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By Joseph Kishore

US military airstrikes launched in Somalia over the weekend killed more than 150 people. The attack took place at what the US Pentagon yesterday said was an al-Shabaab training camp about 120 miles north of the country’s capital, Mogadishu.

The strikes mark a significant escalation of US operations in the Horn of Africa, a region that borders the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a critical oil passageway that links the Mediterranean and the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean.

The airstrikes, carried out on Saturday against the Al Qaeda-affiliated group that controls parts of northern Somalia, are the deadliest in Africa in years. Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook asserted without providing evidence that the targets were graduating from the Raso training camp and posed an “imminent threat” to the US and US-backed African military forces in Somalia.

The Pentagon also claimed that there were no civilian casualties, though it would categorize anyone at the location as by definition a terrorist or military target. Those killed, according to an official cited by the New York Times, were “standing outside in formation” when a combination of drones and manned airplanes destroyed the camp and killed almost everyone present.

The Pentagon said that it had been monitoring the camp for weeks prior to the strike.

The attack on the training camp follows a years-long campaign of drone strikes in the impoverished North African country targeting individual leaders of al-Shabaab. In December of last year, a drone strike assassinated what the US said was one of the organization’s leaders, Abdirahman Sandhere, and two other individuals.

The strikes against the training camp indicate that the Obama administration is expanding its undeclared war in the Horn of Africa, aimed at bolstering the position of the corrupt regime of President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, based in Mogadishu. In recent months, al-Shabaab has carried out a series of attacks on Somali forces and those of a coalition of African countries that is backing the government with the support of the US.

Al-Shabaab has also carried out a number of terrorist attacks, including a January 22 suicide bombing and shootout at a restaurant in Mogadishu that killed 25 people.

While implemented under the framework of the “war on terror,” the main interests of the US in the region lie in Somalia’s geostrategic location. The country’s northern coast lies along the Gulf of Aden, which connects the Red Sea to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. On the other side of the Gulf of Aden lies Yemen, where the US has backed a brutal Saudi-led bombing campaign that began in the spring of last year.

Just to the northwest of Somalia lies Djibouti, where the US has its only permanent military base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier, the center of its drone operations throughout the continent. The water pathway between Djibouti and Yemen, known as the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, is listed by the US Energy Information Association as one of the major global oil transit choke points. Some 3.8 billion barrels of oil and petroleum products were transported through the strait in 2013, including much of the oil exported from the Persian Gulf to Europe and the US.

More broadly, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait is a key access point to the Indian Ocean, which now includes the most significant global trade routes, connecting Europe and the Middle East to Asia, including China.

In addition to the US, Britain has also taken a recent interest in the region, announcing last October that it was sending hundreds of troops to Somalia and South Sudan.

In their determination to retain control of the Horn of Africa, the major imperialist powers have stoked a series of civil wars and internal conflicts between different tribal and national factions. The population has been left to destitute poverty. Somalia, which has a population of more than 10 million people, has a gross domestic product per capita of just $112 and a life expectancy of 52 years. Some 1.1 million people are internally displaced.

Al-Shabaab itself arose out of factions of the Islamic Courts Union, which gained control of Mogadishu in 2006 after 15 years of civil warfare, before being toppled at the end of the year by an Ethiopian invasion orchestrated by the US. In 2007, the US backed the formation of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM), comprised of about 22,000 troops from Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Ethiopia and Djibouti.

After al-Shabaab launched an offensive against Mogadishu in 2010, AMISOM forces, again backed by the US, responded with a campaign that eventually drove the organization out of the capital and from the southern portions of the country. This was followed by regular drone strikes targeting the organization’s leaders.

The operations in Somalia are part of a broader escalation throughout northern Africa, overseen by the US military’s Africa Command and aimed largely at countering the growing influence of China on the continent. In recent months, the Obama administration has announced the deployment of troops and Special Operations forces to both Cameroon and Mali, and the US and European powers are also preparing for a major military escalation in Libya.

08 March, 2016
WSWS.org

By Eric Zuesse

On Friday, March 4th, the leading opposition newspaper in Turkey, Zaman, was taken over by the Government; and on March 5th, one of the other opposition newspapers, Cumhuriyet, reported that Zaman’s separate news-service to other news-media, Cihan News Agency, has now also been disabled on the Internet. (Anyone who goes to the site obtains an error-message.)

The Turkish Government is trying to prevent the Turkish public from knowing that Turkey has been serving as the transit-route by which the U.S. government and its allied Arab oil monarchies (especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar) have been supplying foreign jihadists and weapons (largely U.S. but paid for with Saudi funds) into Syria to oust Bashar al-Assad from power.

Zaman’s editor has been imprisoned for publishing such prohibited truths, but somehow his newspaper continued reporting on a court case in which Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan is accused of breaking Turkish law by aiding terrorists. That continued resistance by the newspaper might be a reason why the Turkish Government has now (as of Friday March 4th) shut it down.

On March 1st, Cumhuriyet, headlined, “Former Justice Minister of Turkey: Erdogan Will Stand Trial,” and reported that, “Former Justice Minister Hikmet Sami Turk, said that Erdogan’s actions ‘do not comply with the decision of the Constitutional Court.’ He criticized [Erdogan] by saying … ‘One day this matter must be settled by the judiciary’.”

Russian Television had first reported on the case, in English, back on 26 November 2015, headlining, “Turkish newspaper editor in court for ‘espionage’ after revealing weapon convoy to Syrian militants.” This news-report said that:

In May, the outlet [Cumhuriyet] published photos of weapons it said were then transferred to Syria by Turkey’s intelligence agency. … The articles, published on Cumhuriyet’s front page in May, claimed that Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization (MIT) is smuggling weapons in trucks into Syria and was caught doing so twice in 2014. The trucks were allegedly stopped and searched by police, with photos and videos of their contents obtained by Cumhuriyet.
According to the paper, the trucks were carrying six steel containers, with 1,000 artillery shells, 50,000 machine gun rounds, 30,000 heavy machine gun rounds and 1,000 mortar shells. The arms were reportedly delivered to extremist groups fighting against the Syrian government of President Bashar Assad, whom Ankara wants ousted from power.

The Erdogan government alleged the weapons were “aid to Syrian ethnic Turkmen tribespeople and labeled their interception by local police an act of ‘treason’ and ‘espionage’.”

Turkey is a NATO member, and the famous investigative reporter Seymour Hersh had revealed in the 6 April 2014 London Review of Books, that on 20 June 2013 — just a few months prior to the sarin gas attack that Obama blamed on Assad and used as his excuse to invade Syria — the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency reported that America’s allies in overthrowing Bashar al-Assad were engaged in “the most advanced sarin plot since al-Qaida’s pre-9/11 effort,” but the U.S. Director of National Intelligence denied that it was true. One U.S. ally there was Al Qaeda in Syria, known in Syria as Al Nusra, (Nusra and Erdogan wanted this gas-attack to provide the excuse that Obama had set as his “red line” to overthrow Assad — a chemical-weapons attack in Syria.) However, Hersh reported, “Last May, more than ten members of the al-Nusra Front were arrested in southern Turkey with what local police told the press were two kilograms of sarin.” All of that had occurred prior to the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack.

Hersh went on:

The officer ultimately responsible for the planning and execution of the attack [U.S. bombing of Syria] was General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the joint chiefs. From the beginning of the crisis, the former intelligence official said, the joint chiefs had been sceptical of the administration’s argument that it had the facts to back up its belief in Assad’s guilt. They pressed the DIA and other agencies for more substantial evidence. ‘There was no way they thought Syria would use nerve gas at that stage, because Assad was winning the war,’ the former intelligence official said. Dempsey had irritated many in the Obama administration by repeatedly warning Congress over the summer of the danger of American military involvement in Syria.

Hersh subsequently reported that, rather than go ahead with an operation that the Joint Chiefs considered fraudulent, they sabotaged Obama’s policy. On 2 January 2016, Hersh headlined in the London Review of Books, “Military to Military,” and he explained how and why they had done this:

The Joint Chiefs felt that a direct challenge to Obama’s policy would have ‘had a zero chance of success.’ So in the autumn of 2013 they decided to take steps against the extremists without going through political channels, by providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army and used against the common enemy, Jabhat al-Nusra and Islamic State. … General Dempsey and his colleagues on the Joint Chiefs of Staff kept their dissent out of bureaucratic channels, and survived in office. General Michael Flynn did not. ‘Flynn incurred the wrath of the White House by insisting on telling the truth about Syria,’ said Patrick Lang, a retired army colonel who served for nearly a decade as the chief Middle East civilian intelligence officer for the DIA. ‘He thought truth was the best thing and they shoved him out. He wouldn’t shut up.’

Obama couldn’t be swayed that the enemy were Al Qaeda and other jihadists instead of Assad — that overthrowing him was his top priority. However, Hersh said in his 6 April 2014 article, that Obama had to backtrack at the last moment anyway, because British intelligence reported to David Cameron that the sarin used in the attack didn’t come from Syria — that it had been imported; this implied that it was a set-up job in order to ‘justify’ invading. Cameron didn’t want to be just another Tony Blair. Obama couldn’t get his necessary-for-appearances’-sake public cover for an invasion, Britain, as his predecessor had done regarding Iraq. Hersh went on, in that 2014 article:

Obama’s move for congressional approval quickly became a dead end. ‘Congress was not going to let this go by,’ the former intelligence official said. ‘Congress made it known that, unlike the authorisation for the Iraq war, there would be substantive hearings.’ At this point, there was a sense of desperation in the White House, the former intelligence official said.

