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By Dan Glazebrook

Turkey’s shooting down of a Russian jet today shows the utter desperation currently sweeping through the regime change camp as Russia closes in on the death squads in Syria – and does so with massive international support.

At 9.30am on Tuesday morning, a Russian SU-24 jet was shot down by Turkish fighter planes. Its pilots were then allegedly killed by Syrian Turkmen anti-government militias, with the body of one paraded on camera in a video that was immediately posted on youtube. Turkey claimed the jet had encroached on Turkish airspace, but Russia maintains the plane was shot down well inside Syrian territory, 4km from the Turkish border. Rather than calling Russia to defuse any tension arising from the attack, Turkey then immediately called an emergency NATO meeting to ramp it up – “as if we shot down their plane”, Putin commented, “and not they ours”.

To make sense of this apparently senseless provocation, it is necessary to cut through the multiple layers of obfuscation which surround Western narratives around Syria and ISIS. The reality is that the forces essentially line up today just as they did at the outbreak of this crisis in 2011: with the West, Turkey and the gulf monarchies sponsoring an array of death squads bent on bringing down the Syrian government; and Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria (obviously) and Hezbollah resisting this project; the rise of ISIS has not fundamentally changed this underlying dynamic. Indeed, the next-to-useless impact of the West’s year-long phony war against ISIS – alongside its relentless funneling of weaponry to militias with an, at best, ambiguous relationship with Al Qaeda and ISIS – has demonstrated that the Syrian state (or “Assad” to use the West’s puerile personalization) remains the ultimate target of the West’s Syria policy. As Obama himself put it, the goal is not to eliminate ISIS, but rather to “contain” them – that is, keep them focused on weakening Syria and Iraq, and not US allies like Jordan, Turkey or the US’s favoured Kurdish factions. In civil wars, there are only ever really two sides: those who want the insurgency to overthrow the government, and those who want the government to defeat the insurgency. In the Syrian civil war, NATO remains on the same side as ISIS. In this sense, Putin is entirely correct when he commented on the Turkish attack it was a “stab in the back, carried out by the accomplices of terrorists” and asked: “do they want to make NATO serve ISIS?”

Russia’s direct entry into the Syrian conflict two months ago, however, has caused utter panic in the ‘regime change’ camp. Belying all their ‘anti-ISIS’ rhetoric, the US and Britain were openly horrified that Russia might actually be putting up an effective fight against the group and restoring governmental authority to the ungoverned spaces in which it thrives. Immediately, the West began warning of ‘blowback’ to Russia, and ramping up advanced arms shipments to the insurgency. Within a month, a Russian passenger plane was blown up, with ISIS claiming responsibility and British Foreign Minister Philip Hammond calling the attack a “warning shot”. It was a “shot” alright, aimed not only at Russia, but also at her allies; the downing of the plane on Egyptian soil was a deliberate act of economic war against the Egyptian tourist industry, a punishment for Egypt’s support for Russia and Syria and its choking off of fighters to Syria since Sisi came to power. Then, two weeks later, came the attack on Paris. White supremacist niceties prevented Hammond calling that a “warning shot”, but that is precisely what it was, this time at those within the regime change/ anti-Russia camp who were showing signs of ‘wobbling’. Hollande had suggested back in January that sanctions on Russia should be lifted asap, and more recently had showed a willingness to cooperate with Russia militarily over Syria: a ‘red line’ for France’s ‘Atlantic partners’. This is what France was being punished for.

Nevertheless, the net continues to close on the West’s death squad project in Syria. From the start the key to ISIS success has been, firstly, the porous Syria-Turkey border, through which Turkey has allowed a free flow of fighters and weapons back and forth for the past four years, and secondly, the massive amounts of finance ISIS receives both from oil sales and from donors in countries prepared to turn a blind eye to terror financing. In recent weeks, all of this has been threatened by the Russian-led alliance (of which France is increasingly willing to be a part).

The past week has seen a large scale Syrian ground offensive, supported with Russian air cover, in precisely the Syrian-Turkish border region which is the death squads’ lifeline: a move which prompted the Turkish foreign ministry to warn of “serious consequences” if the Russian airstrikes continued. Simultaneously, Russia has embarked on a major campaign against ISIS’ reportedly 1000-strong oil tanker fleet which is so crucial to the group’s financial success. As the Institute for the Study of War reported, “Russian military chief of staff Col. Gen. Andrey Kartapolov announced on November 18 “Russian warplanes are now flying on a free hunt” against ISIS-operated oil tanker trucks traveling back and forth from Syria and Iraq, claiming that Russian strikes had destroyed over 500 ISIS-operated oil trucks in the past “several days.”” This massive dent in the group’s oil transporting capacity even shamed the US into belatedly and somewhat half-heartedly launching similar attacks of their own. The smashing of ISIS’ oil industry will not only be a blow to the entire death squad project, but will directly affect Turkey, widely thought to be involved in the transportation of ISIS-produced oil, and even Erdogan’s family itself, as it is the company run by his son Bilal that is believed to be running the illicit trade.

Finally, France yesterday announced a crackdown on ISIS’ financiers, and demanded other countries do the same. French Finance Minister Michel Sapin implied that the report to the G20 on the issue last month was a whitewash, and demanded that the international Financial Action Task Force be much more explicit in its report to the next G20 finance meeting in February about which countries are lax in terms of terror financing. The move is very likely to expose not only Turkey and Saudi Arabia but also, given HSBC’s links to Al Qaeda, the City of London. Indeed, as the Politico website noted, Sapin specifically “said that considering the reputation of the City of London, he would be “vigilant” on the U.K.’s implementation of EU-agreed measures to clamp down on money laundering and exchange financial information on shady transactions or individuals”.The reactions to his demands that implementation of tougher EU regulations be moved forward will also be instructive (in another move exposing the total lack of urgency in the West’s supposed ‘war on ISIS’, they are currently not due to be implemented for another two years).

And on top of all this, the UN Security Council finally passed a resolution authorizing ‘all necessary measures’ to be used against ISIS, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Syria, effectively granting UN approval to Russia’s intervention. As Pepe Escobar has pointed out, French support for the resolution rendered it politically impossible for the US or UK to use their veto – although US ambassador Samantha Power, an extreme Russophobe and ‘regime changer’, registered her disapproval by failing to turn up for the vote and sending a junior official along instead.

In other words, on all sides the net is closing in on the West’s death squad project in Syria. Turkey’s actions today have merely demonstrated, again, the impotent rage of those who have thrown in their chips with a disastrous and bloody attempt to remake the Middle East. Syria is indeed becoming the Stalingrad of the regime changers – the rock on which the imperial folly of the West and it’s regional imitators may finally be broken.

Dan Glazebrook is author of Divide and Ruin: The West’s Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis

This article originally appeared on RT.com

26 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org

Press Release

Irish Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire and 14 delegates from Australia, Belgium, Canada, India, Ireland, Poland, The Russian Federation, The United Kingdom and the United States, will begin a 6-day visit to Syria to promote peace and to express support for all Syrians who have been victims of war and terror since 2011.

This will be Mairead Maguire’s third visit to Syria as head of a peace delegation. Maguire said: ‘People across the world are rightly expressing solidarity with the people of France after the recent terror attack. However, while there is talk of a war on terror and the focus of that war will be Syria, there is little awareness of how a war will impact on the lives of millions of people in Syria”.

In Syria, Christmas, Easter and the Eid festivals are all national holidays. So the group will acknowledge the unity of Syrians by taking part in an ecumenical service in the Grand Mosque in Damascus.

It will meet displaced Syrians and orphans, and will investigate the reconciliation initiative in Syria.

The group hopes to travel to Homs, a city that has been ravaged by fighting. It will report on how people are rebuilding their lives.

Ms. Maguire said, ‘Syrians are custodians of the two oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. The members of the International peace group come from different political and religious backgrounds, but what unites us is a belief that the people of Syria have to be acknowledged and supported, and this is not just for their survival and their country’s survival, but for humankind’s’.

Ms.Maguire noted that when there is talk of war in the world, it seems appropriate that the international peace delegation will travel to Damascus, to listen to the voices of countless Syrians who call for peace, and to bear witness to the true reality of conflict in that country.

25 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Dave Lindorff

In considering the terrifying but also sadly predictable news of a Russian fighter jet being downed by two Turkish fighters, let’s start with one almost certain assumption — an assumption that no doubt is also being made by the Russian government: Turkey’s action, using US-supplied F-16 planes, was taken with the full knowledge and advance support of the US. In fact, given Turkey’s vassal status as a member of US-dominated NATO, it could well be that Ankara was put up to this act of brinksmanship by the US.

What makes the downing of the Russian jet, and the reported death of at least one of its two pilots (the other was reportedly captured alive by pro-turkish Turkmen fighters on the Syrian side of the Syria-Turkish border, and will presumably be returned to Russia) so dangerous is that as a member of NATO, supposedly a “mutual assistance” treaty that binds all members to come to the defense of one that is attacked, if Russia were to retaliate by downing a Turkish military plane, NATO countries including the US would be obligated to come to Turkey’s defense.

Russia knows this, and that is why so far the Russian response to the downing has been muted. Had it been a Jordanian, Saudi or Kuwaiti jet that downed the Russian SU-24, Russia’s response would have been instantaneous. The guilty party would have had some of its planes shot down, or perhaps even bombed on the ground. But President Putin so far has limited himself to demanding a meeting, to warning that Russian-Turkish economic relations would be threatened, etc.

This restraint is good, but clearly, Vladimir Putin will not stop there. Even putting aside domestic considerations (imaging the public clamor for a military response here in the US if some small country shot down a US plane!), he will have to respond or his whole project — so far stunningly successful — of restoring Russia to its pre-USSR-collapse position as a global power, would be a failure.

Putin’s options are actually quite broad, though some carry considerably more risk for everyone, not just for Russia and Turkey. He could have his own air

force in Syria, where Russia is legally acting at the request of the Syrian government to defend it against rebel forces of ISIS and Al Nusra, some of which are backed by both Turkey and the US, calmly wait for a Turkish military jet to cross into Syrian airspace. At that point it could be downed by Russian planes or missiles. No doubt Turkey will be extraordinarily careful going forward to have its pilots keep well away from Syrian air space too avoid that, but it could happen. My guess is that Russian fighter pilots and anti-aircraft batteries in Syria already have their marching orders to take that action, which probably would not activate NATO confrontation with Russia and lead to World War III, as long as there was reasonable evidence that Turkey’s plane was in Syrian airspace.

But should no such opportunity present itself, Russia has plenty of other opportunities to counter Turkey. Remember, Russia is also defending Syria’s coastline, and could sink or capture a Turkish ship that entered Syrian waters (or Russian waters in the Black Sea, which borders both countries).

Russia — knowing that this is really not about Turkey, but about push-back by the US against growing Russian power and influence, both globally and in the Middle East region — could also choose to respond in a venue where it has more of an advantage, for example in Ukraine, where it could amp up its support for the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Lugansk, perhaps by downing a Ukrainian military plane, or more broadly, providing air cover to protect those regions. Russia could also, less directly, provide aid to Kurdish rebels in both Syria and in Turkey itself who are fighting against Turkish forces.

I’m sure there are plenty of other options available to Russia also to turn the screws against both Turkey and NATO, without openly pushing buttons that could lead to a direct confrontation with the US and its NATO fiction. Working in Russia’s favor is that the US aside, the European nations of NATO have no desire to be at war with Russia. There are clearly hotheads in the US Congress, the Pentagon, and perhaps even within the neo-con-infested Obama administration, who are pushing for just such a mad showdown. But in Europe, where the actual fighting would mostly occur, and where memories are still strong of the destructive power of war, there is no taste for such insanity. It could, in fact, have been a big error in the long run for the US to push Turkey into such a deadly provocation, if it leads to more anti-American sentiment among the citizens of such key NATO countries as France, Germany, Italy and Britain.

It should be added that Russia and China have become much closer in recent years, economically, politically and militarily. This means there is also the possibility that the two countries could, in concert, step up pressure on the US in the western Pacific, for example by forcing down one of the provocative US flights near China’s new island projects in the South China Sea. That would force an already stretched US military to shift more forces to Asia from Europe and the Middle East.

It is all terribly dangerous and it is hard to predict where things will lead. One thing seems certain, though. This outrageous shootdown of a Russian plane that was in no way posing a threat to Turkey or Turkish forces, will not end here, because Russia and President Putin cannot allow Turkey and NATO to so blatantly act against Russia and its pilots and go unpunished, particularly as it is Russia that is acting legally in Syria, while the US, Turkey and other nations backing rebel forces there are in all acting blatant violation of international law.

Unless saner heads start prevailing in Washington, this could all quickly spiral into the kind of situation in 1914, where a lot of ill-conceived treaties led to a minor incident in the Balkans turning inexorably into World War I.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, an online newspaper collective

25 November, 2015
Thiscantbehappening.net

By Paul Craig Roberts

Turkey’s unprovoked shoot-down of a Russian military aircraft over Syria raises interesting questions. It seems unlikely that the Turkish government would commit an act of war against a much more powerful neighbor unless Washington had cleared the attack. Turkey’s government is not very competent, but even the incompetent know better than to put themselves into a position of facing Russia alone.

