was (see 2:14 to 2:30):

( Tolkien was a brilliant professor who experienced unspeakable tragedy in war and expressed it in his masterworks.)

The Holy Warriors, of course, were not clueless idiots. Just because Brzezinski seemed to think they were pliant beings that he was molding for his own benefit doesn’t mean they were. They were playing him every bit as much as he was playing them. They have their own volition, and they put it into practice: they accepted the US sponsorship for their terror campaign, then, when they were strong enough, attacked the US for the same reasons they attacked the Soviet Union and the same reasons Latin Americans used to attack US targets: for interfering in their affairs, slaughtering mountains of their people, etc. Yeah; Brzezinski giving the Holy Warriors some sleazy terror sermons, which they probably laughed about when he left, didn’t make them forget all that…
In depth details and sources on the USA’s sponsorship of the Mujahideen, Holy Warriors, here .
Some key details, discussed at the above link, for understanding that the USA does have good intentions in its actions in the world are:
1) Before the US helped turn Afghanistan into an Islamic fundamentalist extremist state, women there, under the Soviet-backed government, actually had rights: they were in schools and universities and wearing whatever they wanted:
The USA put a prompt end to that, resulting in the new dress code required by the US-backed regime:
Not the main intention of the US elites (their intention is to get richer) but openly considered an absolutely unimportant, piddling matter, concerning mere peons, by the supreme beings in Washington.
2) The USA produced violent jihadist literature and distributed it to children in Afghanistan to foster more violent jihad.
“The US, through USAID and the University of Nebraska, spends millions of dollars developing and printing textbooks for Afghan schoolchildren. The textbooks are “filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings…”
Yugoslavia (Bosnia/Kosovo)

In the entire year before the USA’s illegal, international terror-bombing of Yugoslavia , US-backed jihadist extremists, including Al Qaeda members, committed the vast majority of the crimes in the region. Their stated goal was to create a pretext for the US/NATO bombing.
Bill Clinton literally helicoptered Al Qaeda members into Bosnia as part of his international terrorist campaign against Yugoslavia. See here .
At the end of 2013, 49% of Bosnia and Herzegovina considered the USA to be the greatest threat to world peace, with no other country ranking anywhere close ( Win/Gallup ). Russia got 2% of the vote, about 25 times fewer votes than the US.
Books that cover the topic here , here , here , here .

Libya:

While supporting Mubarak of Egypt and many other such dictators for decades, US elites also spend decades trying to murder certain leaders, like Nelson Mandela’s ally Muammar Qaddafi. At first, US terrorists only succeeded in murdering Qaddafi’s daughter and lots of other people, but they finally got him by teaming up with Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, who, acting as mercenaries for the USA, lynched him, to Hillary Clinton’s uncontrollable delight .
See Destroying Libya and World Order: The Three Decade Campaign to Terminate the Qaddafi Revolution , by Dr. Francis Boyle, JD, magna cum laude, Harvard Law School; PhD, Political Science, Harvard University.
Back to Syria

Bush’s gang continued the barbarian USA’s policy of international terrorism against Syria, as terrorist Wesley Clark noted when he revealed that Bush planned to overthrow seven Mid East countries, including Syria, and as Pulitzer winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh also noted in 2007, here .
Obama and his cadre of terrorist thugs, specifically and predominantly Hillary Clinton , simply continued and intensified Bush’s and the USA’s longstanding policy of international terrorism against Syria.
Obama doesn’t even pretend to be supporting “moderates” any more. Now he just openly aids the Islamic Front in Syria, among other jihadist groups. However, even Obama’s cover group, the FSA, was always a largely jihadist, terrorist group itself, carrying out atrocities such as corpse mutilation and massive bombings of election rallies .
Hersh, in the above 2007 article, also notes how US support for terrorist operations has, as a “by-product”, bolstered other extremist groups in the region.
Obama and regional Mid East allies also directly aid Al Qaeda and linked groups like ISIS in Syria, who, as Seymour Hersh’s US government sources have said , carried out, with US ally Turkey, the Ghoutta chemical attack in Syria. Obama doesn’t talk about that.
But he does request hundreds of million of dollars for these groups while Amnesty International and the UN condemn the USA for cutting off water to poor people in Detroit, which is consistent with the USA’s standing as the only country in the world that rejects nourishment as a human right. There’s money to be made from nourishment!
Why

Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused.