Obama, in other words, was now trapped. He couldn’t fire all of his Joint Chiefs — at least not right away; it would be embarrassing, how could he explain it? And the Republicans were eager to expose his Administration’s disarray on the matter. So: the story was passed around that Secretary of State John Kerry got Russia to get Assad to eliminate his sarin stocks. Russia’s leader Vladimir Putin was happy to help Obama avoid invading his Syrian ally. That was how the ‘news’ organizations reported the backtrack — as a rare instance of U.S.-Russian cooperation: good news for everybody. But for Obama, it was actually the way out of a desperately embarrassing situation. And he never gave up his goal of switching Syria from the secular Assad to a failed state whose crucial oil-pipeline routes would be in ‘friendly’ (to Saudi Arabia and Qatar) jihadist Sunni-ruled areas of Syria, so that ‘our’ Arab ‘allies’ (the jihadist-financiing nations, as even Kerry’s predecessor Hillary Clinton had known them to be) can grab the world’s largest energy-market, Europe, away from Russia.

Hersh, in his 2014 article, continued:

The full extent of US co-operation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar in assisting the rebel opposition in Syria has yet to come to light. The Obama administration has never publicly admitted to its role in creating what the CIA calls a ‘rat line’, a back channel highway into Syria. The rat line, authorised in early 2012, was used to funnel weapons and ammunition from Libya via southern Turkey and across the Syrian border to the opposition. Many of those in Syria who ultimately received the weapons were jihadists, some of them affiliated with al-Qaida. (The DNI spokesperson said: ‘The idea that the United States was providing weapons from Libya to anyone is false.’)

He closed:

Barring a major change in policy by Obama, Turkey’s meddling in the Syrian civil war is likely to go on. ‘I asked my colleagues if there was any way to stop Erdogan’s continued support for the rebels, especially now that it’s going so wrong,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The answer was: “We’re screwed.” We could go public if it was somebody other than Erdogan, but Turkey is a special case. They’re a Nato ally.’

There is simply too much evidence proving that Erdogan is supporting ISIS and other terrorist groups in Syria. This is the reality of NATO: conquering Russia, first by switching its allies (such as Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc.), is the assignment, regardless of the public’s safety. Even if the U.S. weren’t backing jihadists directly (which we are), we’re backing them by having jihadist governments such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia and Qatar as allies — instead of as enemies. ‘Our’ oil companies and mega-banks are in bed with them, and their top stockholders and executives, and their lobbyists, control the people who control the U.S. Government. The U.S. Constitution’s “We, the People …” has become only those “People.” The rest are now just for extras in crowd-scenes, at political campaign events — and their mass-mind-control is done by their media, ‘our’ ‘free press’ (who don’t report this reality), in ‘our’ ‘democracy’.

Erdogan is profoundly angry at the unsteady support he has been receiving from the U.S. government in their joint efforts to eliminate Bashar al-Assad. However, apparently, Obama doesn’t feel that the U.S. is yet ready for a nuclear war to be sparked between NATO and Russia — Obama thinks that doing it now would be premature. ‘Color revolutions’ and ‘Arab Spring’ and ‘Maidan demonstrations’, and other populist covers for coups (taking advantage of the local political opposition, which exists in any country), are a far safer way to gradually strip Russia of its allies and turn them into yet-more enemies of Russia — and, only then, can the rip-cord finally be pulled, and Russia be forced to either submit or else die (even if the rest of the world might die also). The U.S. has been doing this boil-the-frog-slowly routine ever since U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush laid the foundation for it in 1990.

As John Kerry recently said, when responding to aid workers at a donor conference for anti-Assad forces, “What do you want me to do? Go to war with Russia? Is that what you want?” Clearly, Erdogan is lots more eager for that than Obama is. Perhaps Erdogan thinks that Putin would just back down. American Presidents, however, aren’t so desperate that they feel they need to do it during their own Administration; they can afford to wait until the time is right, even if the plaudits will then go to some future President. Their paymasters will be duly appreciative of the contributions that each one of them has made toward the final ‘U.S.’ victory. (Victory for the paymasters, of course.)

So, the American government’s charade goes on. But already an MIT analysis — the Lloyd-Postal report — on the sarin attack that occurred 21 August 2013, stated unequivocally that the Obama Administration was lying through its teeth about the matter. They provided excruciating detail showing why “the US Government’s interpretation of the technical intelligence it gathered prior to and after the August 21 attack CANNOT POSSIBLY BE CORRECT.” (That’s a tactful, yet passionate, way of saying: “Obama and his Administration were trying to lie this country into invading Syria.”) Yet, Western news-media still simply ignore the evidence (they can do that in this dictatorship), and report that Assad’s forces were behind the sarin attack. It’s still the official reason why we’re at war against Assad. Was even George W. Bush worse than this?

Seymour Hersh had tried to get his news-reports on these matters published by what had been his regular publisher, the New Yorker, which turned them down; and he tried other U.S. outlets as well, but wasn’t successful in finding any that would pay his regular charges — and he had already spent much in order to research these matters. Finally, he obtained a suitable outlet, in the LRB. This is why his recent reports are being published abroad.

Anyone who wishes to know more about what motivates the U.S. government regarding Syria should read the astoundingly brilliant article by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., published on an obscure environmental website, February 25th, “Syria: Another Pipeline War.” He tells so much suppressed history there, it’s flabbergasting to see it all brought together into one flowing historical narrative — and my checking of the few sources that I hadn’t previously known of indicates that his standards for quality-of-evidence that he builds his narrative on are as rigorous and high as mine are — which is rare. I very much respect that. Every high school student should read his article in order to understand how corrupt the U.S. is at its highest levels. The article is a masterpiece of historical writing. But even a masterpiece can have a flaw: his article plays down the role that leading Democrats after Reagan have been playing in GHW Bush’s long war to conquer Russia. We’re still in the post-Reagan era, just as, between FDR and Reagan, we had been in the post-FDR era. Obama is as rabid a Russia-hater as practically anyone except John McCain would be. If a piece of historical writing is going to be partisan (as almost all are), at least this one is partisan on the less-unacceptable side.

I might write RFK Jr.’s name onto the Presidential line of my ballot in November. There’s someone with favorable name-recognition, who clearly has the integrity and depth, and knowledge, to deal with the rot that has overtaken America, if anyone does. Maybe he could win by acclamation, if he wouldn’t be knocked-off first. But if the idea of writing in his name goes around like wildfire in the weeks before the November 8th general election, then who knows what would happen? Certainly, if Hillary is on the ballot as the ‘Democratic’ nominee, I won’t vote for her, though I’m a lifelong Democrat. And I don’t want to be forced to vote for Trump (since he’s almost totally unpredictable — which still isn’t as bad as Hillary). (Besides: Hillary should be in prison for her destruction of crucial public records — State Department emails — to hide her crimes; and The Donald should be in prison for his fake Trump ‘University’ commercial fraud. But the corrupt Obama won’t allow any such prosecutions.) And there’s such beautiful irony here: “Trump: If Elected, I’ll Prosecute Hillary.” It’s so much like Ukraine! (Cast Hillary as Tymoshenko, and Trump as Yanukovych — and I’d vote then for Trump, so as to avoid the near-certainty of disaster.)

But no intelligent American can be justified in simply not voting for President. That would be outrageously irresponsible. I won’t ever do that. Every intelligent and caring person must vote for President — not leave that responsibility to others (which would be unpatriotic — plus wrong and callous — for any well-informed voter). The “anyone but ___” non-voters are mere fools and frauds. They simply don’t care enough about the country to do their most-basic civic duty, which is to become informed and then to vote for someone on that basis (though never as a ‘protest vote’ — the nation is too important for any mere ‘protest’ — but only as a real vote, for someone who has an authentic chance of winning the election). Any mere throw-away ‘vote’ is like a non-vote.

That article by Kennedy should be linked to by all of his supporters: it tells more about the man than any number of campaign speeches possibly could. It proves that he’s fit for the job, if anyone is. That’s one person who doesn’t need to campaign for the job. He’s an outsider whose knowledge and understanding of the subject is probably among the best there is, and whose heart is unquestionably in the right place — which would be a refreshing and radical change, a change that’s of a kind needed now more than ever in the U.S.

But anyway: RFK Jr.’s article is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the horrendous war in Syria. My article here is just a warm-up to it — and, I hope, a totally non-partisan one.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

06 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Richard Falk

For six years (2008-2014) I acted as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, and found myself routinely and personally attacked by the top UN diplomats representing the U.S. Government. Of course, I knew that America was in Israel’s corner no matter what the issue happened to be, whether complying with a near unanimous set findings by the World Court in the Hague or a report detailing Israeli crimes committed in the course of its periodic unlawful attacks on Gaza. Actually, the vitriol was greater from such prominent Democratic liberals as Susan Rice or Samantha Power than from the Republican neocon stalwart John Bolton who was the lamentable U.S. ambassador at the UN when I was appointed. I mention this personal background only because it seems so disappointingly emblematic of the failure of the Democratic Party to walk the walk of its rule of law and human rights talk.

From the moment Barack Obama stepped into the Oval Office he never tired of telling the country, indeed the world that we as a nation were different because we adhered to the rule of law and acted in accord with our values in foreign policy. But when it came down to concrete cases, ranging from drone warfare to the increasingly damaging special relationships with Israel and Saudi Arabia, the policies pursued seemed almost as congenial to a Kissinger realist as to an Obama visionary liberal. Of course, recently the Republicans from the comfort zone of oppositional irresponsibility chide the government led by a Democrat for its wimpy approach whether in response to Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine, China’s moves in the Pacific, and especially the emergence of ISIS. The Republicans out of office want more bombs and more wars in more places, and seem content to risk a slide into a Second Cold War however menacing such a reality would undoubtedly turn out to be.

How are we to explain this inability of Democrats to follow through on a foreign policy that is linked to law and ethics, as well as to show respect for the authority of the UN, World Court, Human Rights Council, and above all, the UN Charter? Such a question can be partly answered by noticing the gap between Obama the national campaigner and Obama the elected president expected to govern in the face of a hostile and reaction Congress and a corporatized media. In effect, it is the government bureaucracy and the special interest groups especially those linked to Wall Street, the Pentagon, guns, and Israel that call the shots in Washington, and it is expected that a politician once elected will forget the wellbeing of the American people as a whole on most issues, and especially with respect to controversial foreign policy positions, if he or she hopes to remain a credible public figure. The boundaries of credibility are monitored and disciplined by the mainstream media, as interpreted to reflect the interests of the militarized and intelligence sectors of the government and the economy.