If the attack was cleared with Washington, was Obama bypassed by the neocons who control his government, or is Obama himself complicit? Clearly the neoconservatives are disturbed by the French president’s call for unity with Russia against ISIL and easily could have used their connections to Turkey to stage an event that Washington can use to prevent cooperation with Russia.

Washington’s complicity is certainly indicated, but it is not completely out of the question that the well-placed Turks who are purchasing oil from ISIL took revenge against Russia for destroying their oil tanker investments and profitable business. But if the attack has a private or semi-private origin in connections between gangsters and military, would Turkey’s president have defended the shoot-down on such spurious grounds as “national defense”? No one can believe that one Russian jet is a threat to Turkey’s security.

Don’t expect the presstitutes to look into any such questions. The presstitutes, such as the BBC’s Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford, are spinning the story that the loss of the Russian aircraft, and earlier the airliner, proves that Putin’s policy of air strikes against iSIL has backfired as Russians are not safer.

The responses to the shoot-down are also interesting. From what I heard of Obama’s press conference, Obama’s definition of “moderate Syrian rebels” includes all the extremist jihadish groups, such as al Nursa and ISIL, that are the focus of the Russian attacks. Only Assad is an extremist. Obama, following the neocon line, says that Assad has too much blood on his hands to be allowed to remain president of Syria.

Obama is not specific about the “blood on Assad’s hands,” but we can be. The blood is the blood of ISIL forces fighting the Syrian army. Obama doesn’t refer to the blood on ISIL’s hands, but even the presstitutes have told us the horror stories associated with the blood on ISIL’s hands, with whom Obama has allied us.

And what about the blood on Obama’s hands? Here we are talking about a very large quantity of blood: the blood of entire countries—Libya, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and the blood that Obama’s puppet government in Kiev has spilled of the ethnic Russian inhabitants of Ukraine, not to forget the Palestinian blood spilled by Israel using US supplied weapons.

If the blood on Assad’s hands disqualifies Assad from office, the much greater quantity on Obama’s hands disqualifies Obama. And Cameron. And Hollande. And Merkel. And Netanyahu.

Throughout the entire Washington orchestrated conflicts in the Middle East, Africa, and Ukraine, the Russian government has spoken reasonably and responded in a diplomatic manner to the many provocations. The Russian government relied on European governments realizing that Europe does not benefit from conflicts generated by Washington and separating themselves from a policy that is against their interests. But Europe proved to be a collection of American vassals, not independent countries capable of independent foreign policies.

In its campaign against ISIL in Syria, the Russian government relied on the agreement made with NATO countries to avoid engaging in the air. Now Turkey has violated this agreement.

I will be surprised if the Russian government any longer places any trust in the words of the West and any hope in diplomacy with the West. By now the Russian government and the Russian people will have learned that the Wolfowitz doctrine means what it says and is in force against Russia.

From the Ukrainian attack on Crimea’s power supply and the blackout that is affecting Crimea, the Russian government has also learned that Washington’s puppet government in Kiev intends further conflict with Russia.

Washington has made it clear from the beginning that Washington’s focus is on overthrowing Assad, not ISIL. Despite the alleged attack on France by ISIL, the US State Department press spokesperson, Admiral John Kirby, said that Russia cannot be a member of the coalition against ISIL until Russia stops propping up Assad.

To the extent that the shoot-down of the Russian military aircraft has a silver lining, the incident has likely saved the Russian government from a coalition in which Russia would have lost control of its war against ISIL and would have had to accept the defeat of Assad’s removal.

Each step along the way the Russian government has held strong cards that it did not play, trusting instead to diplomacy. Diplomacy has now proven to be a deadend. If Russia does not join the real game and begin to play its strong cards, Russia will be defeated.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

25 November, 2015
Paulcraigroberts.org

By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

Why France’s brave new war on ISIS is a sick joke and an insult to the victims of the Paris attacks.

“We stand alongside Turkey in its efforts in protecting its national security and fighting against terrorism. France and Turkey are on the same side within the framework of the international coalition against the terrorist group ISIS.”
— Statement by French Foreign Ministry, July 2015

19 Nov 2015 – The 13th November Paris massacre will be remembered, like 9/11, as a defining moment in world history.

The murder of 129 people, the injury of 352 more, by ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS) acolytes striking multiple targets simultaneously in the heart of Europe, mark a major sea-change in the terror threat.

For the first time, a Mumbai-style attack has occurred on Western soil — the worst attack on Europe in decades. As such, it has triggered a seemingly commensurate response from France: the declaration of a nationwide state of emergency, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1961 Algerian war.

ISIS has followed up with threats to attack Washington and New York City.

Meanwhile, President Hollande wants European Union leaders to suspend the Schengen Agreement on open borders to allow dramatic restrictions on freedom of movement across Europe. He also demands the EU-wide adoption of the Passenger Name Records (PNR) system allowing intelligence services to meticulously track the travel patterns of Europeans, along with an extension of the state of emergency to at least three months.

Under the extension, French police can now block any website, put people under house arrest without trial, search homes without a warrant, and prevent suspects from meeting others deemed a threat.

“We know that more attacks are being prepared, not just against France but also against other European countries,” said the French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “We are going to live with this terrorist threat for a long time.”

Hollande plans to strengthen the powers of police and security services under new anti-terror legislation, and to pursue amendments to the constitution that would permanently enshrine the state of emergency into French politics. “We need an appropriate tool we can use without having to resort to the state of emergency,” he explained.

Parallel with martial law at home, Hollande was quick to accelerate military action abroad, launching 30 airstrikes on over a dozen Islamic State targets in its de facto capital, Raqqa.

France’s defiant promise, according to Hollande, is to “destroy” ISIS.

The ripple effect from the attacks in terms of the impact on Western societies is likely to be permanent. In much the same way that 9/11 saw the birth of a new era of perpetual war in the Muslim world, the 13/11 Paris attacks are already giving rise to a brave new phase in that perpetual war: a new age of Constant Vigilance, in which citizens are vital accessories to the police state, enacted in the name of defending a democracy eroded by the very act of defending it through Constant Vigilance.

Mass surveillance at home and endless military projection abroad are the twin sides of the same coin of national security, which must simply be maximized as much as possible.

“France is at war,” Hollande told French parliament at the Palace of Versailles.

“We’re not engaged in a war of civilizations, because these assassins do not represent any. We are in a war against jihadist terrorism which is threatening the whole world.”

The friend of our enemy is our friend

Conspicuously missing from President Hollande’s decisive declaration of war however, was any mention of the biggest elephant in the room: state-sponsorship.

Syrian passports discovered near the bodies of two of the suspected Paris attackers, according to police sources, were fake, and likely forged in Turkey.

Earlier this year, the Turkish daily Meydan reported that citing an Uighur source that more than 100,000 fake Turkish passports had been given to ISIS. The figure, according to the US Army’s Foreign Studies Military Office (FSMO), is likely exaggerated, but corroborated “by Uighurs captured with Turkish passports in Thailand and Malaysia.”

Further corroboration came from a Sky News Arabia report by correspondent Stuart Ramsey, which revealed that the Turkish government was certifying passports of foreign militants crossing the Turkey-Syria border to join ISIS. The passports, obtained from Kurdish fighters, had the official exit stamp of Turkish border control, indicating the ISIS militants had entered Syria with full knowledge of Turkish authorities.

The dilemma facing the Erdogan administration is summed up by the FSMO: “If the country cracks down on illegal passports and militants transiting the country, the militants may target Turkey for attack. However, if Turkey allows the current course to continue, its diplomatic relations with other countries and internal political situation will sour.”

This barely scratches the surface. A senior Western official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer from a major raid on an ISIS safehouse told the Guardian that “direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now ‘undeniable.’”

The same official confirmed that Turkey, a longstanding member of NATO, is not just supporting ISIS, but also other jihadist groups, including Ahrar al-Sham and Jabhat al-Nusra, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. “The distinctions they draw [with other opposition groups] are thin indeed,” said the official. “There is no doubt at all that they militarily cooperate with both.”

In a rare insight into this brazen state-sponsorship of ISIS, a year ago Newsweek reported the testimony of a former ISIS communications technician, who had travelled to Syria to fight the regime of Bashir al-Assad.

The former ISIS fighter told Newsweek that Turkey was allowing ISIS trucks from Raqqa to cross the “border, through Turkey and then back across the border to attack Syrian Kurds in the city of Serekaniye in northern Syria in February.” ISIS militants would freely travel “through Turkey in a convoy of trucks,” and stop “at safehouses along the way.”

The former ISIS communication technician also admitted that he would routinely “connect ISIS field captains and commanders from Syria with people in Turkey on innumerable occasions,” adding that “the people they talked to were Turkish officials… ISIS commanders told us to fear nothing at all because there was full cooperation with the Turks.”

In January, authenticated official documents of the Turkish military were leaked online, showing that Turkey’s intelligence services had been caught in Adana by military officers transporting missiles, mortars and anti-aircraft ammunition via truck “to the al-Qaeda terror organisation” in Syria.

According to other ISIS suspects facing trial in Turkey, the Turkish national military intelligence organization (MIT) had begun smuggling arms, including NATO weapons to jihadist groups in Syria as early as 2011.

The allegations have been corroborated by a prosecutor and court testimony of Turkish military police officers, who confirmed that Turkish intelligence was delivering arms to Syrian jihadists from 2013 to 2014.

Documents leaked in September 2014 showed that Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan had financed weapons shipments to ISIS through Turkey. A clandestine plane from Germany delivered arms in the Etimesgut airport in Turkey and split into three containers, two of which were dispatched to ISIS.

A report by the Turkish Statistics Institute confirmed that the government had provided at least $1 million in arms to Syrian rebels within that period, contradicting official denials. Weapons included grenades, heavy artillery, anti-aircraft guns, firearms, ammunition, hunting rifles and other weapons — but the Institute declined to identify the specific groups receiving the shipments.

Information of that nature emerged separately. Just two months ago, Turkish police raided a news outlet that published revelations on how the local customs director had approved weapons shipments from Turkey to ISIS.

Turkey has also played a key role in facilitating the life-blood of ISIS’ expansion: black market oil sales. Senior political and intelligence sources in Turkey and Iraq confirm that Turkish authorities have actively facilitated ISIS oil sales through the country.

Last summer, Mehmet Ali Ediboglu, an MP from the main opposition, the Republican People’s Party, estimated the quantity of ISIS oil sales in Turkey at about $800 million — that was over a year ago.

By now, this implies that Turkey has facilitated over $1 billion worth of black market ISIS oil sales to date.

There is no “self-sustaining economy” for ISIS, contrary to the fantasies of the Washington Post and Financial Times in their recent faux investigations, according to Martin Chulov of the Guardian:

“… tankers carrying crude drawn from makeshift refineries still make it to the [Turkey-Syria] border. One Isis member says the organisation remains a long way from establishing a self-sustaining economy across the area of Syria and Iraq it controls. ‘They need the Turks. I know of a lot of cooperation and it scares me,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how Turkey can attack the organisation too hard. There are shared interests.’”

Senior officials of the ruling AKP have conceded the extent of the government’s support for ISIS.

The liberal Turkish daily Taraf quoted an AKP founder, Dengir Mir Mehmet Fırat, admitting: “In order to weaken the developments in Rojova [Kurdish province in Syria] the government gave concessions and arms to extreme religious groups…the government was helping the wounded. The Minister of Health said something such as, it’s a human obligation to care for the ISIS wounded.”

The paper also reported that ISIS militants routinely receive medical treatment in hospitals in southeast Turkey— including al-Baghdadi’s right-hand man.

Writing in Hurriyet Daily News, journalist Ahu Ozyurt described his “shock” at learning of the pro-ISIS “feelings of the AKP’s heavyweights” in Ankara and beyond, including “words of admiration for ISIL from some high-level civil servants even in Şanliurfa. ‘They are like us, fighting against seven great powers in the War of Independence,’ one said. ‘Rather than the PKK on the other side, I would rather have ISIL as a neighbor,’ said another.”

Meanwhile, NATO leaders feign outrage and learned liberal pundits continue to scratch their heads in bewilderment as to ISIS’ extraordinary resilience and inexorable expansion.

Unsurprisingly, then, Turkey’s anti-ISIS bombing raids have largely been token gestures. Under cover of fighting ISIS, Turkey has largely used the opportunity to bomb the Kurdish forces of the Democratic Union Party (YPG) in Syria and Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey and Iraq. Yet those forces are widely recognized to be the most effective fighting ISIS on the ground.

Meanwhile, Turkey has gone to pains to thwart almost every US effort to counter ISIS. When this summer, 54 graduates of the Pentagon’s $500 million ‘moderate’ Syrian rebel train-and-equip program were kidnapped by Jabhat al-Nusra — al-Qaeda’s arm in Syria — it was due to a tip-off from Turkish intelligence.