– Woodrow Wilson , unpublished paper, 1907

All of the above international terrorism carried out by US elites is precisely aligned with their stated profit and investment interests. They, not us, control the weapon that is the state gang (the “armed forces”), and they use it exactly as president Wilson and countless other officials have directly stated: to force open and control global markets to secure profits. That their weapon, the state, is largely made of people , and that these people are constantly killed as a by-product of using the weapon, is meaningless – peons are expendable nothings; Walmart executives call them “peasants” in official documents – unless the rabble starts getting upset that so many of them are dying and thus it becomes too politically costly for the executives. This is why the USA often censors the images of its dead peons.

The word for running such operations is “empire”. Empire is extremely profitable for the elite beneficiaries and extremely costly for us, since we pay for it in cash, labor, and blood.

As Michael Parenti, PhD Political Science, Yale University, documents, “empire feeds off the republic.”

Robert Barsocchini is an American investigative journalist and writer for the film industry.
05 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By John Chuckman

In each case, there appears to be only one explanation consistent with known facts

I wrote previously of a second great mystery surrounding the disappearance over the Indian Ocean of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, and that second great mystery is the United States’ utter silence surrounding its disappearance, despite its being the very nation able to offer the best information from the world’s most sophisticated radars and spy satellites. There can be no question that the United States gathered data on that catastrophe because its military and intelligence surveillance is unblinking. The fact that we did not hear a word from America, and still do not, can only mean its government wants the event, like the airplane itself, to sink, in this case into public forgetfulness.
Now we have a second Malaysian Airliner destroyed (its national origin is presumably sheer coincidence), Flight MH17, this time at a location from which the wreckage was recoverable. The American press immediately jumped to the conclusion that a Russian high-altitude anti-aircraft missile called BUK was responsible, which surely reflected nothing more than suggestive whispers from American intelligence since no evidence was offered. The altitude of the plane before it was destroyed excluded other ground-based missiles.

But Russia had no possible motive for attacking the airliner, and, indeed, the unfortunate event has only served as fodder for a Western press eager to declare Russia a new threat to the world. The Russian-speakers of eastern Ukraine who broke away from that country’s new American-installed government simply do not have this missile in their arsenal, but Ukraine’s government definitely does. These basic facts demonstrate the inappropriateness of the American press’s early suggestions, but we know that in the disinformation business the first one out with even a remotely plausible story repeated loudly enough leaves a lasting impression, as witness the sad fact that polls show a sizeable proportion of Americans yet believe Saddam Hussein hid terrible weapons.

Despite the wreck’s physical accessibility, there were substantial delays getting investigators to it as Ukraine’s new government pressed attacks against its own eastern, Russian-speaking population. We cannot know, but the long delay may well have permitted sanitizing of the crash site. When able to access the site, experts found the flight recorders intact, but, to this writing, nothing from those recorders has been made public. I don’t recall another case of a major crash when at least some information from an intact flight recorder was not made public quickly. After all, the principle behind such data is to discover problems for civilian aviation, enabling others to avoid them. The data, under international civil aviation agreements, is not anyone’s private property, it is to be shared with all in a timely fashion.

But we have heard nothing except a promise that the investigation’s findings will eventually be made public. With such a suspicious delay, the possibility of tampering or destruction of data cannot be ruled out. And here, too, we have silence from the United States which would have the best supplementary data in the form of radar tracks and satellite images on a European event not far from Russia’s border, an area of intense interest to America. Why don’t they produce them? Moreover, despite repeated requests from Russia and others, Ukraine’s new government has released no data of its own, things we know it must have, such as tower-to-pilot recordings. Clearly, information is being deliberately suppressed, and when we hear in our press and from American-influenced governments about Russia’s underhandedness, it is only a loud diversion from that disturbing fundamental fact.

Do you see the television networks and newspapers in the United States calling for the immediate release of information? No, instead you see the suggestion, sometimes far more than a suggestion, that Russia is responsible for destroying the airliner, and this accusation is made with no evidence and without shame.
You might say we have a conspiracy of silence around an event of international importance. But why should that be so? Why is a country whose politicians regularly make speeches praising themselves about openness, democratic values, and fairness, found withholding critical information in two catastrophes of international importance?
In the first case over the Indian Ocean, it is almost certainly because the United States itself shot down the airliner, either mistakenly or deliberately as it may have been regarded as a potential threat to the secret base at Diego Garcia. Neither of these possibilities would be new experiences for America’s military which, over the years, has been involved in destroying at least half a dozen civilian airliners (see my essay with its footnotes, “The Second Mystery Around Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370” found at Chuckman’s Words on WordPress).