Obama’s disappointing record is instructive because he initially made some gestures toward an innovative and independent approach. In early 2009 he went to Prague to announce a commitment to work toward a world without nuclear weapons, but there was no tangible steps taken toward implementation, and he kept quiet to the extent that his hopes were shattered. He will finish his presidency no nearer that goal than when he was elected, and in a backward move he has even committed the country to modernizing the existing arsenal of nuclear weapons at the hefty cost of $30 billion. The only reasonable conclusion is that the nuclear weapons establishment won out, and security policy of not only this country, but the world and future generations, remains subject to nuclearism, and what this implies about our unnecessarily precarious fate as a species.

Obama gave a second visionary speech in Cairo a few months later in which he promised a new openness to the Islamic world, and seemed to acknowledge that the Palestinians had suffered long enough and deserved an independent state and further, that it was reasonable to expect Israel to suspend unlawful settlement expansion to generate a positive negotiating atmosphere. When the Israel lobby responded by flexing its muscles and the Netanyahu leadership in Israel made it clear that they were in charge of the American approach to ‘the peace process,’ Obama sheepishly backed off, and what followed is a dismal story of collapsed diplomacy, accelerated Israeli settlement expansion, and renewed Palestinian despair and violent resistance. The result is to leave the prospect of a sustainable peace more distant than ever. It was clear that Zionist forces are able to mount such strong pressure in Congress, the media, and Beltway think tanks that no elected official can follow a balanced approach on core issues. Perhaps, the Democrats are even more vulnerable to such pressures as their funding and political base is more dependent on support of the Jewish communities in the big cities of America.

Occasionally, an issue comes along that is so clearly in the national interest that Israel’s opposition can be circumvented, at least temporarily and partially. This seems to have been the case with regard to the Iran Nuclear Agreement of a year ago that enjoyed the rare support of all five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany. Yet even such a positive and sensible step toward restoring peace and stability in the tormented Middle East met with intense resistance at home, even being opposed by several prominent Democratic senators who acted as if they knew on which side their toast was buttered.

It seems pathetic that the White House in the aftermath of going against Israel’s rigid views on Iran found it necessary to patch things up by dispatching high level emissaries to reassure Israel that the U.S. remains as committed as ever to ‘the special relationship.’ To prove this point the Obama administration is even ready to increase military assistance to Israel from an already excessive $3 billion annual amount to a scandalous $5 billion, which is properly seen as compensation for going ahead with the Iran deal in the face of Israel opposition. Even the habitual $3 billion subsidy is in many ways outrageous given Israel’s regional military dominance, economic wellbeing, without even mentioning their refusal to take reasonable steps toward achieving a sustainable peace, which would greatly facilitate wider the pursuit of wider American goals in the Middle East. It is past time for American taxpayers to protest such misuses of government revenues, especially given the austerity budget at home, the decaying domestic infrastructure, and the anti-Americanism among the peoples of the Middle East that is partly a consequence of our long one-sided support for Israel and related insensitivity to the Palestinian ordeal.

True, the Democrats do push slightly harder to find diplomatic alternatives to war than Republicans, although Obama appointed hard liners to the key foreign policy positions. Hilary Clinton was made Secretary of State despite her pro-intervention views, or maybe because of them. Democrats seem to feel a habitual need to firm up their militarist credentials, and reassure the powerful ‘deep state’ in Washington of their readiness to use force in pursuit of American interests around the world. In contrast, Republicans are sitting pretty, being certified hawks on foreign policy without any need to prove repeatedly their toughness. Until George W. Bush came along it did seem that Democrats started the most serious war since 1945, and it took a Republican warmonger to end it, and even more daringly, finally to normalize relations with Communist China, a self-interested move long overdue and delayed for decades by anti-Communist ideological fervor and the once powerful ‘China Lobby.’

Looking ahead there is little reason to expect much departure if a Democrat is elected the next American president in 2016. Clinton has already tipped her hand in a recent speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, the self-anointed voice of the East Coast American establishment. She promised more air strikes and a no fly zone in Syria and a more aggressive approach toward ISIS. Such slippery slopes usually morph into major warfare, with devastating results for the country where the violence is situated and no greater likelihood of a positive political outcome as understood in Washington. If we consider the main theaters of American interventionary engagement in the 21st century, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya we find the perplexing combination of battlefield dominance and political defeat. It is dismaying that neither Clinton nor lead foreign policy advisors are willing to examine critically this past record of frustration and defeat, and seem ready for more of the same, or as it now expressed, ‘doubling down.’ We should not forget that Clinton was the most ardent advocate of the disastrous intervention in Libya, and mainly unrepentant about her support of the Iraq War, which should shock even her most committed backers, considering that it was the most costly mistake and international crime since Vietnam.

Ever since the Vietnam War political leaders and military commanders have tried to overcome this record of failed interventionism, forever seeking new doctrines and weapons that will deliver victory to the United States when it fights wars against peoples living in distant lands of the Global South. Democrats along with Republicans have tried to overcome the dismal experience of intervention by opting for a professional army and total reliance on air tactics and special forces operations so as to reduce conditions giving rise to the sort of robust anti-war movement that dogged the diehard advocates of the Vietnam War in its latter stages. The government has also taken a number of steps to achieve a more supportive media through ‘embedding’ journalists with American forces in the fields of battle. These kinds of adjustment were supposed to address the extreme militarist complaint that the Vietnam War was not lost on the battlefields of combat, but on the TV screens in American living rooms who watched the coffins being unloaded when returned home.

Despite these adjustments it has not helped the U.S. reached its goals overseas. America still ends up frustrated and thwarted. This inability to learn from past mistakes really disguises an unwillingness that expresses a reluctance or inability to challenge the powers that be, especially in the area of war and peace. As a result not only is foreign policy stuck adhering to deficient policies with a near certainty of future failure, but democracy takes a big hit because the critical debate so essential in a truly free society is suppressed or so muted as to politically irrelevant. Since 9/11 this suppression has been reinforced by enhanced intrusions on the rights of the citizenry, a process supported as uncritically by Democrats as by the other party. Again it is evident that the unaccountable deep state wields a big stick!

This is the Rubicon that no Democrat, including even Bernie Sanders, has dared yet to cross: The acknowledgement that military intervention no longer works and should not be the first line of response to challenges emerging overseas, especially in the Middle East. The forces of national resistance in country after country in the South outlast their Northern interveners despite being militarily inferior. This is the major unlearned lesson of the wars waged against European colonialism, and then against the United States in Vietnam, and still later in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The balance of forces in the Global South has decisively shifted against a military reading of history that prior to the middle of the last century was the persuasive basis of defending the country against foreign enemies, as well as providing imperial ambitions with a cost efficient means to gain access to resources and market in underdeveloped parts of the world. National resistance movements have learned since 1945 that they are able to prevail, although sometimes at a great cost, because they have more patience and more at stake. As the Afghan saying goes, “You have the watches, we have the time.”

The intervening side shapes its foreign policy by a crude cost/benefit calculus, and at some point, the effort does not seem worth the cost in lives and resources, and is brought to an end. For the national resistance side the difference between winning and losing for a mobilized population is nearly absolute, and so the costs however high seem never too high. The most coherent intervention initiated by the Obama presidency in 2011 did succeed in driving a hostile dictatorship from power, but what resulted was the opposite of what was intended and expected by Washington: chaos and a country run by warring and murderous tribal militias. In other words, military intervention has become more destructive than ever, and yet its political goals of stability and a friendly atmosphere remain even more elusive than previously.

For Democrats to have an approach that learns from this experience in the period since the end of World War II would require leveling with American people on two main points: (1) military intervention generally does not reach its proclaimed goals unless mandated by the UN Security Council and carried out in a manner consistent with international law; and (2) the human concerns and national interests of the country are better protected in this century by deferring to the dynamics of self-determination even if the result are not always in keeping with American strategic goals and national values. Such a foreign policy reset would not always yield results that the leaders and public like, but it is preferable to the tried and tested alternatives that have failed so often with resulting heavy burdens. Adopting such a self-determination approach is likely to diminish violence, enhance the role of diplomacy, and reduce the massive displacement of persons that is responsible for the wrenching current humanitarian crises of migration and the ugly extremist violence that hits back at the Middle East interveners in a merciless and horrifying manner as was the case in the November 13th attacks in Paris.

Despite these assessments when, hopefully, a Democrat is elected in 2016, which on balance remains the preferable lesser of evils outcome, she has already announced her readiness to continue with the same failed policy, but even worse, to increase its intensity. Despite such a militarist resolve there is every reason to expect the same dismal results, both strategically and humanly. The unfortunate political reality is that even Democratic politicians find it easier to go along with such a discredited approach than risk the backlash that world occur if less military policies were advocated and embraced. We must not avoid an awareness that our governmental security dynamics is confined to an iron cage of militarism that is utterly incapable of adjusting to failure and its own wrongdoing.

We must ask ourselves why do liberal minded Democratic politicians, especially once in office follow blindly militarist policies that have failed in the past and give every indication of doing even worse in the future because the international resistance side is more extremist and becoming better organized. Dwight Eisenhower, incidentally a Republican, gave the most direct answer more than 50 years ago—what he called ‘the military-industrial complex,’ that lethal synergy between government and capital. Such a reality has become a toxic parasite that preys upon our democratic polity, and has been augmented over the years by intelligence services, the corporatization of the media and universities, public policy institutes, and lobbies that have turned Congress into a complicit issuer of rubber stamps as requested.

Under these conditions we have to ask ourselves ‘What would have to happen to enable a presidential candidate of the Democratic Party to depart from the foreign policy failures of the past? That is, to escape from the cage within which foreign policy is now imprisoned: Nothing less than a transforming of the governing process from below that would sweep away this parasitical burden that is ever

more deforming the republic and spreading suffering and resentment to all corners of the planet. American foreign policy is having these harmful effects at a time when decent people of all parties should be exerting their political imagination to the utmost to meet the unprecedented challenges mounted by the accumulating dangers of climate change and the moral disgrace of mounting extreme economic inequalities despite as many as 3 billion people living on less than $2.50 per day.