The Turkish double-game was confirmed by multiple rebel sources to McClatchy, but denied by a Pentagon spokesman who said, reassuringly:

“Turkey is a NATO ally, close friend of the United States and an important partner in the international coalition.”

Nevermind that Turkey has facilitated about $1 billion in ISIS oil sales.

According to a US-trained Division 30 officer with access to information on the incident, Turkey was trying “to leverage the incident into an expanded role in the north for the Islamists in Nusra and Ahrar” and to persuade the United States to “speed up the training of rebels.”

As Professor David Graeber of London School of Economics pointed out:

“Had Turkey placed the same kind of absolute blockade on Isis territories as they did on Kurdish-held parts of Syria… that blood-stained ‘caliphate’ would long since have collapsed — and arguably, the Paris attacks may never have happened. And if Turkey were to do the same today, Isis would probably collapse in a matter of months. Yet, has a single western leader called on Erdoğan to do this?”

Some officials have spoken up about the paradox, but to no avail. Last year, Claudia Roth, deputy speaker of the German parliament, expressed shock that NATO is allowing Turkey to harbour an ISIS camp in Istanbul, facilitate weapons transfers to Islamist militants through its borders, and tacitly support IS oil sales.

Nothing happened.

Instead, Turkey has been amply rewarded for its alliance with the very same terror-state that wrought the Paris massacre on 13th November 2015. Just a month earlier, German Chancellor Angela Merkel offered to fast-track Turkey’s bid to join the EU, permitting visa-free travel to Europe for Turks.

No doubt this would be great news for the security of Europe’s borders.

State-sponsorship

It is not just Turkey. Senior political and intelligence sources in the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) have confirmed the complicity of high-level KRG officials in facilitating ISIS oil sales, for personal profit, and to sustain the government’s flagging revenues.

Despite a formal parliamentary inquiry corroborating the allegations, there have been no arrests, no charges, no prosecutions.

The KRG “middle-men” and other government officials facilitating these sales continue their activities unimpeded.

In his testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in September 2014, General Martin Dempsey, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked by Senator Lindsay Graham whether he knew of “any major Arab ally that embraces ISIL”?

General Dempsey replied:

“I know major Arab allies who fund them.”

In other words, the most senior US military official at the time had confirmed that ISIS was being funded by the very same “major Arab allies” that had just joined the US-led anti-ISIS coalition.

These allies include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait in particular — which for the last four years at least have funneled billions of dollars largely to extremist rebels in Syria. No wonder that their anti-ISIS airstrikes, already miniscule, have now reduced almost to zero as they focus instead on bombing Shi’a Houthis in Yemen, which, incidentally, is paving the way for the rise of ISIS there.

Porous links between some Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels, Islamist militant groups like al-Nusra, Ahrar al-Sham and ISIS, have enabled prolific weapons transfers from ‘moderate’ to Islamist militants.

The consistent transfers of CIA-Gulf-Turkish arms supplies to ISIS have been documented through analysis of weapons serial numbers by the UK-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR), whose database on the illicit weapons trade is funded by the EU and Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.

“Islamic State forces have captured significant quantities of US-manufactured small arms and have employed them on the battlefield,” a CAR report found in September 2014. “M79 90 mm anti-tank rockets captured from IS forces in Syria are identical to M79 rockets transferred by Saudi Arabia to forces operating under the ‘Free Syrian Army’ umbrella in 2013.”

German journalist Jurgen Todenhofer, who spent 10 days inside the Islamic State, reported last year that ISIS is being “indirectly” armed by the West:

“They buy the weapons that we give to the Free Syrian Army, so they get Western weapons — they get French weapons… I saw German weapons, I saw American weapons.”

ISIS, in other words, is state-sponsored — indeed, sponsored by purportedly Western-friendly regimes in the Muslim world, who are integral to the anti-ISIS coalition.

Which then begs the question as to why Hollande and other Western leaders expressing their determination to “destroy” ISIS using all means necessary, would prefer to avoid the most significant factor of all: the material infrastructure of ISIS’ emergence in the context of ongoing Gulf and Turkish state support for Islamist militancy in the region.

There are many explanations, but one perhaps stands out: the West’s abject dependence on terror-toting Muslim regimes, largely to maintain access to Middle East, Mediterranean and Central Asian oil and gas resources.

Pipelines

Much of the strategy currently at play was candidly described in a 2008 US Army-funded RAND report, Unfolding the Future of the Long War (pdf). The report noted that “the economies of the industrialized states will continue to rely heavily on oil, thus making it a strategically important resource.” As most oil will be produced in the Middle East, the US has “motive for maintaining stability in and good relations with Middle Eastern states.” It just so happens that those states support Islamist terrorism:

“The geographic area of proven oil reserves coincides with the power base of much of the Salafi-jihadist network. This creates a linkage between oil supplies and the long war that is not easily broken or simply characterized… For the foreseeable future, world oil production growth and total output will be dominated by Persian Gulf resources… The region will therefore remain a strategic priority, and this priority will interact strongly with that of prosecuting the long war.”

Declassified government documents clarify beyond all doubt that a primary motivation for the 2003 Iraq War, preparations for which had begun straight after 9/11, was installing a permanent US military presence in the Persian Gulf to secure access to the region’s oil and gas.

The obsession over black gold did not end with Iraq, though — and is not exclusive to the West.

“Most of the foreign belligerents in the war in Syria are gas-exporting countries with interests in one of the two competing pipeline projects that seek to cross Syrian territory to deliver either Qatari or Iranian gas to Europe,” wrote Professor Mitchell Orenstein of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, in Foreign Affairs, the journal of Washington DC’s Council on Foreign Relations.

In 2009, Qatar had proposed to build a pipeline to send its gas northwest via Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria to Turkey. But Assad “refused to sign the plan,” reports Orenstein. “Russia, which did not want to see its position in European gas markets undermined, put him under intense pressure not to.”

Russia’s Gazprom sells 80% of its gas to Europe. So in 2010, Russia put its weight behind “an alternative Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline that would pump Iranian gas from the same field out via Syrian ports such as Latakia and under the Mediterranean.” The project would allow Moscow “to control gas imports to Europe from Iran, the Caspian Sea region, and Central Asia.”

Then in July 2011, a $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline deal was announced, and a preliminary agreement duly signed by Assad.

Later that year, the US, UK, France and Israel were ramping up covert assistance to rebel factions in Syria to elicit the “collapse” of Assad’s regime “from within.”

“The United States… supports the Qatari pipeline as a way to balance Iran and diversify Europe’s gas supplies away from Russia,” explained Orenstein in Foreign Affairs.

An article in the Armed Forces Journal published last year by Major Rob Taylor, an instructor at the US Army’s Command and General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, thus offered scathing criticism of conventional media accounts of the Syrian conflict that ignore the pipeline question:

“Any review of the current conflict in Syria that neglects the geopolitical economics of the region is incomplete… Viewed through a geopolitical and economic lens, the conflict in Syria is not a civil war, but the result of larger international players positioning themselves on the geopolitical chessboard in preparation for the opening of the pipeline… Assad’s pipeline decision, which could seal the natural gas advantage for the three Shi’a states, also demonstrates Russia’s links to Syrian petroleum and the region through Assad. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, as well as al-Qaeda and other groups, are maneuvering to depose Assad and capitalize on their hoped-for Sunni conquest in Damascus. By doing this, they hope to gain a share of control over the ‘new’ Syrian government, and a share in the pipeline wealth.”

The pipelines would access not just gas in the Iran-Qatari field, but also potentially newly discovered offshore gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean — encompassing the offshore territories of Israel, Palestine, Cyprus, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. The area has been estimated to hold as much as 1.7 billion barrels of oil and up to 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, which geologists believe could be just a third of the total quantities of undiscovered fossil fuels in the Levant.

A December 2014 report by the US Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute, authored by a former UK Ministry of Defense research director, noted that Syria specifically holds significant offshore oil and gas potential. It noted:

“Once the Syria conflict is resolved, prospects for Syrian offshore production — provided commercial resources are found — are high.”

Assad’s brutality and illegitimacy is beyond question — but until he had demonstrated his unwillingness to break with Russia and Iran, especially over their proposed pipeline project, US policy toward Assad had been ambivalent.

State Department cables obtained by Wikileaks reveal that US policy had wavered between financing Syrian opposition groups to facilitate “regime change,” and using the threat of regime change to induce “behavior reform.”

President Obama’s preference for the latter resulted in US officials, including John Kerry, shamelessly courting Assad in the hopes of prying him away from Iran, opening up the Syrian economy to US investors, and aligning the regime with US-Israeli regional designs.

Even when the 2011 Arab Spring protests resulted in Assad’s security forces brutalizing peaceful civilian demonstrators, both Kerry and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton insisted that he was a “reformer” — which he took as a green light to respond to further protests with massacres.

Assad’s decision to side with Russia and Iran, and his endorsement of their favoured pipeline project, were key factors in the US decision to move against him.

Europe’s dance with the devil

Turkey plays a key role in the US-Qatar-Saudi backed route designed to circumvent Russia and Iran, as an intended gas hub for exports to European markets.

It is only one of many potential pipeline routes involving Turkey.

“Turkey is key to gas supply diversification of the entire European Union. It would be a huge mistake to stall energy cooperation any further,” urged David Koranyi, director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasian Energy Futures initiative and a former national security advisor to the Prime Minister of Hungary.

Koranyi noted that both recent “major gas discoveries in the Eastern Mediterranean” and “gas supplies from Northern Iraq” could be “sourced to supply the Turkish market and transported beyond to Europe.”

Given Europe’s dependence on Russia for about a quarter of its gas, the imperative to minimize this dependence and reduce the EU’s vulnerability to supply outages has become an urgent strategic priority. The priority fits into longstanding efforts by the US to wean Central and Eastern Europe out of the orbit of Russian power.

Turkey is pivotal to the US-EU vision for a new energy map:

“The EU would gain a reliable alternative supply route to further diversify its imports from Russia. Turkey, as a hub, would benefit from transit fees and other energy-generated revenues. As additional supplies of gas may become available for export over the next five to 10 years in the wider region, Turkey is the natural route via which these could be shipped to Europe.”

A report last year by Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) warned that Europe faced a looming energy crisis, particularly the UK, France and Italy, due to “critical shortages of natural resources.”

“Coal, oil and gas resources in Europe are running down and we need alternatives,” said GSI’s Professor Victoria Andersen.

She also recommended a rapid shift to renewables, but most European leaders apparently have other ideas — namely, shifting to a network of pipelines that would transport oil and gas from the Middle East, Eastern Mediterranean and Central Asia to Europe: via our loving friend, Erdogan’s Turkey.

Nevermind that under Erdogan, Turkey is the leading sponsor of the barbaric ‘Islamic State.’

We must not ask unpatriotic questions about Western foreign policy, or NATO for that matter.

We must not wonder about the pointless spectacle of airstrikes and Stazi-like police powers, given our shameless affair with Erdogan’s terror-regime, which funds and arms our very own enemy.

We must not question the motives of our elected leaders, who despite sitting on this information for years, still lie to us, flagrantly, even now, before the blood of 129 French citizens has even dried, pretending that they intend to “destroy” a band of psychopathic murdering scum, armed and funded from within the heart of NATO.

No, no, no. Life goes on. Business-as-usual must continue. Citizens must keep faith in the wisdom of The Security State.

The US must insist on relying on Turkish intelligence to vet and train ‘moderate’ rebels in Syria, and the EU must insist on extensive counter-terrorism cooperation with Erdogan’s regime, while fast-tracking the ISIS godfather’s accession into the union.

But fear not: Hollande is still intent on “destroying” ISIS. Just like Obama and Cameron — and Erdogan.

It’s just that some red lines simply cannot be crossed.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment and founder, editor-in-chief of INSURGE intelligence. He is an investigative journalist, bestselling author and international security scholar. He is the winner of a 2015 Project Censored Award, known as the ‘Alternative Pulitzer Prize’, for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian work, and was selected in the Evening Standard’s ‘Power 1,000’ most globally influential Londoners. Nafeez has also written for TRANSCEND Media Service, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde Diplomatique, New Internationalist, Counterpunch, Truthout, among others. He is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Faculty of Science and Technology at Anglia Ruskin University. He is the author of A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It (2010), and the scifi thriller novel Zero Point, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest.

This article was amended on 21st November 2015 to review and supplement sources cited relating to Turkish sponsorship of ISIS, ensuring their credibility, accuracy and plausibility. Some previously quoted sources were removed due to being too partisan within the Turkish political scene, and new more reliable sources added.

23 November 2015

www.transcend.org

 

By Mousumi Roy

The US war on Daesh (ISIS) started in 2014. Daesh’s territory is smaller than it was and continues to contract. The number of civilian casualties has been quite limited so the non-combatants on the ground are not being driven to join Daesh out of hopes of revenge against US bombers. Some Daesh officers were killed in Mosul by a bomb planted by unhappy constituents. You have never seen a US offensive like this one before. Of course the US has developed some excellent smart munitions that also have small blast radii so it is possible to engage in surgical air strikes. The pamphlets were dropped to warn drivers to stay away from their trucks that were then strafed by A-10s and C-130 gunship versions.