In the case of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, destroyed over Ukraine, I believe the United States is hiding the fact that the Ukrainian armed forces shot it down. Why would the United States do this? We know, there being a great deal of good information in the public record, that the United States has made a huge investment in Ukraine over the past few years trying to destabilize an elected government, one friendly to Russia, and it succeeded when that government fled from a coup. Imagine America’s embarrassment at the world’s seeing its new proxy government, its supposed champion of eastern democracy, first misdirecting a civilian airliner, Flight MH17 having inexplicably been sent off course over a war zone, and then shooting it down with a fighter. Russian data, released to the public, shows a Ukrainian fighter was near the airliner, and an early photo of the wreckage leaked to the world clearly shows a large fuselage panel from the pilot’s cabin riddled with holes as by heavy caliber ammunition from a fighter’s canon.

That embarrassment would come on top of a series of embarrassments America’s meddling in Ukraine’s affairs has produced: over the general revolt of Russian-speaking Ukrainians against a new government openly unfriendly to their interests; over revelations that Nazi-like groups – and Ukraine has a number of them, notably the Right Sector – committed the sniping murders of hundreds of civilians from rooftops in Kiev in support of the original coup; over Ukraine’s pathetic military failures on the ground with its soldiers displaying poor morale and worse leadership; over the world’s seeing Ukraine bombing and rocketing its own citizens; over the failure of various cheap ruses such as using repainted surplus Hungarian T-72 tanks, fit only for scrap, to pass as invading Russian armor (while this ruse failed, it did for a while take in a lot of Western journalists, surely a reflection on the depth of their investigations); and, perhaps, most grating of all for the engineers of the whole murderous and destructive scheme, some deft statesmanship by Vladimir Putin snatched from their grasp important expected fruits of the enterprise.

In a number of instances the Ukrainian armed forces have demonstrated embarrassing incompetence, and reading between the lines of screaming propaganda and demands for this or that, appear actually to be losing the highly unequal fight. They do not fight with motivation for their new American-installed government, with its neo-Nazi auxiliaries, and against fellow citizens. I believe the shooting down of the airliner was one of many blunders, and the recordings from the black boxes, if revealed without doctoring, would unambiguously prove this to be the case. As would Ukraine’s flight controller recordings, still held secret.

The United States, despite embarrassments and setbacks, has worked to make other gains out of its dirty work in Ukraine. It has been able to use almost comical assertions of a new Russian threat to strengthen its hold on NATO, an organization which has been obsolete for years and which serves only to thinly disguise American hegemony in Europe. Even now it pushes members for increased military spending to a minimum of two percent of GDP as the admission price for playing with the big boys in NATO. For America, the great appeal of increased expenditures would be a further subsidizing of its costly presence in Europe. NATO is held together by America’s financial, economic, and diplomatic power, still great despite that country’s having entered its relative decline in world influence. It can still grant rich favors and contracts or it can work away quietly against the interests of a dissenting state. A Europe with the many economic problems we see today is naturally fearful of summoning America’s wrath
Altogether, it’s a vast and shameful enterprise the United States has launched, and while most of its unpleasant consequences have yet to be seen, it has certainly brought war and grief to a previously peaceful region. But the stark truth is that, in recent years, bringing war and grief seems to be a core mission of American foreign affairs.

John Chuckman is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He has many interests and is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. John regards it as a badge of honor to have left the United States as a poor young man from the South Side of Chicago when the country embarked on the pointless murder of something like 3 million Vietnamese in their own land because they happened to embrace the wrong economic loyalties. He lives in Canada, which he is fond of calling “the peaceable kingdom.” He has been translated into at least ten languages and is regularly translated into Italian and Spanish. Several of his essays have been published in book collections, including two college texts. His first book was published, The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power, by Constable and Robinson, Lo

05 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Ghali Hassan

It is skinning to watch U.S. President Barack Obama calling on Iraq to form an “inclusive” government. Iraq communities lived side by side for centuries and in some cases for millennia. The U.S. planted the seed of division and violence in Iraq. During the Occupation, the U.S. has carried out ethnic and religious cleansing in major Iraqi cities, particularly around the capital Baghdad, to encourage division and animosity among the Iraqi population. It is the U.S. that continues to fuel the violence to this day, financing, training, and arming terrorists and extremist groups. The aim is to use proxy forces to create chaos, control the region, and, at the same time, demonise Muslims and Islam.

Prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion and murderous occupation of Iraq, terrorism and extremism had zero presence in Iraq. The rise of terrorism in the region is the direct result of the U.S. war of aggression and military presence in Iraq. We all know the U.S. criminal legacy in Iraq. The genocidal invasion and preceding sanctions – without any justification – killed three million innocent Iraqis, including more than half a million children, and totally destroyed a relatively advanced developing country whose people were largely prosperous. Close to five million Iraqis were displaced by the invasion out of a population of 31 million, and five million Iraqi children became orphans. Women suffered the greatest losses in education, professions, child care, nutrition, and safety. More than one-fourth of Iraq’s population died, became disabled, or fled the country as refugees. As a result of U.S. terror on Iraq since the early 1990s, Iraqi culture and a generation of Iraqis have been destroyed in a premeditated barbaric violence. In addition, the U.S. brought into Iraq a culture of corruption and decadence unheard of in the long history of Iraq. Despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity, sadly, not a single individual responsible for the lies and war that destroyed Iraq and killed millions of Iraqis has been held accountable or indicted for mass murder and societal destruction. As someone who has followed events in Iraq very closely for years, I do not buy into Western “moral responsibility” and “humanitarian aid”. It is outright criminal and barbaric what Western governments, led by the U.S., have inflicted on the people of Iraq. It is morally abhorrent to support any Western leader who uses the word “humanitarian” to serve Western imperialist interests.

Iraqi property, including billions of dollars in gold reserves and priceless treasures of Iraq antiquity, were looted and taken out of the country. On Israel’s behalf, the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi army and police, rending Iraq defenceless and ruled by U.S.-created militias. Iraq’s military hardware, including Iraq’s war planes, were shipped to Israel and Jordan during the U.S. occupation. The real aim of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq was the destruction of Iraq on behalf of the fascist state of Israel. After withdrawing its troops from Iraq, the U.S. left the Iraqi army without a single fixed-wing war plane and most of Iraq’s weapons are AK47 rifles and light arms bought from the Ukraine. To counter the invasion and terror attacks by ISIS (“Islamic State” [IS] in Iraq and Syria, ISIS) mercenary forces, Iraq has made an urgent request of Russia for the supply of defensive weapons.

In 2011, the U.S. failed to establish a foothold in Iraq after the Iraqi Parliament rejected the U.S. demand to enter into the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq that will turn Iraq into a permanent colonial dictatorship. The U.S. reluctantly withdrew from Iraq, accusing the government of Nuri al-Maliki of being not sufficiently pro-American because of al-Maliki’s policy of rapprochement between Iraq and Iran. After the withdrawal of U.S. troops, the U.S. resorted to fomenting violence and division among Iraqis. In addition to the political chaos that was created by the U.S. and its allies, the Iraqi army remains weak and unable to defend Iraq. A failed state, engulfed in violence, is the condition that the U.S. has created in order to control Iraq and to serve U.S.-Israel interests. The U.S. capitalised on the chaos it has created by backing and arming terrorist groups, including ISIS terrorists, in order to replace al-Maliki with a more pro-American stooge.

ISIS is not an “Islamic ‘Sunni’” force, as Western politicians and the corporate media falsely portray it. ISIS is not just a by-product of U.S.-Israel terror and Zionist policies in the region; ISIS is a U.S.-Israel product, a proxy terrorist force of foreign mercenaries. In fact, the name “Islamic State” (IS) is the brainchild of the U.S. CIA to blacken and denigrate the name of Islam. Since 2011, the U.S., Israel, France, UK, and Turkey have openly financed, trained, and armed ISIS terrorists against the Syrian people and the Syrian Government. Indeed, the U.S. has been open and has acknowledged its complicity in the ongoing terror in the Middle East. In June 2014, the Obama administration asked Congress to authorize $500 million to provide U.S. military training and arms to “moderate Syrian rebels”, including ISIS, or IS. Across the Atlantic, the British Government of David Cameron drew up plans (drawn by the then most senior UK military officer, General Sir David Richards) to train and equip a 100,000-strong ISIS army in an effort to topple the legitimate Syrian government. It is evident that the U.S. and Britain are directly involved in the terrorist attacks not only on Syria but also on Iraq. In addition, Western governments, led by the U.S., Britain, and France have provided ISIS with unhindered access to social media to spread its violent propaganda.