Not only is the Democratic Party failing the nation by its refusal to meet the modest first principle of Florence Nightingale—‘do no harm’—but it is not rising to the deeper and more dangerous threats to future wellbeing and sustainability directed at the nation and the ecological health of the planet, and also of menace to peoples everywhere. What the United States does and does not do reverberates across the globe. Political responsibility in the 21st century does not stop at the border, and certainly is not fulfilled by walls and drones. If political parties cannot protect us, then it is up to the people to mount the barricades, but this too looks farfetched when the most vital form of populism now seems to be of a proto-fascist variety activated so viciously by the candidacy of Donald Trump, and reinforced more politely by his main Republican rivals.

Richard Falk is an international law and international relations scholar who taught at Princeton University for forty years. Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and taught at the local campus of the University of California in Global and International Studies and since 2005 chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. For six years (2008-2014) he acted as UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine

06 March, 2016
Richard Falk Blog

By Bill McKibben

Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line: it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human civilization.

That’s important because the governments of the world have set two degrees Celsius as the must-not-cross red line that, theoretically, we’re doing all we can to avoid. And it’s important because most of the hemisphere has not really had a winter. They’ve been trucking snow into Anchorage for the start of the Iditarod; Arctic sea ice is at record low levels for the date; in New England doctors are already talking about the start of “allergy season.”

This bizarre glimpse of the future is only temporary. It will be years, one hopes, before we’re past the two degrees mark on a regular basis. But the future is clearly coming much faster than science had expected. February, taken as a whole, crushed all the old monthly temperature records, which had been set in … January. January crushed all the old monthly temperature records, which had been set in … December.

In part this reflects the ongoing El Nino phenomenon — these sporadic events always push up the planet’s temperature. But since that El Nino heat is layered on top of the ever-increasing global warming, the spikes keep getting higher. This time around the overturning waters of the Pacific are releasing huge quantities of heat stored there during the last couple of decades of global warming.

And as that heat pours out into the atmosphere, the consequences are overwhelming. In the South Pacific, for instance, the highest wind speeds ever measured came last month when Tropical Cyclone Winston crashed into Fiji. Entire villages were flattened. In financial terms, the storm wiped out ten percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, roughly equivalent to fifteen simultaneous Hurricane Katrina’s.

This was followed by a few months of the highest wind speeds ever recorded in our hemisphere, when Patricia crashed into the Pacific coast of Mexico. And it joins all the other lines of misery: the zika virus spreading on the wings of mosquitoes up and down the Americas; the refugees streaming out of Syria where, as studies now make clear, the deepest drought ever measured helped throw the nation into chaos.

The messages are clear. First, global warming is not a future threat — it’s the present reality, a menace not to our grandchildren but to our present civilizations. In a rational world, this is what every presidential debate would focus on. Forget the mythical flood of immigrants — concentrate on the actual flooding.

Second, since we’re in a hole it’s time to stop digging — literally. We’ve simply got to keep coal and oil and gas in the ground; there’s not any other way to make the math of climate change even begin to work. There is legislation pending in the House and Senate that would end new fossil fuel extraction on America’s public lands. Senator Sanders has backed the law unequivocally; Secretary Clinton seemed to endorse it, and then last week seemed to waffle. Donald Trump has concentrated on the length of his fingers.

No one’s waiting for presidential candidates to actually lead, of course. In May campaigners around the world will converge on the world’s biggest carbon deposits: the coal mines of Australia, the tarsands of Canada, the gasfields of Russia. And they will engage in peaceful civil disobedience, an effort to simply say: no. The only safe place for this carbon is deep beneath the soil, where’s it been for eons.

This is, in one sense, stupid. It’s ridiculous that at this late date, as the temperature climbs so perilously, we still have to take such steps. Why do Bostonians have to be arrested to stop the Spectra pipeline? Anyone with a thermometer can see that we desperately need to be building solar and windpower instead.

In a much deeper sense, however, the resistance is valiant, even beautiful. Think of those protesters as the planet’s antibodies, its immune system finally kicking in. Our one earth is running a fever the likes of which no human has ever seen. The time to fight it is right now.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and co-founder of 350.org. His most recent book is Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.
© 2016 Bill McKibben

06 March, 2016
The Boston Globe

By Shubhda Chaudhary

Saudi Prince and entrepreneur, al-Waleed bin Talal made a startling statement to Kuwaiti Al Qabas daily stating that ‘Saudi Arabia must reconsider its regional commitments and devise a new strategy to combat Iran’s increasing influence in Gulf States by forging a Defense pact with Tel Aviv.’ It would deter any possible Iranian moves in the light of unfolding developments in the Syria and Moscow’s military intervention.

He openly stated that ‘I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada( uprising) and i shall exert all my influence to break any ominous Arab initiatives set to condemn Tel Aviv , because I deem the Arab-Israeli entente and future friendship necessary to impede the Iranian dangerous encroachment.’

With the emergence of neo-liberalism and complex interdependence, Saudi Arabia and Israel have had built tacit alliances but they have not been openly embraced. Though, this has now turned into a geopolitical strategic acrimony between Iran and Saudi Arabia. As we are witnessing a regional cold war in West Asia, the media attention has anyway shifted from the Palestinian issue, in spite of the fact that they are currently undergoing a ‘leaderless Intifada.’ But it’s astonishing that Saudi Arabia, the powerful giant for Wahabbi ideology is thinking of deterring its stand in the Palestinian cause.

The manner in which, one after another, Arab states have abandoned the Palestinian cause has now become a convention. But such an unreasonable statement by Saudi Prince reveals the emerging hidden contours of power.

He further mentioned ‘Iran seeks to buttress its presence in the Mediterranean by supporting Assad regime in Syria, added Prince al-Waleed, but to the chagrin of Riyadh and its sister Gulf sheikhdoms, Putin’s Russia has become a real co-belligerent force in Syrian 4-year-old civil war by attacking CIA-trained Islamist rebels. Here surfaces the paramount importance of Saudi-Israeli nexus to frustrate Russia-Iran-Hezbollah axis.’ The quote validates that Russia is bombing CIA trained Islamist rebels which has always been controversial and often called a conspiracy theory. At the same time, it also highlights the insecurity of Saudi Arabia against the emergence of Russia-Iran and Hezbollah axis within the Syrian paradigm.

Prince al-Waleed bin Talal had previously been in news also for supporting the annexation of Bahrain during the Arab Uprising at Pearl Square in Manama, which witnessed complete media blackout though there was massive man-slaughter. The entire idea of uprisings for democracy is so antithetical to the entire monarchial set-up of Saudi Arabia that it has also played a pivotal role in fuelling the sectarian war in West Asia.

Nevertheless, the Palestinian Ambassador to India stated that Prince al-Waleed had later stated that he had made no such statements and they do not hold true. It’s quite unbelievable that any news agency can have the leverage t fabricate such strong views on its own behalf and hence, on meticulous scrutiny, it might have an iota of truth.

Shubhda Chaudhary is a PhD student at JNU. She can be contacted at shubhda.chaudhary@gmail. com

04 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Jon Kofas

Introduction

Is Trump a reflection of America, at least a segment of the population that has proved it wants him as the next president, or is he a historical accident, an aberration from the norm in politics? Despite both Republican and Democrat, conservative, liberal and leftist critics that Trump is not a reflection of the American mainstream, the astonishing results of the primary voting process reveal a very different story for a man who could easily win the nomination. This would be especially the case if the Republican Party establishment owned by billionaires like Trump supports his candidacy instead of undermining it in every respect possible.

Although Trump has opportunistically toyed with right-wing populism – racism, xenophobia, misogyny, jingoism – and although he is indeed a con-artist as Marco Rubio calls him and a fraud as Mitt Romney calls him, he is very much a reflection of mainstream America as much as Bernie Sanders representing the anti-neoliberal pro-Keynesian wing of the Democrat party. It is indeed true that he is an embarrassment at home and overseas because of who he is and because he is a right wing populist approaching as close to neo-Fascism as any candidate for president.

However, Trump is a product of and reflects the traditions and institutions as much as any Republican who in essence represents the same ideological and policy position. Nor can it be argued that the corrupt billionaires and Republican political establishment is against Trump on moral grounds as though these people are on a higher moral plane like Pope Francis who criticized Trump for lacking compassion for the poor trying to cross the border. Therefore, the issue comes down to the degree to which the Republican political and business establishment wants Trump as its presidential candidate no matter what the voters want, and the degree of control the party machinery and billionaires wish to exercise in the political arena as they are looking beyond the presidency to House and Senate seats that may be at risk because of Trump at the head of the party ticket.

Legitimacy and Democracy

Regardless of whether Trump becomes the nominee or the next US president, the larger issue is one of a “bourgeois democratic” society’s institutional mechanisms and sources of legitimacy. If legitimacy rests with the party machinery and the wealthy people funding it, then the system parading as democratic is a fraud, and it is not just Trump. The issue of legitimacy is at stake in American democracy and especially with this campaign of 2016 where the frontrunner and presumptive nominee after striking a deal with the party bosses finds himself isolated from the party bosses and those funding the party.
In US, does legitimacy emanate from the political party apparatus that chooses candidates and presents them to voters for election? If the people by majority vote for a candidate that the political party establishment has chosen to be on the ballot but does not want that candidate does this mean that popular vote is meaningless as is the electoral process? According to 19th century German sociologist Max Weber, the sources of legitimacy converge in an open society and they are based on tradition, charismatic leadership and legal authority. Based on a constitutional system and laws, legal authority by elected and/or appointed officials is one source of legitimacy.