Daesh is popular in Saudi Arabia. That is one reason why the King fears Daesh. Al-Baghdadi has created himself in the image of al-Wahhab and as such is popular in Saudi Arabia. No doubt that money flows from wealthy privileged people in the Gulf states to Daesh. The US has urged the region to police itself. If I recall there was a prominent Kuwaiti who was moving Gulf money to Daesh.

Daesh sells refined oil products through distribution channels in Turkey. Daesh also sells refined oil products to the people who live in the Caliphate. The Caliphate carries on trade with its neighbours. People drive in and out of Daesh territory on a daily basis both into other parts of Syria and Iraq, and into Turkey. The Caliphate is not economically isolated. Its residents still generate income and still have money to buy gasoline. There are major checkpoints that people must pass through but traffic still goes in and out. ‪Daesh trades gasoline for vegetables with rival rebel groups in Syria. Why the US was reluctant to destroy Daesh’s gasoline/diesel distribution capacity. It hurt the local population and it hurt the anti-Assad rebels. Prices have gone up dramatically and truck drivers are now refusing to transport Daesh oil for fear of being killed…‬

The new joint force comprising Arab rebels and YPG have liberated 200 villages in two weeks killing hundreds of Daesh fighters. The main issue is not whether or not a small force could capture Raqqa. It is how to hold onto it given that Daesh would resort to guerilla warfare involving suicide bombers. Al-Nusra is threatening the Syrian Kurds. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish forces to be enemies of Turkey. The US sees the Syrian Kurds as allies. All the players in the region agree that al-Nusra are part of al-Qaeda and; therefore, terrorists who cannot be supported. So where does al-Nusra get its funding and weapons? And why is al-Nusra attacking the YPG?

President Erdogan of Turkey is demanding that the US stop supporting the Syrian Kurds. Recently the US airdropped many tons of supplies to the Syrian Kurds but to placate Erdogan the US is calling the group the Democratic Forces of Syria. It is composed of the Syrian Kurdish forces known as the YPG and The Syrian Arab Coalition which is a small group of moderate Syrian Arab rebels most of whom come from the Raqqa area.

Daesh forces fight against the other Syrian rebels as well as fighting regime forces. US airstrikes have made it possible for the Syrian Kurds (and their new Arab allies) to advance on Raqqa. Daesh lost as many as 2,000 fighters trying to hold onto Kobani. Since being driven out of Kobani Daesh has had to pull more of its fighters back towards Raqqa to oppose the YPG advance. This reduces the number of Daesh fighters available to fight the other anti-Assad rebels. The rebels that Russia is helping Assad attack has pulled fighters out of areas where they were fighting Daesh. US support of the Kurds is making it possible for the other rebels to focus on Assad’s forces. Daesh is moving fighters and resources to Mosul to escape the current bombing of Raqqa. While France is using smart munitions to limit collateral damage the Russians are dropping a large mass of dumb munitions. Raqqa may be experiencing some serious damage. Russia has deployed 25 heavy bombers and many cruise missiles.

We know what kind of aircraft the Russians are using which tells us what kind of targets are being sought. We also know that the Russians are using dumb munitions because 1- they are cheap and 2- the Russians do not have many smart munitions. We also know what modifications are needed to the Russian aircraft in order to use smart munitions. Most of the Russian aircraft at Latakia do not have these modifications.

The US is not going to give MANPADS to the rebels. Up to this point the US has not declared war on Syria. US airstrikes on Syrian territory have Assad’s tacit approval. That is why the US is only bombing Daesh. Assad approves of the bombing of Daesh. If other rebels end up with MANPADS they could be used against Russian aircraft piloted by Russians. Obama has made it clear that he will not tolerate US allies supplying Syrian rebels with MANPADS. Saudi Arabia is abiding by that demand.

The US could carry out expensive drone surveillance of places it thinks the Russians have bombed but in most cases is that those places are battlefields that will have sustained damage from bombs, artillery, artillery rockets, mortars, tank rounds, and TOW missiles. How much of that could be attributed to Russian bombs? Since we know or believe that the Russians are just bombing rebel positions in support of Assad’s offensive what is there to be learned?

The US air strikes were not very effective until the day that Turkey allowed the Iraqi Kurds to reinforce the Syrian Kurds in Kobani. The Iraqi Kurds brought US target acquisition capabilities with them. From that point on US air strikes were very effective.The fact is that the US has targeted refineries and other fixed installations associated with oil production in Syria and Iraq. It could do so using high flying fighters because the fixed installations can be identified by satellites and GPS coordinates provided to the pilots. It makes sense that the US would have targeted the refineries but not the trucks based on the way it acquires targets.

The A-10 has been out of production for a long time. There are no spare parts being made anymore. The JSF was to take over the role of close air support but it is too expensive and it is running late. So a handful of A-10s have been gathered together to provide more close air support to troops on the ground. Any spare parts for operating A-10s have to come from scrapped A-10s. The JSF is a stealth aircraft. Russian MANPADS are even more lethal than stingers and they are guided by radar. The US presumed that non-stealthy close air support aircraft like the A-10 are obsolete. They are operating at considerable risk.

The CIA was tasked with trying to determine how many MANPADS are floating around Syria. The US has refused to supply any of the rebels with stingers even though that is what they have been demanding for some time. Daesh only has stingers because they captured them from the Iraqi Army in Mosul. That puts the A-10s at risk. The C-130 gunshsips are at even greater risk. They are just Hercules transports with huge guns. One variant fires a 105 mm shell. Stingers have an effective altitude of 14,000 feet. A-10s and C-130a operate at a few hundred to a few thousand feet.

‪Both the pentagon and the white house have been very cautious because they know that to succeed they need the support of the people in the regions occupied by Daesh. They are very much influenced by the experience of the Iraq war. Upwards of 75% of aircraft sent to attack a position return with all their ordnance because of a risk of civilian casualties.‬

We cannot compare Hamas, Gaza, & the IDF with Daesh, Syria, and the US air force. Daesh executes a lot of people on a regular basis but I would be surprised if they had executed 170,000. Most of its victims are muslims. The people fighting Daesh on the ground are Kurds, Iraqi soldiers, Iraqi Shiite militia members, rival Arab rebel groups in Syria and soldiers of the Syrian Armed Forces.

First Obama created ISIS out of the cesspool he left in Libya, reducing Africa’s wealthiest nation to rubble, because Gaddafi was too independent of Washington’s dictates. Then he lied about Assad because Assad was also too independent. Obama helped fund, train, arm and support ISIS terrorist brigades and their affiliates – along with his coalition of terror, Britain, France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Israel, Qatar, Emirates – even as he publicly pretended to be fighting them in Iraq and Syria. It wasn’t until Russia entered Syria and wasted ISIS, that Obama and his fellow terrorist sponsors flew into a panic.

Russia is ensuring a safe haven for Assad….2016 is going to be a bad year for Russians. Forced austerity will lead to a loss of public services.

Mousumi Roy is a columnist based in Muscat

24 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Jeffrey D. Sachs

Hillary Clinton’s speech on ISIS to the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) showed clearly what to expect in a Clinton presidency: more of the same. In her speech, Clinton doubled down on the existing, failed U.S. approach in the Middle East, the one she pursued as Secretary of State.

The CIA-led policy in the Middle East works like this. If a regime is deemed to be unfriendly to the U.S., topple it. If a competitor like the Soviet Union or Russia has a foothold in the region, try to push it out. If this means arming violent insurgencies, including Sunni jihadists, and thereby creating mayhem: so be it. And if the result is terrorist blowback around the world by the forces created by the US, then double down on bombing and regime change.

In rare cases, great presidents learn to stand up to the CIA and the rest of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. JFK became one of the greatest presidents in American history when he came to realize the awful truth that his own military and CIA advisors had contributed to the onset of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The CIA-led Bay of Pigs fiasco and other CIA blunders had provoked a terrifying response from the Soviet Union. Recognizing that the U.S. approach had contributed to bringing the world to the brink, Kennedy bravely and successfully stood up to the warmongering pushed by so many of his advisors and pursued peace, both during and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. He thereby saved the world from nuclear annihilation and halted the unchecked proliferation of nuclear arms.

Clinton’s speech shows that she and her advisors are good loyalists of the military-industrial-intelligence complex. Her speech included an impressive number of tactical elements: who should do the bombing and who should be the foot soldiers. Yet all of this tactical precision is nothing more than business as usual. Would Clinton ever have the courage and vision to push back against the U.S. security establishment, as did JFK, and thereby restore global diplomacy and reverse the upward spiral of war and terror?

Just as the CIA contributed to the downward slide to the Cuban Missile Crisis, and just as many of JFK’s security chiefs urged war rather than negotiation during that crisis, so too today’s Middle East terrorism, wars, and refugee crises have been stoked by misguided CIA-led interventions. Starting in 1979, the CIA began to build the modern Sunni jihadist movement, then known as the Mujahedeen, to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA recruited young Sunni Muslim men to fight the Soviet infidel, and the CIA provided training, arms, and financing. Yet soon enough, this US-created jihadist army turned on the US, a classic and typical case of blowback.

The anti-U.S. and anti-Western blowback started with the first Gulf War in 1990, when the U.S. stationed troops throughout the region. It continued with the Second Gulf War, when the U.S. toppled a Sunni regime in Iraq and replaced it with a puppet Shia regime. In the process, it dismantled Saddam’s Sunni-led army, which then regrouped as a core part of ISIS in Iraq.

Next the U.S. teamed up with Saudi Arabia to harass, and then to try to topple Bashir al-Assad. His main crime from the perspective of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia: being too close to Iran. Once again, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia turned to Sunni jihadists with arms and financing, and part of that fighting force morphed into ISIS in Syria. The evidence is that the covert U.S. actions against Assad pre-date the overt U.S. calls for Assad’s overthrow in 2011 by at least a couple of years.

In a similar vein, the U.S. teamed up with France and the UK to bomb Libya and kill Muammar Qaddafi. The result has been an ongoing Libyan civil war, and the unleashing of violent jihadists across the African Sahel, including Mali, which suffered the terrorist blow last week at the hands of such marauders.

Thanks to America’s misguided policies, we now have wars and violence raging across a 5,000-mile stretch from Bamako, Mali to Kabul, Afghanistan, with a U.S. hand in starting and stoking the violence. Libya, Sudan, the Sinai, Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan are all cases where the U.S. has directly intervened with very adverse results. Mali, Chad, Central African Republic, Somalia are some of the many other countries indirectly caught up in turmoil unleashed by U.S. covert and overt operations.

Of course the U.S. is not solely to blame for all of this. Countries across the Sahel, Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia are impoverished, suffering from food shortages and hunger, high joblessness, global warming, severe droughts, illiteracy, and the impact of dysfunctional or non-existent schools. The region still reels from the artificial borders and the cynical actions of the colonial powers, Britain and France, after World War I. The British Empire, of course, was key to entrenching radical Wahabism in Saudi Arabia, which now provides cash and ideological support for many of the Sunni jihadists.

Until today, Clinton has not acknowledged the roots of the conflict in the region, including the disastrous role that the U.S. has played, including under her watch as Secretary of State. She has not been a mastermind of it, but has been a loyal backer carried along by the CIA, the broader military-industrial-intelligence complex, and the conventional neocon thinking in DC. That’s no doubt good for her national politics. It’s hard to run for President as an opponent of the permanent U.S. security state. Being a card-carrying member of the U.S. security establishment is the mainstream media’s definition of a “serious” candidate.

Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders are learning this for all their troubles. O’Malley and Sanders wisely and correctly support an America that works with other countries and with the UN Security Council to build peace in the Middle East rather than an America that continues to indulge in endless and failed CIA adventures of regime change and war. While Clinton arrogantly demands that other countries such as Russia and Iran fall squarely behind the U.S., O’Malley and Sanders recognize that it is through compromise in the UN Security Council that we can defeat ISIS and find lasting solutions in the Middle East.

Whether Clinton could ever break free of the military-industrial complex remains to be seen. If she does become president, our very survival will depend on her capacity to learn.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is the director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Price of Civilization: Reawakening American Virtue and Prosperity.”

23 November 2015

www.commondreams.org

By William A. Cook

PROLOGUE

How remarkable that the book that tops the New York Times best seller list is authored, if one were to see through the eyes of mid-Eastern victims of American/Israeli invasions since 9/11, by a war criminal. Put simply, the purpose of the book is to defend the indefensible, the legitimacy of the Iraq war and the justified empirical ends of the Neo-cons and Zionist agendas that have brought America to its knees in the eyes of the world as terrorist states(1).Indeed isn’t this the crux of the problem? Is America exceptional? How is it exceptional? And why is it exceptional?

Cheney sees America’s exceptionalism as global supremacy that must be maintained, a continuation then of the Project for the New American Century, proposed in 1992 by Cheney and his Neo-con cabal in lock step with AIPAC, to make America the dominant nation on the planet. Fifteen years after the “second Pearl Harbor,” Cheney views that project as an enormous success darkened only by Obama’s failure to sustain the pressure to maintain dominance. Yet even a cursory view of research shows that the Bush/Cheney administration bungled their adventure into the mid-East economically, politically, and morally. The only nation that can claim success is the Zionist led government of Israel (2).