Furthermore, according to the German weekly Der Spiegel , ISIS “rebels” are trained in secret bases in Jordan and Turkey by U.S. and Israeli Special Forces. They are financed by the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar. Moreover, in May 2013 the European Union (EU) decided to lift previously imposed sanctions on the import of Syrian oil, not because the EU was concerned about the plight of the Syrian people, but because the EU intended to allow the flow of oil from areas (North-East Syria) controlled by ISIS terrorists and other anti-government “rebels” (“EU decision to lift Syrian oil sanctions to boost Jihadist groups”, The Guardian , 19/05/2013).

Furthermore, U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R) of Kentucky told NBC News’s ‘Meet the Press ‘ that the U.S. government has been funding ISIS allies and supporting the terrorist group in Syria. “They’re emboldened because we’ve been supporting them … It could be Assad [who could have] wiped these people out months ago … I personally believe that this group would not be in Iraq and would not be as powerful had we not been supplying their allies in the war”, he said. President Vladimir Putin of Russia was a rare exception when he categorically opposed any Western military attack on Syria to topple the Syrian Government.

A document released by Edward Snowden, the former NSA whistle-blower, revealed that ISIS was formed by the U.S., UK, and Israeli intelligence apparatus as part of a strategy known as the “hornet’s nest”, in order to attract fundamentalists from around the world to Syria. By turning against ISIS, the U.S. and its allies aimed at invading Syria, as recently announced by General Martin E. Dempsey, U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Dempsey said: “This is an organization that has an apocalyptic end-of-days strategic vision that will eventually have to be defeated.” He made it clear that defeating ISIS terrorist can only be possible by invading Syria. “Can they be defeated without addressing that part of the organization that resides in Syria? The answer is no,” Dempsey said. In other words, to defeat ISIS, the U.S. has to invade Syria, repeating the same U.S. aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq.

The ongoing Western arms deliveries to the Kurds in northern Iraq – with the deliberate intention to bypass the central government in Baghdad and without explicit UN resolution – is designed to encourage division and ultimately secession. The Kurds, the faction led by U.S. stooge , Ma’asoud al-Barzani, are not fighting ISIS; they are in cohort with ISIS, the U.S., and Israel. In fact, ISIS terror allows al-Barzani to enlarge the area he controls, including the northern oil fields.

If President Obama is serious about defeating ISIS, he had an opportunity before they crossed from Syria into Iraq. To the contrary, the U.S. and its allies provided heavy weapons and facilitated the ISIS march into Iraq. The U.S. warned Syria against attacking the terrorists. It was the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq by U.S. proxy terrorists.

It is laughable that ISIS alone, which is waging war on two states (Syria and Iraq), has the military capability to march into Iraq in broad daylight without the training and heavy weapons provided by the U.S. and U.S. allies. The U.S.-Israel strategy is to foment fratricidal violence among Muslims, and at the same time demonise Islam and Muslims in the West by blaming the violence on Muslims themselves. Hence, the violence in Syria and Iraq is U.S.-Israel fomented political violence and is not “sectarian” violence. Sectarianism is a myth created and nurtured by Zionists and U.S. imperialists.

It is the same U.S. strategy that was used in Afghanistan in the 1980s against the former Soviet Union troops there. Of course, terrorist forces transform and change their names. For example, al-Qaeda has been transformed into ISIL, ISIS and now IS. Hence, IS or ISIS is the new al-Qaeda, the pretext to justify aggression abroad and repressive measures at home. In a word, ISIS is the creation of the U.S. and it allies, Israel and Turkey in particular. ISIS main functions are: firstly, to be used as a tool to blackmail and intimidate the Iraqi and Syrian governments – indeed, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki was forced to resign; secondly, ISIS criminal nature is used to demonise Islam and dehumanise Muslims in the West and around the world. ISIS is serving U.S.-Israel Zionist interests.