The powers of legal authority are not without limits considering checks and balances in the US democratic system and popular consent as the underlying source of political power, at least in theory. It should be stressed that Max Weber never created linkage between social justice and political legitimacy, whereas his contemporaries ideologically to the left did exactly that. The question of popular sovereignty and legitimacy is one with limits in American history that had excluded slaves, women, and for all practical purposes the poor and minorities from the voting process. Although in the early 21st century the system ideally permits for all citizens to vote for pre-selected candidates of the party machinery, the issue of legitimacy remains a big question mark because the preservation of the public and private institutions take precedence over any elected official whose goal must be to serve the institutions and not change them without congressional authorization.

The Historical Role of the Wealthy in Politics

Historically in Europe the very wealthy recognized the symbolic significance of not running for office and simply manipulating the political process from behind the scenes. After all, money has always bought political influence at all levels of government, and one way of protecting the interests of capital has been to rely on the legislative branch of government because one never knows if the executive deviates from serving capital as faithfully as the socioeconomic elites expect. This rule of the very wealthy staying out of politics was broken in the Age of Imperialism in Europe (1870-1914) when the stakes became so important that competing interests at the national and international levels were fighting for market share on a world scale.

More recently, there have been billionaires like Silvio Berlusconi who was Italy’s prime minister and many European politicians have used their political office as a vehicle of moving into the socioeconomic elite class. Last spring a millionaire businessman Juha Sipila was elected to Prime Minister of Finald by promising to make the country competitive just as Republicans have been advocating, never mentioning income inequality or social justice. Therefore,

Europe is not entirely free of the businessman-politician promising the moon to voters.

From its founding, the US carved a different path than Europe that tended to be skeptical of wealthy oligarchs in political power. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt were all multi-millionaires and saw their class interests converging with the nation’s interests, without necessarily neglecting completely the marginalized in society. It is true, of course, that after 1850 and the era of Lincoln we have layers and professionals with a record of public service running for office, but they were just as representative of big capital’s interests as the wealthy presidents. The Gilded Age (1870-1900) proved as much despite presidents in the White House that were not super wealthy like Washington and Jefferson. There are remarkable parallels between the late 19th century Gilded Age and the new Gilded Age of the late 20th-early 21st century America.

The Progressive Era (1900-1920) that started at the local level in Wisconsin during the age of mass consumerism as the Industrial Revolution was expanding the economy prompted calls by the rising professional middle class for limits on the role of the wealthy in politics. After all, American politics was blatantly bought and paid for by the wealthy in all levels of government to the degree that calling such a system democracy could not be taken seriously.

Ironically, Theodore Roosevelt who was very wealthy and a Republican favored the role of the state as an arbiter of capital and he favored reforms that would rationalize the political economy. He recognized that capitalists left to their own devices were predatory and the rise of big business meant the need to create large government bureaucracies to regulate and assist the private sector. In short, Roosevelt had no illusions that capitalism must be rationalized otherwise it would cause havoc in society and destroy democracy rooted in pluralism. He knew first hand that the wealthy had politicians in their back pockets and tried to broaden the process to integrate the lower middle class into the political mainstream largely to afford legitimacy to a corrupt system. Progressivism only regulated big businesses and hardly placed restrictions on capital accumulation to the detriment of labor.

The Great Depression forced Franklin Roosevelt to expand on many programs of the Progressive Era that started at the turn of the century under Roosevelt and continued under Wilson. Despite opposition by the wealthy who did not want the state used as an agent of growth and development and an arbiter in society, FDR had no choice if he wanted to save a system from chaos and collapse. He broadened the political process and co-opted the lower classes into the Democrat mainstream, thus affording legitimacy to the system. When the Second World War ended, however, the US began to slowly deviate from the premises of government’s role in society, justifying it on the basis of the Cold War and the need to compete in the world considering the US was the world’s number one economy having inherited Europe’s and Japan’s imperial role.

Just as people today complain of wealth concentration among the top one percent, so did the people in the late 19th century. Just as people today complain that government is corrupt, bought and paid by the rich, so did the people in the Gilded Age (1870-1900). Just as people today are receptive to populism from the center-left and the extreme right because the so-called middle represents the very rich, so did people in the Gilded Age. The fundamental difference is that the US economy was expanding very rapidly in the late 19th century in every sector from agriculture, mining, manufacturing and services. In the early 21st century there is no comparable expansion, making politics and the role of the billionaires in society much more controversial. Finally, whereas in the late 19th century the US had room to expand its middle class, in the recent Gilded Age from Reagan to the present the middle class has been contracting and the future prospects are very bleak for upward mobility.

Billionaires and Trump

The challenge for Republican or Democrat party politicians who represent the existing social order and capitalist political economy has always been to forge consensus by securing a broad popular base in order to govern in what is supposed to be a bourgeois democracy. It is never easy to convince people from the middle class and working class that their interests rest with a political representative of the rich, although it has been done around the world for the last two centuries. The politicians with the ability to make their case and secure public support win elections.

The Republican Party invited Trump knowing that it needed a “star quality” candidate, a celebrity billionaire with mass appeal to broaden the party’s popular base. This is exactly what this man did but the idea was to broaden the popular base, not to win. Someone more mainstream establishment would actually be the one to win the nomination. Political parties have always sought popular figures to run for office precisely because of their mass appeal and ability to convince voters to identify with the candidate, despite the reality that the candidate is beholden to those who chose him/her to run for office.

The Trump brand in the age of pop culture sells as much in real estate development as in politics. After all, Trump made hundreds of millions of dollars selling his name that he equated with business success; this despite massive losses and three bankruptcies, failure of an airline business, the phantom Trump University, etc. Just like the Democrats, the Republicans are a well oiled political machine and no one can run without the blessing of the party hierarchy as Trump is doing with self-financing campaign, which in essence means he does not have to answer to campaign donors. The billionaires and party operatives invited Trump to run because they knew he was selling the brand name to voters, mostly white and male without a college degree that aspire to dreams of becoming billionaires or at least identify with the anti-establishment nationalist rhetoric, often bordering on Fascist considering he has borrowed quotes from Mussolini that Trump preaches to win votes.

Just in case there is any doubt that the wealthy own politicians, just follow the money trail and look at newspaper endorsements and media coverage. The media built up Trump as a political messiah so that people would vote Republican. The media follows the marching orders of its billionaire and millionaire owners. On 3 March 2016, FOX news instructed its reporters and guests to stop giving Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio any sort of favorable coverage. In itself this is hardly newsworthy that a news organization would pick favorites, considering this is how it has been throughout the history of the press. However, it does reveal the factionalism within the Republican Party at a time that the economic elites in the US are split over which candidate even within their own party best represents finance capital. Usually, the wealthy rally around one candidate and recognize the need to sell that individual to voters as though he is a popular choice. There have been cases from the 19th century to the present when the elites have been split about political parties and leaders, mostly obviously during the election of 1860 that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House.

A number of billionaires, including the founder of Home Depot, the Ricketts family that owns the Chicago Cubs, the Koch brothers and many others have become public with their adamant opposition to Trump. Considering he too is from the billionaire class just like Mitt Romney who ran on the Republican ticket in 2012, there is no reason to oppose Trump if his policy positions are not so very different from Romney’s and if he is as malleable as some like Jimmy Carter believe. There are of course many reasons that conservative billionaires oppose Trump to the degree that some have publicly stated Hillary would make a better president.

The underlying assumption that there is solidarity among capitalists is simply wrong, although there is indeed a common interest among them to keep profits high, and wages and their taxes low. There are competing capitalist interests and always have been in the political economy.

a. The inability to buy the election, as Bernie Sanders and Trump have argued, frustrates billionaires, even if the candidate is one whose policy positions are very close to theirs.

b. There are competing interests that believe Trump will favor one or the other. For example, he has argued that drug companies are engaged in price gauging and that Apple is taking away jobs from the US and shipping them to China. Clearly, he would probably favor construction firms because he is on record favoring rebuilding of the aging infrastructure, probably with mob-connected firms, although there is hardly a difference between mob money and legitimate one given the interactivity that takes place between banks and the mod.

c. His proposal of taxing Hedge Funds has not been well received by Wall Street and the banks involved in such products.

d. Defiance toward congress, even toward Majority Leader Paul Ryan that Trump threatened of getting along or paying a big price is no way to forge alliances in Washington and on Wall Street. This kind of bravado and reckless rhetoric is what the billionaire-politician Romney alluded to when he asked Americans to oppose Trump.

e. Promising to do something about illegal immigration but in essence winking at the elites that the Obama policy will continue does not sit well with right wing ideologue billionaires of the Republican party.

A closer examination of Trump’s positions on policy, without actually knowing what he would do once in office if elected, reveals that he is indeed no different than his colleagues still in the race and hardly different on many issues from Hillary Clinton a many issues once the hyperbolic populist rhetoric is taken out.

1. Ever since Republican presidential candidate announced he would run for office. Trump began to denigrate Mexicans, women, Muslims, and just about every non-white male Protestant group, including Catholics offended by Trump’s trashing of Pope Francis. The reasons for this is that a segment of American society that includes the establishment agree with Trump, but disagree on the modality of expressing such views considering one must abide by political correctness to cover up bigotry in America.

2. Although he proposed assassinating the families of ISIS jihadists, a war crime as the United Nations defines it, the media stayed silent because they agree and would never dare support international law.

3. When he berated the Pope, the media sided with Trump against Francis who argued that Christians built bridges not walls. Pope Francis is the most leftist Pope in modern history and a critic of American consumerism and the culture of greed that the US media and establishment support as part of the value system.

4. When he proposed sending back more than 11 million illegal aliens, conservatives found it difficult to justify defending illegal aliens, except to argue that they do provide cheap labor and it would cost too much to ship them back. How could they oppose Trump considering this is a core issue for the Republican Party that rhetorically opposes non-white immigrants but in practice uses them for cheap labor just as Trump has in his hotels and construction projects?