Exceptionalism is not dominance as Joseph Conrad noted in Heart of Darkness as he describes the beginnings of European colonialism: “They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force—nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle the darkness.”

Ironically, Cheney’s book attests to this very point—America’s exceptionalism as he sees it is just that dominance “when you have it,” and Cheney is witness to Obama’s vision of an America that no longer has the resources to fall further into the ditch of debt in order to maintain “America’s global dominance.” His eyes, Obama’s eyes, see the darkness Conrad mentions which Conrad describes as

“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it…and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to…” (3) Like superiority of being, like “chosenness,” like racism that permeates the Zionist/Neo-con mentality giving them the belief that they have a right to dominate the peoples of the world who interfere with their chosen agenda. To give him his due, Obama does not see the world through Cheney’s eyes, he sees through the eyes of the social activist, “to see the world through other people’s eyes and not just our own,”(4) an empathy for those oppressed and without power.

So what then is America’s “exceptionalism”? It is the idea that is at the back of it, the idea that gave rise to a philosophical defense to break away from, to dissolve the bonds that link it to a mother country, to declare the “rights of mankind” before the world justifying, if need be, a revolution against that mother country. Again, ironically, Cheney recognizes the minds that conceptualized this exceptional distinction that differentiated America from the rest of the world by quoting, would you believe, Charles Krauthammer, an ardent supporter of the Neo-con philosophy, when he references the founding fathers of our revolution from Jefferson to Adams to Madison to Hamilton, Washington, Franklin and Jay. Perhaps Krauthammer thought he could yoke the Neo-con’s manifesto, “Project for a New American Century” to these cherished documents that made America truly exceptional. Unfortunately, Krauthammer excludes from his list the dominant voice of our exceptionalism, Thomas Paine, the one father who lived the words he preached. Unlike Jefferson and Washington he did not have slaves to free to fulfill what the words he wrote truly meant.

But the Declaration of Independence is not enough to declare America exceptional. That document provided the philosophical base for a new perception of humankind: from subject of Kings, Emperors and dictators to the source of the power that provides the government for the people, resident in the inalienable rights of birth made possible by the Deist conception of the Creator, the conditions that gave rise to life on this planet. All are equal, all possess these rights, and that is the concept behind the Constitution of the United States, the means by which the Declaration can be practiced in fact. “We the people…” it declared. How glorious the concept, how unique for its time, an idea that toppled the powers of the world by offering a whole new concept of the individual. That becomes the threat to those in power, the knowledge by the people of rights denied over the eons of centuries now the very premise of existence. That’s exceptional.The concept that is, not the document itself. We must note that the Constitution is a flawed document, glued together by Ben Franklin’s compromise (5) that left silent the omission of “all the people” left out: the Native Americans and the slaves.

Fortunately Jefferson argued with Adams that the signing of the Constitution did not guarantee those rights. He understood the weakness of those who would and could gain power over the people even in a democracy of rights proclaimed. He argued for and in 1791 got the Bill of Rights through the Congress. Now in theory the exceptionalism was complete, three documents that changed the world for those provided the rights of birth. Even more fortunately, those rights are now recognized and provided for under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the United Nations made available to 194 nations across the planet.
Or so it would seem. Not certainly to the Neo-cons or Cheney who believe that their concepts of power overstep the documents of the US and the UN as Cheney states:“No other nation, international body, or community of nations can do what we do,” … “America’s enemies are on the wrong side of morality and justice.”

Cheney’s book, Exceptional, can only be viewed through his exceptional eyes that have blinded him from the reality of the Neo-cons/Zionist chaos unleashed on the mid-East. The book deserves to be analyzed if only to ensure that its fabrications be seen for what they are. I present here a peep into the Prologue, that item in a book that talks about its content and the authors’ intent.

In order to grapple with Cheney’s Prologue we must keep in mind what he says are Obama’s beliefs and why they are anathema to the Neo-cons/Zionist forces. “He (Obama) is gambling America’s security on the veracity of the mullahs in Tehran. He is unconcerned with maintaining American supremacy because it is inconsistent with his worldview. ‘No world order,’ he tells us, ‘that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed.’” In short, Obama sees through the eyes of one who thinks of others caught in the vice of a colonial idea and living a life doomed to suppression of rights and oppression by military forces.

Cheney opens his Prologue with a quote from Daniel Webster:

“And now let us indulge an honest exultation in the conviction of the benefit which the example of our country has produced and is likely to produce on human freedom and human happiness. And let us endeavor to comprehend in all its magnitude and to feel in all its importance the part assigned to us in the great drama of human affairs.”

Strange indeed that Cheney would choose a man who, in his indulgence of an “honest exultation,” would omit as an example of our country’s contribution “to human freedom and human happiness” the malignancy that permeated the institution of slavery which Webster supported. Here is what his biographer wrote of this “exceptional man.”

“He spoke for conservatives, and led the opposition to Democrat Andrew Jackson and his Democratic Party. He was a spokesman for modernization, banking, and industry, but not for the common people who composed the base of his opponents in Jacksonian Democracy. “He was a thoroughgoing elitist, and he reveled in it,” says biographer Robert Remini.” (Wikipedia).

One has to pay attention to Cheney’s words and the words he does not provide lest the reality behind his effusive, shall we dare say “exceptional, unrestrained, lavish” words, veil truth that contradicts the very praise he gushes forth as definitive. This one can surmise, Webster’s elitism is something Cheney also revels in, especially his disdain for the common person or, to put it in democratic terms, the individual citizen who should be respected, treated with dignity and called upon to consider actions to be taken in his/her name, like freedom of speech, like creating war regardless of international law, like recognition of the illegality of torture, extrajudicial execution, abandonment of the writ of habeas corpus, the very abandonment of law in favor of dictatorial directives; such is the mindset of one who guided the development of America’s foreign policy under George W. Bush with the aid of the Neo-cons and PNAC, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” a policy antithetical to the founding documents of this democracy.

“Less than fifty years after our founding, the benefit of America’s example for the world was evident. Yet Daniel Webster could not have begun to imagine the true magnitude of the role we would play “in the great drama of human affairs.” We have guaranteed freedom, security, and peace for a larger share of humanity than has any other nation in all of history. There is no other like us. There never has been. We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known.”

Let’s take a serious look at Cheney’s statement: “We have guaranteed freedom, security, and peace for a larger share of humanity than has any other nation in all of history.” No evidence here to demonstrate the truth of this assertion, but who needs it. Consider by contrast a scholar that has investigated just how much guaranteed freedom and security and peace we have as a nation secured for the peoples of the world. James A. Lucas has compiled here an extensive study complete with pages of sources that testify to the accuracy of his statements. It is this reality that Cheney obfuscates with his exuberant words that bury the truth in the very graves of those destroyed by Cheney’s blessed America.

This study reveals that U.S. military forces were directly responsible for about 10 to 15 million deaths during the Korean and Vietnam Wars and the two Iraq Wars. The Korean War also includes Chinese deaths while the Vietnam War also includes fatalities in Cambodia and Laos.

The American public probably is not aware of these numbers and knows even less about the proxy wars for which the United States is also responsible. In the latter wars there were between nine and 14 million deaths in Afghanistan, Angola, Democratic Republic of the Congo, East Timor, Guatemala, Indonesia, Pakistan and Sudan.

But the victims are not just from big nations or one part of the world. The remaining deaths were in smaller ones which constitute over half the total number of nations. Virtually all parts of the world have been the target of U.S. intervention.

The overall conclusion reached is that the United States most likely has been responsible since WWII for the deaths of between 20 and 30 million people in wars and conflicts scattered over the world.

To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation. They had to make decisions about other things such as finding lost loved ones, whether to become refugees, and how to survive.

And the pain and anger is spread even further. Some authorities estimate that there are as many as 10 wounded for each person who dies in wars. Their visible, continued suffering is a continuing reminder to their fellow countrymen.

It is essential that Americans learn more about this topic so that they can begin to understand the pain that others feel. Someone once observed that the Germans during WWII “chose not to know.” We cannot allow history to say this about our country. The question posed above was “How many September 11ths has the United States caused in other nations since WWII?” The answer is: possibly 10,000. (James A. Lucas, 24 April, 2007, Countercurrents.org).
N.B. War Crimes Times’ Editor’s note: An edited version of this article appears in the Spring 2014 WCT print edition. The link below is to the original unedited version complete with source notes. The numbers in this article were compiled in 2007. Since then, the U.S. has added to its total through attacks on other nations including Libya, Yemen, and Somalia; with its drone program; with the residual political instability from past actions in Afghanistan and Iraq; and likely from secret special operations.

Needless to say, Cheney mentions nothing of the numbers killed or maimed in these imperialist wars waged in distant countries that he was responsible for, though the rationale for America to wage them is mercurial at best and evil at worst. How does one, as a principle actor in the devastation of millions, avoid recognition of the human destruction wrought by his tenure in office, both under H. W. Bush and W. Bush? How does he as Secretary of Defense under Bush senior omit mention of the most horrific blood bath of that pretty little war of 90 days, the literal burial of thousands escaping from Kuwait on the Highway of Death caught in the pinchers of a destroyed roadway on either end.

Here is testimony by Joyce Chediac to this inhumane bloodbath done under the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney: “I want to give testimony on what are called the “highways of death.” These are the two Kuwaiti roadways, littered with remains of 2,000 mangled Iraqi military vehicles, and the charred and dismembered bodies of tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, who were withdrawing from Kuwait on February 26th and 27th 1991 in compliance with UN resolutions.”

U.S. planes trapped the long convoys by disabling vehicles in the front, and at the rear, and then pounded the resulting traffic jams for hours. “It was like shooting fish in a barrel,” said one U.S. pilot. The horror is still there to see. … On the sixty miles of coastal highway, Iraqi military units sit in gruesome repose, scorched skeletons of vehicles and men alike, black and awful under the sun, says the Los Angeles Times of March 11, 1991. … There for 60 miles every vehicle was strafed or bombed, every windshield is shattered, every tank is burned, every truck is riddled with shell fragments. No survivors are known or likely. The cabs of trucks were bombed so much that they were pushed into the ground, and it’s impossible to see if they contain drivers or not. Windshields were melted away, and huge tanks were reduced to shrapnel.

“Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic,” said Major Bob Nugent, an Army intelligence officer. “This one-sided carnage, this racist mass murder of Arab people, occurred while White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater promised that the U.S. and its coalition partners would not attack Iraqi forces leaving Kuwait. This is surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history. … they were going home, responding to orders issued by Baghdad, announcing that it was complying with Resolution 660 and leaving Kuwait. At 5:35 p.m. (Eastern standard Time)…. President Bush responded immediately from the White House saying (through spokesman Marlin Fitzwater) that “there was no evidence to suggest the Iraqi army is withdrawing. In fact, Iraqi units are continuing to fight. . . We continue to prosecute the war.”

The massacre of withdrawing Iraqi soldiers violates the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat.”

“After the cease-fire, in an interview with New York Newsday, Maggart and Moreno came forward with some of the first public testimony about the burying alive of Iraqi soldiers. Prior to their interview, then Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, never mentioned the atrocities, even when he submitted a report to Congress just prior to the interviews.” Never admit to what you cannot defend or mention human misery lest it be considered as a weakness. Silence is security for the rapist, the serial killer and the politician that must avoid truth; it is the “Face of Falsehood” that would turn silence of his massacres into “exceptional behavior” when it is in fact “exceptional callousness and cruelty.”

Cheney’s book is a desperate effort to justify the doctrines of the Neo-cons/Zionists based on policies directly opposed to international law as stated in U.S. law and the Charters and Conventions of the United Nations that we have signed. Cheney has served as Secretary of Defense under George 1st and Vice President under George 2nd: as such he has guided into our foreign policy the right of America to preemptively invade sovereign nations based on our assessment of their ability to challenge America’s dominance in the currency that controls world banking and/or threatens America militarily; he has accepted as American policy the right to torture captured enemy soldiers against the Geneva Conventions, to execute extra judicially individuals determined to be a danger to the United States thus erasing American legal procedures without due process, and he has allowed for removal of Habeas Corpus and freedom of speech and due process for American citizens to mention a few..

The consequences of these imposed policies on the United States has been destructive of the very foundational principles of the American exceptional democracy as presented above. A recent study by Princeton University “spells bad news for American democracy—namely, that it no longer exists.”(6)
Ultimately the failure of Cheney’s book lies in its belief that power and the sustainability of power embody the exceptionalism of the United States. It is not so. Cheney knows this and implies as much in his condemnation of Obama’s thought:

“The arc of the moral universe is long,” (Obama) he recites, “but ultimately it bends toward justice,” as though no action is required.’ The truth is America’s eloquent and argued principles will be grasped by those suffering under the boots of oppression because their righteousness cries out to all for relief. Even now the Universal Declaration of Human Rights governs or should govern for the people of 194 nations if member states would take control of that institution and yoke it away from rogue states like America and Israel so that the justice provided for in its operation could manifest itself.