The U.S. and its allies had the opportunity to stop ISIS before they moved from Syria to Iraq. In fact, the U.S. facilitated ISIS invasion of Iraq. President Obama has warned and threatened the Syrian government if Syrian forces attacked ISIS. It is not a coincidence that ISIS declared the end of the Sykes-Picot agreement , which divided the region between British and French interests at the end of World War I at the same time Israeli fascist PM Benjamin Netanyahu annexed Palestinian land in the Jordan valley. Furthermore, ISIS mercenary forces march into Iraq was timed with Israel’s terror attacks on the Palestinian people in Gaza and aimed at diverting public attention away from Israel’s war crimes.

Despite concerted efforts by Western politicians and the media to dissociate these terrorist forces from the West, overwhelming evidence shows these terrorist forces that are terrorising the people of Syria and the people of Iraq are Western-sponsored terrorist forces. They are disguised as “Islamic militants”, but have nothing to do with Islam and their criminal actions are anti-Islamic. They are violating all Islamic principles and Islamic laws. It is misleading – as some despicable journalists have alleged – to even hint that Muslims have failed to speak out against ISIS. Muslims around the world have condemned ISIS terrorists in the strongest terms.

ISIS violent acts have been exploited by Western media to spread anti-Muslim propaganda and justify the next all-out war on Muslim nations, like Syria and Iraq. As Tony Cartalucci writes in New Eastern Outlook : “The alleged killing of the journalist James W. Foley has created outrage amongst public opinion. It generated an illusion of confrontation between ISIS and the U.S., and further vilifies ISIS. The media’s narrative is that ISIS stands apart from other terrorist groups in Syria, and with that narrative, the West is simultaneously bolstering ISIS in Syria under the guise of arming and aiding ‘moderates’, while it conducts token airstrikes on ISIS in Iraq”. The U.S. had several opportunities to save the lives of Foley and Steve Sotloff, but it refused because it doesn’t serve U.S. interests. Hence, the U.S. is culpable in their deaths. Foley and Sotloff’s killings (although videos of their executions show they were staged) showed us the criminal nature of Western-sponsored terrorists.

Here in Australia, the hypocrisy of the neo-fascist Liberal government has reached a new level of moral bankruptcy. Prime Minister Tony Abbot is forming a nuclear alliance with Asia’s two most openly fascist leaders, India’s Narendra Modi and Japan’s Shinzo Abe. A militarily stronger and offensive Australia is good for the U.S. The Australian political and military establishments are bragging about joining President Obama’s “humanitarian war” on Iraq and possibly Syria. On 28 August 2014, Tony Abbotts unashamedly told Parliament, “that no one in this Parliament I am sure, no human being anywhere, would wish to stand by and watch the preventable slaughter of innocent people.” We do know that Mr Abbott and his neo-fascist Liberals gang had just stood by and watched the slaughter (genocide) of innocent Palestinian women and children by the Israeli fascist regime. Keeping with Australian Anglo-Saxon traditions, Australia remains the unconditional supporter of the Israeli fascist regime, even when it massacred innocent Palestinian women and children in broad daylight.

Furthermore, since 2011, Australia has been at the forefront, supporting the anti-Syrian government “rebels”, including ISIS, in their terror against the Syrian people. Syrian diplomats in Canberra were expelled and the government of Syria has been accused of committing war crimes despite overwhelming evidence that ISIS continue to commit heinous war crimes.

Just as ISIS forces began attacking Iraq, the Australian neo-fascist Liberal government of Tony Abbott began a campaign of vilifying and demonising Muslim Australians. The racist campaign is designed as a “desperate diversion” to divert the Australian public from serious economic issues and from rampant government corruption and incompetency to govern the country. The government fabricated a “threat to Australia’s security”, allegedly posed by Muslim Australians who travel to the Middle East, to justify new draconian laws targeting the Australian Muslim Community and, in the process, turning Australia into a fascist police state. Muslim and Arab Australians who travel to the Middle East to visit their relatives and friends will be labelled “terrorists” and accused of endangering “Australian security”. They risk prosecution and even jail if they return to Australia.

Indeed, several innocent Muslim Australians have been detained at Australian airports in the past few months and prevented from leaving the country because of their Middle Eastern backgrounds.