5. When he argued that he would go to an economic war against China, Japan, South Korea and Mexico, no politician or media bothered pointing out that the world economy is tightly integrated and economic nationalism makes no sense for the US at the core of globalization. How could anyone argue that that products coming from Mexico and China are made by US firms and in Japan and South Korea exporting companies in which US investors have a stake. How could anyone argue that Japan finances the US debt and unleashing an economic war would also have geopolitical consequences that would only strengthen China and weaken US strategic allies in Asia?

6. When he argued that he would have the Chinese “get rid of” the leader of North Korea, no one criticized such a proposal because political assassinations and coup d’etat hardly pose a problem for either Republican or Democrat.

7. When he proposed cutting the Department of Education, no Republican or the press asked why because they agree. After all, the teachers and their unions have a long-standing history of usually voting Democrat. Moreover, the media and the Republicans have cultivated the perception that the Department of education is to blame for all calamities befalling the country’s educational system. Never mind that schools well funded in rich communities have excellent schools while the ghetto suffers along because its schools are underfunded owing to funds going to support prisons.

8. When Trump argued that he would send in massive forces to defeat ISIS, no one in either political party or in the media bother pointing out that jihadists operate in roughly fifty countries and employ unconventional methods of warfare that have proved almost impossible to eliminate with conventional means in the last two decades.

9. When this man employed the nebulous slogan “Make America Great Again”, only Clinton insisted that America is already great because she is running on the Obama legacy, such as it is with a record of pursuing neo-liberal policies that make the rich richer. No conservative dared to argue that America is already great because that would be an endorsement for Obama. Therefore, Trump reflects their view.

10. When he proposed eliminating OBAMACARE, no Republican or mainstream media objected because it is an anathema for the conservative elites and big business to support social welfare. However, they have no problem when Trump proposed lowering corporate taxes at home and to have corporate money repatriated. How could the media and the conservatives criticize Trump for wanting to erode social welfare and strengthen corporate welfare?

11. When he proposed cutting funding for Planned Parenthood, there was no criticism from the Republicans because they advocate the exact same thing.

12. When he offered unqualified support for the Second Amendment, neither his Republican colleagues nor the media argued that something must be done to bring under control the epidemic of shootings with handguns.

13. When he admitted that he hates to pay taxes and there are reports he pays very little taxes, no one had a problem with this issue because it is ubiquitous among conservatives who want the working class and middle class to carry the brunt of the tax burden through direct and indirect taxation. There are studies indicating Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the rich would cost an estimated $1 trillion per year; this in a country that has $19 trillion in public debt soon to rise at $21 trillion. The irony here is that Trump has said his plan would lower the debt but non-partisan groups looking at his tax policy insist the opposite would be the case.

14. Although he is on record opposing the war in Iraq, and argued that Saudi Arabia is the world’s biggest “funder of terrorism”, he has repeated the need to bomb ISIS in Syria and Iraq, and placing troops on the ground to bring down Syria’s Assad.

15. Trump alarms US allies so he is unacceptable. Reagan alarmed allies as did George W. Bush, but they were both presidents that much of the world viewed very unfavorably and destabilizing for the world. Why would Cruz or Rubio be any less destabilizing for the world than Trump the deal maker? It is indeed true that conservatives, centrists and leftists around the world are amazed that the US has Trump as a frontrunner, but they would be more interested in making sure he does not pursue economic nationalism or start new wars as his hyperbolic rhetoric would suggest. They have the exact same concern about Cruz and Rubio, and they realize that any president would have constraints from congress.

16. When he publicly stated that he wants to repeal the law to after the media legally on libel cases, there was no outcry by politicians, business people or even most of the media about the First Amendment and freedom of the press.

17. Even when he was forced to repudiate David Duke, a well known KKK member, many conservatives argued that this is not as bad as some present it because the late West Virginia Democrat Senator Robert Byrd was also a former KKK member in his youth during the 1940s. Ultra right winger Mike Huckabee among others noted that Sen. Byrd endorsed Obama and that was acceptable but Duke endorsing Trump is an anathema. In short, we are all Klansmen here under these three-piece suits so let’s just stop pretending. Trump’s hesitancy to denounce emphatically the KKK has been cited as proof he does not belong in the Republican Party. However, institutional racism as manifested in the criminal justice system, the educational system, infrastructural policies such as the Flint Michigan water poisoning afflicting blacks, all these are acceptable.

18. Business deregulation that would be in line with the neoliberal mainstream all administrations have pursued since Reagan. This would result in fewer environmental, labor, health and safety regulations. Republicans and many Democrats hardly have a problem with neoliberal policies such as these considering this is the general direction they have been going in the last three decades.

Many critics of Trump pretend as though he is a recent visitor from a distant planet, as though he is not a reflection of the Republican Party and at least a segment of American society. Although “Trumpism” has similarities with “Reaganism”, among them Nativism and xenophobia, underlying racism and sexism, jingoism and right-wing populism embodying the popular issues already part of the Republican Party mainstream, there are many who insist he is outside the mainstream of Republican politics.

Organized Crime: It is true that he may be an embarrassment because Trump has worked with organized crime in New York. When confronted with the allegations, he replied that he had to work with organized criminal elements to have his hotels constructed because organized crime controlled the cement business. A number of US banks have paid fines for laundering drug money, so why should Trump be an exception to major banks?

Trump University: He may carry a stigma because he created an unaccredited makeshift real estate university that was in essence a “get-rich quick scheme” where students’ tuition ran as high as $35,000. Trump University turns out to have been another of the billionaire’s many ways of making money promising the moon and delivering nothing. The US government has been investigating a number of online and brick and mortar colleges that promise the moon and deliver fast food jobs to their students. Why should Trump be any different?

Illegal Workers: It is true he may have hired illegal workers knowingly and had to pay more than $1,000,000 in fines. He publicly justified on the basis of worker shortage, not low wages. It is also true that he used tax abatements to make money in real estate and there are reports he probably pays very little or no taxes.

KKK: Only when Trump was not emphatic and categorical about disavowing former Ku Klux Klan member David Duke and the Klan did some elements of the mainstream media turn on him. It is one thing to embrace aspects of the Klan’s belief and entirely another to remove the thin veil of political correctness that exposes a mainstream politician as just another Klansman and neo-Nazi. White Anglo-Saxon Protestants want to project the appearance of respectability by distancing themselves from neo-Nazis and the Klan, while all along wholeheartedly supporting institutional racism as evidence by the criminal justice system that weighs heavily in the black and Hispanic communities; poising blacks in Flint Michigan for profits; police shootings of black youth in the inner city; black youth unemployment at 50%, and a series of other real life measures that keep the apartheid society alive and well. Obama not Trump has been the president in the last seven years when all of this has taken place. If Obama is not doing much about racism, why should a right-wing populist trying to win the White House?

Conclusions

It hardly stretches credulity to conclude that Trump is not the ideal candidate for a “normal” individual to be displayed at a psychologists’ convention. Nevertheless, within the realm of what is acceptable as normal in politics, Trump may be granted a generous pass. One could argue that a politician would have to be inhuman to propose massive displacement of 11 million illegal immigrants; or the deaths of thousands of innocent people as a result of a jingoistic foreign policy? But Reagan and George W. Bush were harsh toward minorities and carried out foreign interventions resulting in millions dying and displaced. Yet, Reagan and Bush are heroes, while Trump who advocates similar measures is outside the Republican mainstream?

I am amazed that even leftist critics of Trump have difficulty assessing the situation. Some have argued that the Trump phenomenon represents white anger and fear because society is changing demographically and the economic pie is becoming smaller. Demographic change and smaller economic pie has actually hurt minorities more than whites, but it is true the absence of upward social mobility among whites has driven a segment of them to the right politically. Another critique by the left is that the Trump phenomenon represents a breakdown of society and or the two-party system essentially representing the same class. It is true that both parties have always represented the same capitalist class, but it is just as true that American society was on verge of breakdown during the depression of the 1890s and of the 1930s. Yet, it bounced back and revived itself.

What is so different in the early 21st century? The US has actually slipped very rapidly into a role of interdependence with China that is headed for global economic hegemony. This is hardly good news for those who believe in the American Dream accessible to all who work hard. The increasingly secondary role of the US in the world economy and its dogmatic insistence on policing the world as political and economic leverage is running its course and will continue to erode living standards.

All candidates agree that the debt at $19 trillion will rise to $21 and probably well in the upper 20s in the next ten years. This means that unless there is a radical shift in the political economy, America of the 2030s will probably resemble that of the 1930s. The political arena reflects the ugly realities in the economy and society. In the end the larger question is how the electoral process has exposed the reality of the wealthy in control of the political class trying to sell a dream to voters, a brand like the “Trump band” when in fact there is nothing but empty air behind it because the real economy is faltering under the existing system. The future is bleak and the stakes very high for the wealthy trying to make sure they retain their privileges as the economy is on its way to a long steady decline relative to China and Asia at large.

Jon Kofas is a retired university Professor from Indiana University.

04 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Eric Zuesse

The Nobel-Prize-winning former chief economist of the World Bank, and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the U.S. President, Joseph Stiglitz, went to England to warn the British public, and Parliament, that “no democracy” can support U.S. President Barack Obama’s proposed trade-deals, because all of these have a feature built into them, called Investor State Dispute Resolution, or ISDS, which will establish a supra-national authority that gives international corporations the power to sue any signatory nation that introduces new or increased economic regulations regarding product-safety, the environment, workers’ rights, or anything else that the corporation alleges lowers the corporation’s profits; and because these cases will be tried not in courts that are subject to the given nation’s constitution and laws, but instead by private three-person panels of mainly corporate lawyers, and their rulings will not be subject to being appealed within the given nation’s court system — the panel’s decison will be final. There will be no democratic accountability at all, regarding regulations and laws that are designed to protect the public: environmental, product-safety, and workers’ rights. The existing regulations will be, in effect, locked in stone, or else decreased — never increased, no matter how much the latest scientific findings might indicate they ought to be. That’s because the international corporations’ panels will have powers above and beyond any signatory nation’s constitution and laws. ISDS gives international corporations the right to sue taxpayers; it does not give any government the right to sue an international corporation (and that also means no right to sue such a corporation for having filed a frivolous lawsuit against the taxpayers). It’s a new profit-center for international corporations, in which those profits are coming from the taxpayers of nations that lose these lawsuits — and these cases will explode in volume if Obama’s deals get passed.