The reality of America’s exceptionalism must be understood before it can be sustained. It is not power, it is a moral transcendent concept that reflects the ultimate meaning of humanity in this world. This concept, the rights provided by life, supersede the transience of military power because they are inclusive of all humans both in America and elsewhere in the world should others desire to accept the concept embedded in America’s foundational documents. These cannot be imposed despite Cheney’s desire to impose what the Neo-cons will.

America can and must declare its faults before it can mirror for the world its virtues. The truth is that we began by hiding the evil we embedded in our Constitution by not speaking truth to the world or to our citizens. Our early Presidents imposed policies detrimental to the values asserted in our foundational documents thus silently declaring justification for those policies. We fought a Civil War that emancipated the slaves only to have the country under Jim Crow laws enslave in a different way. Today the completeness of the freedom guaranteed under the Bill of Rights is not yet complete as the actions in Ferguson so graphically display. All Americans, not just Cheney, must attend to this silence.

For Cheney to wish to impose America’s exceptionalism on the people of the mid-East is more than hypocritical, it is diabolical. Ironically he ridicules Russia for building a wall to separate its people from the enemy, yet he accepts and pays for with America’s tax dollars the building of a 400 mile wall in Palestine calling it self-defense for the Israeli nation. That wall is an insult to Americans who had no say in its construction yet have to bear the hatred of the world for having it built in their name. That wall is an abomination against the very principles America touts to the world, “All men are created equal.” That wall is condemned by the International Court of Justice and subsequently denied as operative by the United States by denying its signature to the right of that court to act. This is democracy?

Who is Cheney to declare what is right and what is wrong. He proclaims the might of America’s military forces and uses them to justify America’s use of power against nations that have not acted against America, but he does not find it abominable that he refused to join those forces and reneged five times, it is reported, because “I had other priorities in the ’60s than military service.” (Slate, 3/18/2004). A man who has no scruples can justify any actions by sarcastic commentary that mocks those who have nothing important to do and can therefore be drafted, but it doesn’t matter because to him they do not exist. A man who has entered into a position of power cannot afford to deny the premises of his actions without condemning himself before the world, but a man of principle will admit to error because he is not alone in the actions he has imposed. Others have suffered but only if they are recognized by the man in power. A man who arguably directed the administration of George W. Bush cannot give credibility to the consequences of his reign in power even though he itemizes them in his Prologue, not to accept responsibility but to transfer blame to the man who followed Bush: “…the explosive spread of terrorist ideology and organizations, the establishment of an ISIS caliphate in the heart of the Middle East, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and increasing threats from Iran, China, North Korea, and Russia, President Obama has departed from the bipartisan tradition going back seventy-five years of maintaining America’s global supremacy and leadership.”

A man of conscience does not avoid speaking of America’s role in Vietnam because it is embarrassing to talk about or the Iraq war and its exceptional standing as a morally justified war or the immoral policy that yokes America to the Zionist lobby and its affiliates because it destroys America’s credibility abroad; one says nothing—a strategy of silence and omission. A man without a conscience writes a book justifying the actions of his compatriots using the hyperbole of the masters who have conned us in the past, the greatness of America, the exceptional leaders we have had, the victories we have in our recording of the Second World War, because that was a just war, but nothing of the ones he was responsible for because the less said the better.
This book is the face of falsehood, as Melville called it, the deceptive mask that hides the truth knowing in the heart that it is all a lie. To live long enough to see and bear witness to the failures of the policies you worked so hard to impose and see them damned by the people of the world is not easy to take unless you can find solace with those who executed your policies lost in some magnificent retreat, hidden from the world…or to boldly grab your ego and go forth to the lists, pen in hand and challenge the obvious.

1. According to a new poll from WIN and Gallup International, the U.S. represents the largest threat to world peace today.
2. Bruce Riedel. “Iran Big Winner in the Iraqi Debacle.” Brookings
3. Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness. Everyman, 7.
4. Barack Obama. Jim Lehrer News Hour, 2009-12-23.

“ It is very important for I think those of us who desperately want peace, who see war as, at some level, a break-down, a manifestation of human weakness, to understand that sometimes it’s also necessary – and you know, to be able to balance two ideas at the same time; that we are constantly striving for peace, we are doubling up on our diplomacy, we are going to actively engage, we are going to try to see the world through other people’s eyes and not just our own.”

5. Ben Franklin. “Final Speech to the Constitutional Convention.” 9/17, 1787
6. Brendan James, Published TPM Livewire, April 18, 2014.

Would you be kind enough to add Age of Fools as a new release made available at Amazon and other book sellers October 14, 2015. Thanks, Bill
William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He writes frequently for Internet publications including The Palestine Chronicle, MWC News, Atlantic Free Press, Pacific Free Press, Countercurrents, Counterpunch, World Prout Assembly, Dissident Voice, and Information Clearing House among others. His books include Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, a novella, and the forthcoming The Plight of the Palestinians. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or www.drwilliamacook.com

22 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Dr Gideon Polya

The appalling Paris atrocity (130 killed) has led Hollande and Obama to call for the destruction of Islamic State i.e. genocide as defined by the UN Genocide Convention. A major report by 3 physician organizations recently estimated that 2 million Muslims had died in the US War on Terror but UN data show that Muslim avoidable deaths from deprivation in countries subject to Western military intervention in 2001-2015 now total about 27 million, this demanding peace now and ICC prosecutions of those responsible for this Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide.

President Obama (Antalya, Turkey, 16 November 2015) stated: “Tragically, Paris is not alone. We’ve seen outrageous attacks by ISIL in Beirut, last month in Ankara, routinely in Iraq. Here at the G20, our nations have sent an unmistakable message that we are united against this threat. ISIL is the face of evil. Our goal, as I’ve said many times, is to degrade and ultimately destroy this barbaric terrorist organization” [1].

President Francois Hollande (17 November 2015) stated: “France is at war. No barbarians will prevent us from living how we have decided to live. To live fully. Terrorism will never destroy the republic, because the republic will destroy terrorism’… The sponsors of the attack in Paris must know that their crimes further strengthens the determination of France to fight and to destroy them. We must do more. Syria has become the largest factory of terrorists the world has ever known. France is not engaged in a war of civilisations because those assassins don’t represent a civilisation. Our democracy has triumphed before over adversaries that were much more formidable than these cowards” [2].

There has been saturation coverage in the Western media of the appalling Paris tragedy that killed 130 people on 13 November 2015, this coverage dwarfing reportage of the recent Kunduz Hospital atrocity in Afghanistan perpetrated by the US (22 killed, 2 October 2015 ), the most recent Beirut Massacre by jihadi non-state terrorists (43 killed, 12 November 2015) and the Bamako Mali Massacre by jihadi non-state terrorists (27 killed, 20 November 2015) – clear evidence of the entrenched and egregious racism of the anti-Arab anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted and subverted Western Mainstream media.

The eminent US organization Just Foreign Policy has estimated that there have been 1.5 million “Iraqi deaths due to the US invasion” and I have estimated (based on UN Population Division 2006 Revision data) that to this we should add a further 1.2 million Iraqis killed through war-imposed deprivation [4, 5]. However the ABC News of the taxpayer-funded ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the UK BBC) commenting on the US withdrawal in 2011 stated: “The withdrawal ends a war that left tens of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 American soldiers dead” [6].

Another ABC News report about Wikileaks document releases states: “The founder of the WikiLeaks website says hundreds of thousands of US military documents leaked by the website show the truth about the Iraq war. The documents suggest senior US commanders turned a blind eye on torture by the Iraqi authorities and show the US has kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it. The documents suggest senior US commanders turned a blind eye on torture by the Iraqi authorities and show the US has kept records of civilian deaths, despite previously denying it. It has put the death toll at 109,000, including more than 66,000 civilians. The US has criticised the release, saying the documents are classified and could lead to military and civilian deaths. But Julian Assange has defended his actions at a press conference just a short while ago, saying the release serves the public interest” [7] .

The “Iraq Body Count” project currently reports “total violent deaths including combatants 224,000”, this highly flawed estimate being unwisely based on the dodgy evidence of media and official reports [8]. The mendacious BBC which, like the endlessly lying, Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted Australian ABC, has an appalling record of malreportage [9, 10] opines: “Other reports and surveys have resulted in a wide range of estimates of Iraqi deaths. The UN-backed Iraqi Family Health Survey estimated 151,000 violent deaths in the period March 2003 – June 2006. Meanwhile, The Lancet journal in 2006 published an estimate of 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths related to the war of which 601,027 were caused by violence” [11].

Western Mainstream media under-reporting in claiming circa 20,000-200,000 Iraqi deaths due to the US War on Terror – when the true figure from top medical epidemiologists, the UK ORB organization and UN demographers is probably in excess of 2 million Iraqi deaths from violence or imposed deprivation – is genocide-ignoring and holocaust-ignoring on a massive scale. A holocaust involves the death of huge numbers of people whereas genocide is defined more precisely by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention which states that “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” [4].

Genocide-ignoring and holocaust–ignoring is far, far worse than repugnant genocide-ignoring and holocaust denial because at least the latter permit public discussion of the matter. The endlessly lying, Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted Western Mainstream media are involved in massive lying by omission, lying by commission, genocide-ignoring, holocaust–ignoring and effective genocide-ignoring and holocaust denial.

Of course this is not new. Thus, for example, generation after generations of lying journalists, politicians, and historians in the English-speaking world have resolutely ignored the “forgotten” WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which the British with Australian complicity deliberately starved 6-7 million Indians to death for strategic reasons (genocidally racist White Australia was complicit by withholding food from starving Indian from its huge wartime grain stores) [12-15]. History is written by the victors and Western Mainstream media presstitutes are resolutely committed to untruth [16, 17].

It gets worse. Iraq has been subject to repeated Western invasion in the century since British invasion in 1914 (racist White Australia is currently involved in its Seventh Iraq War and its Third Syrian War in a century) and Iraqi deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation since 1914 now total 9 million [4]. Further, Iraq is but one of 20 substantially or significantly Muslim countries variously invaded, occupied, sanctioned and /or bombed by US Alliance forces since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity on 11 September 2001 in which about 3,000 people were killed [3].

All of this raises the key questions of (1) precisely how many millions of Muslims have died from violence or from imposed deprivation in substantially Muslim countries attacked by the US Alliance since 9-11; and (2) how the civilized world should respond.

Kit O’Connell (a US journalist from Austin, Texas, a Daily Staff Writer for MintPress News, and Associate Editor of Shadowproof) (2015): “It may never be possible to know the true death toll of the modern Western wars on the Middle East, but that figure could be 4 million or higher. Since the vast majority of those killed were of Arab descent, and mostly Muslim, when would it be fair to accuse the United States and its allies of genocide? A March report by Physicians for Social Responsibility calculates the body count of the Iraq War at around 1.3 million, and possibly as many as 2 million. However, the numbers of those killed in Middle Eastern wars could be much higher. In April, investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed argued that the actual death toll could reach as high as 4 million if one includes not just those killed in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the victims of the sanctions against Iraq, which left about 1.7 million more dead, half of them children, according to figures from the United Nations [18].

Dr Nafeez Ahmed ( investigative journalist, international security scholar, author of “Zero Point” and associated with the Institute for Policy Research and Development) has concluded that “In Iraq alone, the US-led war from 1991 to 2003 killed 1.9 million Iraqis; then from 2003 onwards around 1 million: totalling just under 3 million Iraqis dead over two decades… the total Afghan death toll due to the direct and indirect impacts of US-led intervention since the early nineties until now could be as high 3-5 million” [19].

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and Physicians for Global Survival (PGS) published a detailed and documented major report in March 2015 on Muslim deaths in Western wars that has been ignored by Mainstream media but concluded (2015): “Executive Summary. This investigation come to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed [in 2011-2013] around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000 in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan i.e. a total of 1.3 million. Not included in this figure are further war zones such a Yemen. The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision –makers are aware of [sic] and propagated by the media and major NGOs. And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely” [20].

“Iraq Body Count” makes the absurd claim of 224,000 total violent Iraqi deaths including combatants since the 2003 invasion [8], this being based on media reports, an approach that has been shown by top medical epidemiologists to be severely flawed [4]. The Physicians’ Report [20] estimates 1 million Iraqi deaths from violence or war-imposed deprivation in the period 2011-2011 whereas the eminent US Just Foreign Policy estimates – based on data from the UK ORB polling organization and from polling by US medical epidemiologists published in The Lancet – that 1.5 million Iraqis have died due to the US invasion and comments: “The number is shocking and sobering. It is at least 10 times greater than most estimates cited in the US media, yet it is based on a scientific study of violent Iraqi deaths caused by the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003” (noting that top US medical epidemiologists in their paper in The Lancet estimated that 90% of the deaths found were violent) [5].