Yet the Abbott government and ASIO have nothing to say about hundreds of Australian Jews (“dual citizens”) who join the Israeli army and participate in Israel’s massacres of innocent Palestinian women and children. They return to Australia as heroes, wandering the streets of Melbourne and Sydney with Palestinian blood on their hands. They do not risk arrest for war crimes or being called terrorists. The Australian media and Australia’s despicable journalists and commentators treat these war criminals with deafening silence.

In addition to the 43 laws that are already in place, the new repressive anti-Muslim laws have absolutely nothing to do with national security. Rather, the new laws (like the old ones) are aimed at criminalising Muslim and Arab Australians, restricting the right of all Australians to live in a free country and intensifying police state measures. As George Williams, a professor of law at the University of New South Wales in Sydney observed, that the new anti–terrorism laws “would extend the powers of government at the expense of [Australian] citizens is unexpected and quite shocking.” Professor George added that, “allowing innocent Australians to be detained in secret and subjected to coercive questioning by ASIO [the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation] is more suited to dictatorship regimes” ( SMH , 11 August 2014). Moreover, the Abbott government is introducing legislation to stop welfare payments for Muslim Australians who the government and its security agencies deemed pose a ”serious threat to Australia’s national security”. It is important to remember that, these draconian laws apply to Muslim Australians only – the label of “terrorist” is only applied to Muslim and Arab Australians. White Australians (Christians or Jews) who commit acts of terrorism are labelled as “psychopaths” or “loners”, not terrorists. In other words, only Muslim Australians are singled out.

Echoing the war criminal George W. Bush’s racist and divisive call of “you are either with us or against us”, Tony Abbott is calling on Muslim Australians to join his fascist-Liberal “team Australia” or else. He is telling Muslim Australians, “You are all guilty until proven innocent”. On 21 August 2014, Mr Abbott, echoing another war criminal, Tony Blair, told an audience in Adelaide, “Extremism is the enemy, not Islam”. We all know that “extremism” is a catch-all word for all Muslims. According to Abbott’s sick mind, Muslim Australians who refuse to join Abbott’s “team” will be considered “extremists”. Taking his cue from war criminals like Tony Blair and Dick Cheney, one of Abbott’s advisors, former Australian army chief Peter Leahy – retired warmongers have become a fixture on Australian TV screens – was more frank when he said: “We will fight Islam for 100 years”. It is difficult to discern the reasons behind Australian fascist-Liberal hatred for Muslims and Islam. The Muslim Community is singled out by the neo-fascist Liberals and their supporters because it is a small and divided Community that lacks a power base in Australia or outside Australia. It is also easy to single out the Muslim Community because of years of demonization and vilification by politicians and the Australian racist media. The fears that Muslim Australians of Middle Eastern backgrounds could pose a threat in Australia are absurd and racist. It is a hysteria created by politicians and the media to justify repressive measures.

There has been no act of terrorism committed in Australia by Muslim Australians. People are targeted because of their Islamic/Arabic names and their religious beliefs. Innocent Muslim Australians are framed by ASIO and the police in so-called “Sting Operations”, prosecuted and imprisoned on fabricated charges for their opinions. The Australian Government has co-opted obscure academics, the so-called “counter-terrorism experts” (aka anti-Muslim bigots), to support its racist laws and anti-Muslim propaganda. Furthermore, to get some legitimacy to enact these laws, the Abbott Government undermined Muslim unity by bribing and coercing some of the despicable self-appointed “community leaders” to back the new laws. The laws and the language used by Tony Abbott and his neo-fascist Liberals aimed at spreading the plague of Islamophobia across the country.

ISIS is not an indigenous Islamic resistant movement; it is a U.S.-sponsored proxy terrorist force of foreign mercenaries. By creating and demonising ISIS, the West is demonising Muslims and Islam to justify a war of terror and to advance its imperialist-Zionist agenda, regardless of the loss of innocent human lives and the criminal tragedies it creates.

Only when the U.S. and its allies understand the principles of sovereignty and stop interfering violently in the affairs of other nations will they be able to claim to defend world peace. Only when the U.S. and its allies stop financing, training, and arming terrorists will they be able to claim to have defeated terrorism.

Ghali Hassan is an independent researcher and writer living in Australia.

08 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org