Stiglitz was speaking specifically about the TTIP, which is Obama’s proposed trade-deal with Europe, and he based his analysis upon the published proposed TPP, which is its companion trade-deal for virtually all nations that are in or on the Pacific. (Wikileaked texts indicate that the TTIP is basically similar to TPP.)

In the article by Huffington Post that reports on Stiglitze’s comments was this, from Stiglitz:

“There’s nothing to stop you, in TTIP, from passing regulations. You can keep the regulations. You would just have to keep writing a cheque to [cigarette firm] Phillip Morris every year for the profits they lost from what they would have been if they had been able to kill people in the way they had in the past,” he said. “Every year you would have to write them another billion dollar cheque.” …
He said it would mean “any government that passes a regulation that has an adverse effect on the profits of a company can be sued” by that company.
Stiglitz said the lawyers who drafted TPP designed it to be so strict that if governments passed regulations “trying to prevent polonium in baby cereal” companies would sue. “This is not a joke,” he added.
Previously, on the basis of a legal analysis of Obama’s trade-deals, a leading legal expert at the United Nations, explained why (as my headline summarized it) “UN Lawyer Calls TTP & TTIP ‘a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots’.” That lawyer was saying essentially the same thing as Stiglitz, but from a legal not an economic standpoint.

For information specifically about the motivation behind Obama’s trade-deals, see this.

Obama’s proposed ‘trade’ deals have not yet been passed into law in the United States. Here are the positions of leading U.S. Presidential candidates regarding whether they will favor or oppose them if they become the next U.S. President on 20 January 2017:

Hillary Clinton supports and was actively involved in producing Obama’s proposed trade-deals, but they became too unpopular among Democratic primary voters and so during her Democratic Party primary campaign for the White House she reversed her previous verbal position on the matter, just as she did in 2008 when she condemned her husband’s more-limited model, the NAFTA, after her having actually helped him to win approval for it in the U.S. Senate.

Bernie Sanders has condemned and voted against Obama’s trade-deals consistently. His actions have matched his words.

Donald Trump also condemns Obama’s proposed trade-deals, but his opposition, like Hillary’s, is merely verbal while he’s running for President, and though he (unlike Clinton) has no active record of having helped to produce these deals, he (like Clinton) does have a record of switching his positions in order to win votes. He’s not like Sanders; he can’t be trusted (or, at least, not intelligently trusted).

More details about these deals, and their origins, can be found here, which provides the deeper historical context, going all the way back to the U.S. Constitution.

Specifically regarding the corporate panels that will, in a sense, become an international-corporate world government if these deals become law, the details of that can be found here.

Essentially, what both Stiglitz and the UN’s lawyer are saying is that, if these deals become law, then workers’ rights laws, and product-safety laws, and environmental laws, won’t be able to be increased — not even, for example, in order to meet the verbal commitments that were recently made at the Paris conference on climate change. (Those ‘commitments’ to reduce global-warming gases would automatically become not merely unenforceable — which they already are — but they would become outright impossible to fulfill, because any effort to put them into place would produce crippling corporate-lawsuit-imposed fines against taxpayers.)

When Stiglitz said, “This is not a joke,” he was saying, essentially, the same thing as the UN lawyer did: “We don’t want a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots. We don’t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law.” He was saying: Don’t assume that the future won’t be an international-corporate dictatorship, because that now is actually quite likely. If both of these agreements become law, then even the publics in non-member nations will almost certainly become crushed, because they’ll be essentially boycotted by international corporations: both employment and consumption will collapse there. The interntional corporations would still come out way ahead, no matter how impoverished those people might become.

President Obama has specifically targeted the BRICS nations for that type of crushing treatment. He says this within a moralistic context in which he also says “the United States is and remains the one indispensable nation.” He said that on 28 May 2014, when he told graduating cadets at West Point this too:

“Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us.”

None of the five BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — is included in either of these two ‘trade’-pacts: Obama was telling America’s future military leaders that those are enemy nations, which those future U.S. military officers might be fighting against in their careers, and he was placing that prospect into a broader economic (not merely military) context. Obama’s ‘trade’ deals are about lots more than merely ‘trade.’

It’s widely expected that at least the TPP, if not also the TTIP, will become passed into law in the United States at some time between the November 8th U.S. Presidential election and the start of the new Presidency on 20 January 2017.

Both of these ‘trade’ deals are being rammed through Congress in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Treaty Clause. Apparently, the U.S. Constitution no longer rules in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court has never considered the matter (even though it would entail overthrowing a large portion of the U.S. Constitution if it becomes passed into law and sticks). However, if Obama’s ‘trade’ deals become passed into law, and remain, then what Stiglitz said, “This is not a joke,” will also mean that no intelligent and decent person will want to have children, unless that person wants them to live in a downward-spiralling dictatorship — which is what that would mean (and which would hardly qualify as being ‘decent’).

The vote that the American people will be making on November 8th could thus turn out to be the most important vote in the entire history of the world: the stakes are so large — for the entire world. And that’s no joke, either. If these proposed deals are not already too late to stop, this could well be the last chance. And to say that isn’t ‘apocalyptic,’ either: there’s nothing at all of ‘Scripture’ referred-to here. There’s nothing that’s at all ‘supernatural’ about this. It’s pure reality: very hard, very cold, and very real (and very profitable for the international billionaires whose agents have been pushing for this ever since at least 1954).

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
04 March, 2016
Countercurrents.org

By Rt News

Dutch lawmakers have questioned the course of the investigation into the MH17 crash in Ukraine, highlighting innuendos in the Dutch Safety Board report, and lack of raw data despite US claims of picking up “imagery” as the jet disappeared from radars.

Dutch MPs have held a parliamentary debate on the investigation into the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014 that killed all 298 on board, most of them citizens of the Netherlands.

In particular, the Tuesday discussion focused on the final report into the causes of the incident issued by the Dutch Safety Board last October, and the recent chief prosecutor’s letter which revealed the investigation has no raw radar data, useful footage or satellite images of the missile launch.
During the debate, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte’s government insisted that there was already enough information for a criminal investigation into the crash, while Dutch opposition lawmakers questioned innuendos and a lack of firm evidence.

Among the questions raised by Dutch MPs was an issue concerning raw radar data and satellite imagery that the United States claimed to have in its possession and which it called strong evidence.

“We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing, and it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar,” said US Secretary of State John Kerry in an interview with David Gregory of NBC’s Meet the Press in July 2014.

The reason why Dutch investigators apparently haven’t seen that data was questioned during the parliamentary debate: “So our question is, why has [it] not been asked what information they had because Kerry literally says: we saw it “disappear from the radar” screens,” said Pieter Omtzigt of the of the Christian Democratic Appeal.

The Dutch Minister of Security and Justice Ard van der Steur in response argued that the Safety Board on one hand “stated in their report that they themselves did not ask for this data” while on the other the investigators “were given insight into the information distributed to the by the Americans via the Military Intelligence Services.”

Meanwhile, Washington officials have failed to clarify to what extent alleged US intelligence was shared with the investigation.

“I believe we have collaborated with the Dutch in their investigation,” State Department spokesperson Mark Toner told RT’s Gayane Chichakyan. “I just don’t know to what level we shared information with them, I’d have to look into that.”

The evidence provided by Ukraine has also raised questions during the debate, in particular the lack of raw radar data, which was unavailable because the military radar was allegedly switched off and the primary civil radar was allegedly on maintenance, according to Kiev’s claims.

“We know that a part of the information we received from Ukraine is incorrect,” Omtzigt said, referring to Kiev’s conflicting statements and noting that secrecy over the evidence used in the investigation complicates the issue even further.

Meanwhile, Henricus van Bommel of the Socialist Party wondered how can it be possible that “Ukraine did not notify the European Air Traffic Organization ‘EuroControl’ about the fact that the radars were switched off, while this should have been done. How do you react to this?”

Van Bommel also called it “weird” that in contradiction to Washington’s claims of having the imagery of the missile launch, the Public Prosecution Service now admits that no “useful” data exists as the day the MH17 was shot down was “cloudy.”

The Russian side has provided the Dutch Safety Board with all available primary radar data tracing Flight MH17 right after the tragedy, as early as August 2014, according to the Deputy Head of the Federal Air Transport Agency, Oleg Storchevoy. Moreover the data is stored to this day, and can be provided once again to the relevant authorities if necessary.

However, it remains unclear if the investigators had indeed received “all cooperation and documents needed” for a conclusive probe, Omtzigt added.

“Through the primary rough radar-data a rocket [launch] is very likely to be detected,” Omtzigt said.

“And what is the case? This is the only, the only plane disaster in Europe in the last ten years, where this data is not available to the researchers.”

“Did these strange events lead to an insight of the ministry that not everyone involved was cooperating?” Omtzigt wondered. “Did these countries [the US, Ukraine and Russia] oblige to the UN resolution 2166… did these three countries oblige regarding this radar data?”

Among the topics up for debate was Kiev’s failure to close its airspace for civilian aircraft, and the fact that the Dutch government concealed for six months that it was briefed by Kiev about insecurity of the airspace above eastern Ukraine ahead of MH17 crash, according to the Dutch MPs.

“The [Dutch] government was privy to the information given to diplomats at the Kiev briefing,” said Raymond de Roon of the Party for Freedom. “At the day of the briefing the government knew – the government agencies knew – the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Defense knew that planes were shot down above the Ukraine, above a certain altitude.”

“All of this was known, none of it shared with the airlines. This is what should have happened. Can the prime minister vow that this information from here on in will be shared?” he wondered.

Parliamentarians also believe that the investigation into the MH17 disaster is taking too long as 19 months have passed since the crash.