Using data from the UN Population Division 2006 Revision data I have made an upper estimate of 2003-2011 Iraqi avoidable deaths from deprivation totalling 1.2 million, this leading to an estimate of 2.7 million Iraqi deaths from violence (1.5 million) or from war-imposed conditions as determined from differential pre- and post-invasion mortality data (1.2 million) in the period 2003-2011. This approach assumed that these 2 data sets (i.e. “deaths from violence” and “deaths from war-imposed conditions ”) do not overlap if violently killed people do not make it to hospitals etc for “official counting” – indeed the gross, up to 7-fold under-estimate of Iraqi violent deaths by “Iraq Body Count” based on “official counting” validates my approach [4]. A related approach estimates 7.2 million Afghan deaths post-9-11 from violence (1.7 million) or war-imposed deprivation (5.5 million) [21, 22].

Crucially, while the Physicians ‘ Report [20]. estimates “deaths from war-related conditions” as determined from differential immediately pre- and post-invasion mortality data, I assume that the historical pre-invasion trend of massive decreases in mortality in Iraq (and Syria) should have continued and indeed assume that the Iraqi mortality rate post-1990 could and should have attained the base-line rate for high birth-rate impoverished countries of about 4 deaths per 1,000 of population per year and hence given an avoidable death rate of zero (0) but for war-imposed conditions. In other words, the invasion of Iraq not only yielded violent deaths and increased avoidable deaths relative to the pre-invasion year, it also blocked a quite achievable rapid decline to zero avoidable deaths per annum [23].

Avoidable death, avoidable mortality, excess death, excess mortality, premature death, untimely death, death that should not have happened) is the difference between the observed deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with the same demographics (i.e. the same birth rate and age distribution) [23]. Thus, for example, in 2015 GDP per capita is abut $6,000 for both Cuba and China and about $15,000 for both Iraq and Libya [24], but while there are zero (0) annual avoidable deaths in Cuba and China, as catalogued below annual avoidable deaths in war-devastated Iraq (population 36.4 million) and Syria (population 6.3 million) currently total 47,000 and 14,000, respectively [23].

Finally, the Physicians’ Report estimate of 80,000 Pakistani war-related deaths in 2001-2011 is about 100 times lower than the 9.1 million Pakistani avoidable deaths from deprivation in the period October 2001- October 2015 as estimated (see below) using UN Population 2015 Revision data [24] and assuming a base-line mortality rate for this high birth rate, impoverished country of 4 deaths per 1,000 births per year for zero avoidable mortality that could and should have been attained in Pakistan but for US-driven militarism, dictatorship, terrorism, corruption and war.

Soap, insecticide-impregnated mosquito netting, antibiotics, immunization, basic preventative medicine, maternal education. maternal literacy, and good primary health care are vastly cheaper than drones, bombs, militarization, war and nuclear weapons, as well illustrated by the marvellous example of the terrific health outcomes in US sanctions-impoverished but well-governed Cuba which has an infant mortality rate about the same as for the US that has a 9-fold greater per capita GDP [23, 24].

T o avoid the controversy about how many Muslims have actually been violently killed, one can simply consider how many Muslims have died avoidably from Western war- or Western hegemony- imposed deprivation in the 14 year period from October 2001- October 2015 in substantially or significantly Muslim countries subject to Western sanctions, attack or occupation in that period. This approach has the benefit of being uncontroversial and conservative e.g. it ignores violent deaths in which Muslim bodies or body parts went into mass graves or otherwise did not make it to hospitals or morgues for “official counting”. Of course, whether a child is slowly and painfully killed by economically- and/or militarily-imposed deprivation or is killed quickly by bombs or bullets, the death is just as final and just as irreversible [23].

Below is an alphabetical list of 20 substantially or significantly Muslim countries variously attacked, invaded, occupied or sanctioned by the US Alliance in the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-promoted US War on Terror since the 9-11 atrocity that numerous science, architecture, engineering , aviation, military and intelligence experts believe was a US Government 9-11 false flag operation (with some suggesting Israeli involvement) [3].

Listed below for these 20 US Alliance-violated, substantially or significantly Muslim countries are (a) 2015 population [25]; (b) 1950-2005 avoidable deaths [24], (c) annual avoidable deaths (2015) from the latest UN 2015 Revision data [25], assuming a baseline mortality for high birth rate, impoverished but otherwise peaceful and well-governed countries of about 4 deaths per 1,000 of population per year (for Lebanon, Libya, Syria and Palestine with death rates close to this baseline, avoidable mortality was estimated as 1.4 times the under-5 infant deaths) [24]; (d) average-based 14 year avoidable deaths for the post-9-11 period of 2001-2015, (e) present annual per capita GDP [24], (f) % Muslim (upper estimates), (g) post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths based on Muslim percentage in each country, and (h) Western invasion dates and details.

Post-9-11 avoidable deaths in 18 countries with substantial or significant Muslim populations and variously subject to Western military operations in the post-9-11 US War on Terror:

1. Afghanistan: (a) 32.5 million, (b) 16.6 million. (c) 149,000, (d) 2.2 million, (e) $1,900, (f) 99.8% Muslim, (g) 2.2 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Afghanistan was subject to repeated UK invasions in the 19th century but finally recovered independence in 1919; after the US-backed removal of a socialist government in 1978, the Russians invaded and Afghanistan endured decades of war against the Russians (1979-1989) and thence civil war (1989-1996); in 2001 Afghanistan was invaded by the US Alliance (notably the US, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Australia, Canada, New Zealand) on the false basis of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda being responsible for 9-11.

2. Burkina Faso: (a) 18.1 million, (b) 6.8 million, (c) 109,000, (d) 1.5 million, (e) $1,700, (f) 60.5% Muslim, (g) 0.9 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Burkino Faso was a French colony until 1960, post-independence French military presence and French forces boosted in 2013 as part of Operation Barkhane directed against Muslim rebels in the Sahel.

 

3. Central African Republic: (a) 4.9 million, (b) 2.3 million, (c) 55,000, (d) 0.8 million, (e) $600, (f) 15.0% Muslim, (g) 0.1 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) the Central African Republic was a French colony until 1960, post-independence French military presence and France further boosted forces in 2013 as Muslim Genocide expanded (almost all Muslims have been expelled from the capital).

 

4. Chad: (a) 14.0 million, (b) 5.1 million, (c) 147,000, (d) 1.9 million, (e) $2,600, (f) 53.1% Muslim, (g) 1.0 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Chad became ostensibly independent in 1960 but there were major post-independence French military involvements in Northern Chad and France further boosted forces in 2013 as part of Operation Barkhane directed against Muslim rebels in the Sahel.

 

5. Côte D’Ivoire: (a) 20.1 million, (b) 7.0 million. (c) 199,000, (d) 3.0 million, (e) $3,100, (f) 38.6% Muslim, (g) 1.2 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Cote D’Ivoire suffered major French military involvements in suppressing socialists before and after independence in 1960 and a major French re-invasion in 2002.

 

6. Djibouti: (a) 0.9 million, (b) 141,000, (c) 8,000, (d) 0.1 million, (e) $3,100, (f) 94.0% Muslim, (g) 0.1 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Djibouti suffered a major, continuing French, US and British presence after independence in 1977; it was a base for French participation in the 1990-1991 Gulf War; French suppressed Affar rebellion in 1977-2002; France gave the former French Foreign Legion’s Camp Lemonnier to the government of Djibouti, which then leased it to the US in 2001; France maintains over 1,500 troops in Djibouti and French forces in Djibouti have taken part in operations in Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Côte D’Ivoire.

 

7. Iraq: (a) 36.4 million, (b) 5.3 million, (c) 47,000. (d) 0.7 million, (e) $15,300, (f) 97.0% Muslim, (g) 0.7 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Iraq suffered invasion by the UK in 1914 with the UK continuing to repress Iraqi rebellion in Iraq up to and including WW2, notwithstanding ostensible Iraqi independence in 1932; Gulf War (1990-1991) in which 0.2 million Iraqis were killed; 1990-2003 Sanctions; 2003-2011 US Alliance Iraq War; renewed US and Australian military advisers and renewed bombing of Iraq in 2014 by US Alliance (US, UK, Australia, France).

 

8. Iran: (a) 79.1 million, (b) 14.3 million, (c) 55,000 (d) 1.0 million, (e) $17,400, (f) 99.4% Muslim, (g) 1.0 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Iran is one of the world’s oldest nations and has not invaded another country for several hundred years; the US engineered a coup against the secular and democratic Mossadegh government in 1953 with the installation of dictatorship under the Shah; the US imposed sanctions on Iran after the revolution that removed the Shah in 1979; the US backed Iraq in the Iraq-Iran War in which 1.5 million Iranians were killed (Iranian 1980-1988 avoidable deaths 2.1 million); under urging from the Zionist-perverted US the UN imposed sanctions on Iran over its nuclear energy program that Iran declared to be for peaceful purposes only; the last major direct violent US action against Iran was the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by a US guided missile cruiser killing all 290 on board; US ally Apartheid Israel bombed an Iranian ship in Sudan in 2009; an estimated 68,000 Iranians have died since 9-11 from opiate drug-related causes due to the US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry from 6% of world share in 2001 to 93% by 2007 (1.2 million people have died world-wide since 9-11 due to US Alliance restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry, the breakdown as of 2015 including 280,000 Americans, 256,000 Indonesians, 68,000 Iranians, 25,000 British, 14,000 Canadians, 10,000 Germans, 5,000 Australians and 500 French; about 4,000 Iranian border guards have died trying to block opiate smuggling from US-occupied Afghanistan; under urging from the Zionist -perverted US the UN imposed deadly sanctions on Iran in 2006 over its nuclear energy program that Iran declared to be for peaceful purposes only (no sanctions were applied to the nations including Apartheid Israel that actually have nuclear weapons) – these opiate-related deaths and deaths from sanctions are reflected in huge post-9-11 avoidable mortality in Iran.

 

9. Lebanon: (a) 5.9 million, (b) 0.5 million, (c) 1,000, (d) 16,000, (e) $18,000, (f) 59.5% Muslim, (g) 10,000 post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Lebanon suffered French occupation after WW1 and gained independence in 1944; substantially occupied by Apartheid Israel in 1982 (3,000 Palestinians killed in the Sabra and Shatila Massacre); Israel withdrawal in 2000; in 2006 Apartheid Israel attacked again killing over 1,000, making 1 million homeless and destroying infrastructure on a huge scale.

 

10. Libya: (a) 6.3 million, (b) 0.8 million, (c) 6,000, (d) 78,000 (27,000 in 2011-2015), (e) $15,900, (f) 94.0% Muslim, (g) 73,000 post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Libya gained independence in 1950 and under rule by Muammar Gaddafi in 1969-2011 became the most prosperous country in all of Africa, but the 2011 France-UK-US (FUKUS) Alliance bombing campaign removed Gaddafi, splintered and devastated the country, killed 100,000 people and generated 1 million refugees with annual avoidable deaths increasing 3-fold after Western intervention.

 

11. Mali: (a) 20.1 million, (b) 7.0 million, (c) 199,000, (d) 1.8 million, (e) $1,700, (f) 90.0% Muslim, (g) 1.6 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Mali was brutally subdued by the French in the 19th century but secured independence in 1960 but with French hegemony; in 2013, France launched airstrikes against Tuareg rebels who had conquered the northern half of the country and finally defeated them in a so-called Operation Serval. France followed up Operation Serval with Operation Barkhane dedicated to killing Muslim rebels in the Sahel countries of Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

12. Mauritania: (a) 17.6 million, (b) 1.3 million, (c) 123,000, (d) 2.3 million, (e) $4,300. (f) 100.0% Muslim, (g) 2.3 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Mauritania was invaded by the French in the 19th century so as to consolidate French territory from Senegal to the Sudan, and Mauritanian resistance was only finally overcome in the 1930s; Mauritania became formally independent in 1960 but was subject to French hegemony and interference. France’s Operation Barkhane involves thousands of air-supported French troops dedicated to killing Muslim rebels in the Sahel countries of Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

13. Niger: (a) 19.9 million, (b) 6.6 million, (c) 111,000, (d) 1.8 million, (e) $1,100, (f) 94.0% Muslim, (g) 1.7 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Niger was conquered by France in the late 19th century but became ostensibly independent in 1960 but under French hegemony; the French Operation Barkhane involves thousands of air-supported French troops dedicated to killing Muslim rebels in the Sahel countries of Mali, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, Niger and Chad.

14. Pakistan: (a) 188.9 million, (b) 49.7 million, (c) 660,000, (d) 9.1 million, (e) $4,700, (f) 96.0% Muslim, (g) 8.7 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Pakistan gained independence from the UK in 1947 after 2 centuries of British rule in which 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from deprivation in the British Raj; independence in 1947 was marked by generation of 18 million refugees between India and Pakistan (half Muslim, half Hindu) and up to 1 million people were killed; in 1971 US-backed Pakistani forces killed 3 million mostly male Bengalis and raped 300,000 Bengali women in a Bengali Holocaust that marked the creation of Bangladesh; Australian-targeted US drone attacks commenced in 2004.