Some families of the MH17 victims have been trying to take legal action against Ukraine by suing the country and its president for manslaughter by negligence, as it was Kiev’s obligation to close the airspace at the time. Elmar Giemulla, aviation law professor, who is representing several families of the victims told RT that they have filed a lawsuit, however received no clear response from Ukrainian authorities.

“We had filed our lawsuits more than one year ago and we never received response from the court except from the acknowledgment of receipt. We know definitely that our lawsuit arrived at the court but for the time being we have been left completely in darkness by the court,” he said.

“We don’t know if the Ukrainian defendant had received a copy of our lawsuit. We do not know whether the Ukrainian side has responded to our allegations, claims. And we do not know what the court has in mind or whether the court will be treating this lawsuit …”

Any criminal investigation “revolves around evidence” but ultimately, Ukraine is responsible for the safety of its airspace, international lawyer Thomas Sima told RT, reiterating one of the Dutch Safety Board’s conclusions.

“At all levels it sounds though the evidence has been blocked,” Sima said. “From what I understand the Ukraine has not released key radar information… so if evidence is sealed and you are not allowed to see it and other evidence is being withheld, it is going to be hard to make a case and prove it.”

In the meantime the United States may indeed be “rather loathed” to release its intelligence, because raw data might reveal some of the military secrets, Julian Bray, aviation security and airline operation expert told RT.

“There are 101 different reasons why they won’t hand it over, but they have actually opened the door, because they say they have irrefutable proof,” Bray said. “Now, if they have the proof somehow they’re going to need to release it.”
3 March 2016

By Catherine Shakdam

Forget the green movement, forget dissent, and calls for violence, Iranians today are expressing their yearning for change through the ballot box, confident that reforms will be debated, legislated and implemented in line with the general will.

Much can be said of the Islamic Republic’s resilience in the face of adversity, whether it be political, economic or ideological. Rooted in religious tradition, and a faith whose strength too few observers have bothered to recognize (for it disturbs their own sense of political righteousness, and I would say republican correctness), Iran stands as a mirror of its people – the alliance of the religious and the worldly, a covenant of sort in between divine law and man-made laws.

Whether Western capitals are willing to admit it or not, Iran stands a democracy – maybe not a perfect one (what nation could claim such a feat), but a democracy nevertheless; one which through the decades has proven a rampart against many great attacks, and many great machinations (Iraq, US sanctions, oil embargo, worldwide defamation… the list goes on).
History will certainly remember how the Iranian nation was robbed decades of freedom for colonialists imagined Iran’s riches belonged to the British Crown, and not its people. If not for the United Kingdom and the United States, Iran would have been spared the indignity of the Pahlavi House… hundreds and thousands of lives would have been spared the injustice of imperialism.

But just as it was born in resistance to Iran’s Islamic Republic, has endured and grew through it – so much so that not even deep economic sanctions could shake its foundations. Such has been Iran’s commitment to democracy. And while many might not agree with the path Iranians took, it looks as if most finally came to terms with it: It’s called pluralism, people. Try it on for size!

This February will likely be remembered as a historical moment for Iran’s democratic evolution as its people were called upon to elect both their next parliamentarians, and their Assembly of Experts.

While the Majlis (parliament) is responsible for passing the country’s legislation (every 4 years), the Assembly of Experts decide who will sit as Supreme Leader over the Islamic Republic (every 8 years).

Needless to say, to have both electoral cycles coalesce is rather significant, even more so in the light of Iran’s recent historical nuclear deal and its return to the international fold. No longer a pariah shun by world powers, Iran has been set to rise a titan over both Asia and the Middle East: a powerful ally, and a bridge builder between East and West.

But before I begin delving into the inner workings of Iran’s political dynamics there is a point I would like to make clear, as misconceptions and misrepresentations continue to this day to darken people’s perception of Iran.

Iran has been gravely misunderstood, and I would say underestimated. Iran is more than just a nation, it is also a civilization with a history stretching across millennia – such cultural and political wealth should not be taken lightly. The Iranians are an old people, and a wise people. Their land and their history speaks as much of God as it does freedom and self-governance.

It is the marriage of those two traditions which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to manifest into a governing system in 1979, one the keeper of the other, both the expressions of a political wisdom Iranians chose to embrace and stand upon.

Today the Supreme Leader of Iran’s Islamic Republic stands not as a tyrant over a democratic parody, but a guide and a keeper of tradition. Sitting outside and over politics, the Supreme Leader has occupied a difficult place as his role has been to both safeguard and embrace those changes innate to any society. And while the affairs of the state might remain ultimately within the president’s hands, it is its faith Iran has entrusted to the Supreme Leader. Denying Iran’s politico-religious paradigm is missing a piece of this very Iranian puzzle.

Where most Western democracies have chosen to separate the state from the religious, Iran embraced both to imagine a new system, best fitted to its own sense of political self. And though many still turn their nose up in disgust – secularists have a tendency to do that at the mention of God; disdain will do little by way of change when popular will stands fast. Iran is the way it is because of and through the will of its people.

Let’s now go back to the order of the day: the double elections and what they entail for Iran’s future.

While Iran has a myriad of political outfits, two have been sitting on very vocal, and opposite end of the spectrum – this is not to say their political visions are antagonistic per se, only that they view change from different vantage points: the reformists and the principalists.

Reformists, as the name suggests, would like to fast-track Iran through economic reforms, to alleviate the negative effects sanctions have had on the economy, while allowing the country to embrace modernity.

Principalists are much more traditional in their views, and would like instead to cautiously implement change by fear; unfettered capitalism would debilitate Iran’s institutions from the inside out.

What do the Iranians say?

Iranians chose somewhere in the middle as it happens. If the capital Tehran spoke in favor of reformists, other provinces were more conservative in their choice, opting instead to stand the course with principalists in both bodies (Majlis and Assembly of Experts).

Candidates on the reformist list took all 30 parliamentary seats in the Tehran constituency, up from just two previously, final results released by Interior Minister Fazli showed.

Where to now?

“Forward” said Ayatollah Khamenei’s press office. A keen observer, the Supreme Leader was first to congratulate Iranians for their high turnout (over 62 percent participation), noting how important it had been for the nation to stand united.

Very much a vote of confidence for President Rouhani, many experts believe the elections will allow for a smoother legislative process. “Rouhani will face less opposition in the Majlis than before,” said Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of politics at Tehran University. “How much less we will have to wait and see,” he added.

In the midst of so much political chatter and the emergence of so many independent political voices Iran kept its composure, a credit I’d attribute to its institutions.

Catherine Shakdam is a political analyst, writer and commentator for the Middle East with a special focus on radical movements and Yemen. A regular pundit on RT and other networks her work has appeared in major publications: MintPress, the Foreign Policy Journal, Mehr News and many others.Director of Programs at the Shafaqna Institute for Middle Eastern Studies, Catherine is also the co-founder of Veritas Consulting. She is the author of Arabia’s Rising – Under The Banner Of The First Imam

2 March 2016

By Ben Norton

ISIS massacred at least 40 people and wounded 58 more in a suicide bombing at a funeral in east Iraq on Monday. Most of the people at the funeral were from the Shia religious community, which the Sunni extremist so-called Islamic State considers to be heretical.

The attack took place in Muqdadiya, northeast of the capital city Baghdad.

Another ISIS suicide bombing took place the same day, west of Baghdad, killing eight members of the Iraqi security forces.

Just one day before, ISIS massacred another 78 Iraqis in a double suicide bombing in a Shia-majority neighborhood in Baghdad. At least 100 more people were wounded.

Sunday’s attack was the deadliest bombing inside the Iraqi capital so far this year.

From Feb. 28 to 29, at least 118 Iraqis were killed. When one factors in the additional ISIS attack on a Shia mosque in Baghdad on Feb. 25, in which 15 people were killed, at least 133 Iraqis have been massacred in the past few days.

And this does not even include the dozen more Iraqi soldiers who died in battles with ISIS during the same time period.

In the horrific November 2015 Paris attacks, 130 people were killed. The world virtually stopped, as heads of state from across the globe condemned the killings, and as stories filled up the headlines of every leading publication.

Yet there has been virtually no international outrage over the 133 Iraqis slaughtered by ISIS in the past few days. Like the Paris attacks, these bombings were primarily directed not at Iraqi fighters, but rather at civilians from the Shia community. Yet there was little press coverage, and most people yawned and moved on.

Do French lives matter more?

According to the United Nations, 670 Iraqis, including 410 civilians, were killed in February. Another 1,050 civilians were injured. ISIS was responsible for most of the casualties, targeting places of worship, markets and even funerals, in what the U.N. calls “vicious” attacks.

In January, another 849 Iraqis were killed, and 1,450 were injured. “This conflict continues to exact a heavy toll on the population,” remarked Ján Kubiš, head of the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq.

The responses — or lack thereof — from Western media outlets, governments, and citizens makes their answer obvious.

Some might argue the reason there is less media attention on attacks in Iraq is because extreme violence like this is more regular in the country. Yet the irony in this argument is that the reason such violence has become quotidian in Iraq is becausethe U.S. destroyed its government and plunged it into chaos.

Al-Qaeda was not in Iraq before the U.S. invaded. And ISIS did not even exist. It was the U.S. military occupation and so-called de-Baathification strategy that dissolved the government, and the U.S.-backed sectarian government that incited a sectarian war, destabilizing the region — and leading to the deaths of at least 1 million Iraqis, according to a report by the Nobel Prize-winning medical organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who backed the war, has conceded that this is true.

A January United Nations report found that at least 18,802 civilians were killed and 36,245 wounded in Iraq in the 22 months between Jan. 1, 2014 and Oct. 31, 2015. Another 3.2 million Iraqis were displaced.

Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion — which the U.N. explicitly said was illegal — and subsequent occupation, Iraq has suffered extreme violence. Paris attacks have become regular occurrences. And yet, although they are equally tragic and horrific, they garner exponentially less attention.

Ben Norton is a politics staff writer at Salon. You can find him on Twitter at@BenjaminNorton.
MORE BEN NORTON.

1 March 2016