15. Palestine: (a) 4.7 million, (b) 0.7 million, (c), 5,000, (d) 70,000, (e) $4,900 (cf its Occupier Apartheid Israel’s $33,000) , (f) 85.0% Muslim, (g) 60,000 post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Palestine has an ancient history dating back to the very start of agrarian civilization; British forces invaded in 1914 and together with Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) forces conquered Palestine; the 1917 Balfour Declaration promised Palestine to the genocidal Zionists as a Jewish Homeland; Surafend Massacre of Palestinians by Australian and New Zealand ANZAC troops in 1918; 1948 creation of the State of Israel with massive forcible expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians and Zionist seizure of about 80% of Palestine; in 1967 Israel seized all of Palestine plus part of Syria; 90% of the land of Palestine has now been ethnically cleansed and Israeli Apartheid means that of 12 million Palestinian, 6 million are forbidden to step foot in Palestine and of 6 million Palestinians living under Israeli rule only 28% ( 1.7 million Palestinian Israelis) can vote for the government ruling them – the rest have essentially zero human rights; 2 million Palestinians have died since 1936 from Zionist violence (0.1 million) or Zionist -imposed deprivation (1.9 million).

16. Philippines: (a) 100.7 million, (b) 9.1 million, (c) 270,000, (d) 2.7 million, (e) $7,000, (f) 11.0% Muslim, (g) 0.3 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) the Philippines was acquired by the US from Spain at the conclusion of the Spanish-American War (1898) but in the subsequent 1899-1913 Philippines-US War about 1 million Filipinos died; the Philippines became independent in 1946 but with retention of US bases; in the 21st century US forces returned to combat communist rebels and thence Muslim rebels in the south in Operation Enduring Freedom – Philippines (OEF-P) (many Filipinos object to this military action by the US in their country).

17. Somalia: (a) 10.8 million, (b) 5.6 million, (c) 91,000, (d) 1.2 million, (e) $600, (f) 96.0% Muslim, (g) 1.2 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Somalia was repeatedly invaded by Italy in the 19th and 20th centuries. The British took over Somalia in WW2. Independence in 1960 was followed by war against Ethiopia and civil war, the effects of which were exacerbated by drought and famine. The US invaded in 1992 and after extensive civil war an Islamic administration assumed power in 2005. However the US backed an Ethiopian invasion in 2007 and thence a Kenyan invasion. In 2009 France and Germany invaded Somali waters to retake a captured French yacht and in 2013 French special forces from Djibouti failed in an operation to rescue a captured French intelligence agent.

18. Sudan: (a) 40.2 million, (b) 13.5 million, (c) 157,000, (d) 2.3 million, (e) $4,300, (f) 97.0% Muslim, (g) 2.3 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Sudan was conquered by the UK in 1898 but eventually became independent in 1958; the US under Clinton notoriously bombed a Sudan pharmaceutical factory in 1998 (Professor Noam Chomsky estimated that 10,000 Sudanese would have died from disease as a result); US ally Apartheid Israel bombed Sudan in 2009 and such Israeli bombing attacks on Sudan are presently continuing. Apartheid Israeli arms are heavily involved in the US-backed civil war in the newly independent South Sudan.

19. Syria: (a) 18.5 million, (b) 2.2 million, (c) 14,000, (d) 190,000 (68,000 in 2011-2015), (e) $5,100, (f) 96.0% Muslim, (g) 171,000 post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) Syria, one of the oldest nations in the world, was allocated to France by the 1916 Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement that divided the Middle East between Britain and France; Syria was put under a League of Nations mandate to France in 1920; in 1944 Syria became independent and in 1945 Syria became a founding member of the UN with the last French forces leaving Syria in 1946; in 1967 the Syrian Golan Heights region was captured and largely ethnically cleansed by Apartheid Israel which continues to periodically bomb Syria; commencement of Sunni rebellion in 2011 backed diplomatically and materially by Turkey, the US, UK, France, Qatar, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Apartheid Israel. The Syrian Civil War has so far killed about 0.3 million people violently, killed a similar number of people through war-imposed deprivation, and generated about 12 million refugees. Syria was once a haven of religious toleration and a world leader per capita in providing haven for refugees, but over half of its population are now refugees themselves and Syria has now been devastated in a sectarian civil war involving the Assad Government versus anti-Assad Sunni rebels (of which ISIS is the most powerful) that are variously backed by the UK, US , France, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Australia and Apartheid Israel.

20. Yemen: (a) 19.9 million, (b) 6.6 million, (c) 111,000, (d) 1.2 million, (e) $1,100, (f) 100.0% Muslim, (g) 1.2 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths, and (h) South Yemen gained independence from the UK in 1967 and North and South Yemen unified in 1989; continuing armed conflict with Australian-targeted US drone attacks in the 21st century that are continuing. Currently Yemen is being war criminally invaded by an anti-Houthi Saudi-led Coalition including Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Senegal, and Sudan.

Summary and conclusions.

The post-9-11 avoidable deaths in the 20 countries violated by the West in the post-9-11 War on Terror total 34.0 million. However we can re-assess this data by considering the Muslim percentage of the population in these 20 countries and can estimate that post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths in these 20 US Alliance-violated countries total 26.8 million, noting that, as discussed above, it is likely that most of the violent Muslim deaths in the Zionist-promoted US War on Terror are not included in this estimate. About half the victims of this Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-prosecuted Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide are children.

This carnage of 26.8 million post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths is 26,800,000/130 = 206,154 or about 200,000 times greater than the 130 murdered in the recent appalling Paris massacre – however, in contrast to the saturation coverage of the appalling Paris atrocity, this Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide is resolutely ignored by genocidally racist, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-subverted Western Mainstream media.

Using data from the UN Population Division 2006 Revision of World Population Prospects it was previously determined that Iraqi avoidable deaths in 1990-2003 and 2003-2011 totalled 1.7 million and 1.2 million, respectively, and combining this data with Gulf War violent deaths of 0.2 million and Iraq War violent deaths of 1.5 million, yielded estimates of Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation totalling 1.9 million (1990-2003), 2.7 million (2003-2011) and 4.6 million (1990-2011) [4, 22, 23]. However using the present UN 2015 Revision data [25] one estimates Iraqi avoidable deaths in 1990-2003 and 2003-2011 totalling 0.5 million and 0.4 million, respectively, this yielding estimates of Iraqi deaths from violence or violently-imposed deprivation totalling 0.7 million (1990-2003), 1.9 million (2003-2011) and 2.6 million (1990-2011). The UN 2015 Revision data on Iraq may underestimate avoidable deaths because they are based on data provided by the US-installed regime which, for example, implausibly claims that Iraq under-5 infant mortality declined after imposition of Sanctions in 1990 and declined further after the US invasion in 2003 [25].

Similarly, using 2006 Revision data it was determined that Afghan avoidable deaths and violent deaths in 2001-2014 totalled 5.5 million and 1.7 million, respectively for a total of 7.2 million post-invasion deaths from violence or from deprivation. However using the present UN 2015 Revision data [25] based on data from the government of US occupied Afghanistan one estimates that Afghan avoidable deaths and violent deaths in 2001-2015 have totalled 2.3 million and 0.7 million, respectively, for a total of 3.0 million post-invasion deaths from violence or from deprivation.

The 2015 Paris Massacre in which 130 innocent civilians were murdered by jihadis is a shocking crime that must be unequivocally condemned but is already being exploited (a) by the jihadi non-state terrorist perpetrators as a victory and evidence for more atrocities to come, and (b) by the US state terrorists, French state terrorists and US Alliance state terrorists as a “French 9-11” with calls from Obama and Holland to genocidally destroy jihadi rebels in Syria and Iraq [1, 2].

Completely missing from the continuing hysterical response to the Paris atrocity from US lackey Western Mainstream journalists, politicians and academics is any public airing of the horrendous reality of 27 million Muslims dying avoidably since 9-11 in 20 substantially or significantly Muslim countries that have been attacked by US Alliance state terrorists. Jihadi non-state terrorists must be condemned (a) for the violent crimes they personally commit against innocent people and (b) for the vastly greater crimes committed by the US Alliance against Muslims in response to jihadi outrages. Indeed jihadi non-state terrorists are among the greatest assets of US imperialism – every jihadi atrocity is another excuse trumpeted by Mainstream media for more atrocities against the Muslim world by US state terrorists and US Alliance state terrorists.

The Paris atrocity can be seen as “blowback” for horrendous crimes committed by the US Alliance against the Muslim world from West Africa to South East Asia [26, 27]. The horrible reality is that the US has a long history of false-flag operations(with 9-11 being the most immediately and subsequently deadly) [3] , supporting terrorism and exploiting terrorist acts by Indigenous insurgents lacking military industries, navies, airforces and tanks, and essentially only armed with light arms and explosives for bombs.

Indeed the US has along history of supporting terrorists (e.g. US-backed terrorists in Ecuador who would bomb Catholic churches knowing that the socialists would be blamed; the US-backed Gladio organization that committed atrocities in post-war Europe that would be blamed on communists; and backing jihadi fighters in Afghanistan in the 1980s and in the Balkans in the 1990s) [28]. Indeed the US has an appalling record of replacing secular governments in the Muslim world with sectarian regimes (e.g. Afghanistan, 1978; Iraq, 2003; Libya, 2011; and now in Syria today but for Russian support for the Assad Government ) [29].

Even the appalling Western Mainstream media can no longer ignore the Elephant in the Room realities that (a) the illegal US Alliance invasion of Iraq generated sectarian warfare and the Sunni rebellion that transmuted into ISIS, and (b) support for anti-Assad rebels by the US Alliance state terrorism – US state terrorism, UK state terrorism, French state terrorism, Australian state terrorism, Apartheid Israeli state terrorism, Turkish state terrorism, Jordanian state terrorism, Qatari state terrorism and Saudi Arabian state terrorism – has led to ISIS (Islamic State, IS, ISIL, Daesh) dominating rebel-held Syria.

Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Decent, pro-peace people must wonder what they can do in the face of appalling non-state terrorism (e.g. as exhibited by ISIS in killing 130 innocent people in this latest Paris atrocity) and the vastly worse carnage wrought by US state terrorism, UK state terrorism, French state terrorism, and Apartheid Israeli state terrorism in the Muslim world involving post-9-11 Muslim avoidable deaths in 20 US Alliance-violated countries now totalling 26.8 million. Decent people who are utterly opposed to both non-state terrorism and state terrorism must (a) inform everyone they can, (b) urge and support urgent cease-fire, dialogue and compromise between all parties to prevent a worsening catastrophe in both Iraq and Syria, and (c) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all people, parties, politicians, companies, corporations and countries disproportionately involved in militarism, violence, war, genocide, non-state terrorism and state terrorism.

References.

[1]. Barack Obama, “Press conference by President Obama – Antalya, Turkey”, White House, 16 November 2015: https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/11/16/press-conference-president-obama-antalya-turkey .

[2]. Martin Robinson, “France will be in a state of emergency for THREE MONTHS: Holland vows to “destroy” ISIS and pledges “no barbarians will prevent us from living how we have decided to live:”, Daily Mail, 17 November 2015: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3320731/France-state-emergency-THREE-MONTHS-Hollande-vows-boost-spending-security-pledges-no-barbarians-prevent-living-decided-live.html ).

[3]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[4]. “Iraqi Holocaust Iraqi Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/iraqiholocaustiraqigenocide/ .

[5]. Just Foreign Policy, “Iraq Deaths”: http://www.justforeignpolicy.org/iraq .

[6]. “US military marks end of its Iraq war”, ABC News, 16 December 2011: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-15/us-military-marks-end-of-its-war-in-iraq/3733982 .

[7]. ABC News, “Iraki leaks show scale of civilian casualties” , 24 October 2010: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2010-10-23/iraqi-leaks-show-scale-of-civilian-casualties/2308808 .

[8]. “Iraq Body Count”: https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ .

[9], “Censorship by the BBC”: https://sites.google.com/site/censorshipbythebbc/ .

[10]. “ABC fact-checking unit & incorrect reportage by the ABC (Australia’s BBC)”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/abc-fact-checking-unit ,

[11]. BBC, “Iraq War in figures”, 14 December 2011: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-11107739 .

[12]. “Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine) writings of Gideon Polya”, Gideon Polya Writing: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/bengali-holocaust .

[13]. Gideon Polya (1998), “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, 2008 edition that is now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ .

[14]. Gideon Polya (1995) ” The Forgotten Holocaust – The 1943/44 Bengal Famine”: http://globalavoidablemortality.blogspot.com.au/2005/07/forgotten-holocaust-194344-bengal.html .

[15]. Gideon Polya (2011), “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”, Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm .

[16]. “Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/home .

[17]. “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/ .

[18]. Kit O’Connell, “4 million Muslims killed in Western wars: should we call it genocide?”, MintPress News, 18 August 2015: http://www.mintpressnews.com/4-million-muslims-killed-in-western-wars-should-we-call-it-genocide/208711/ .

[19]. Nafeez Ahmed, “Unworthy victims: Western wars have killed 4 million Muslim since 1990”, MintPtress News, 9 April 2015: http://www.mintpressnews.com/unworthy-victims-western-wars-have-killed-four-million-muslims-since-1990/204182/.

[20]. International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), “Body Count. Casualty figures after 10 years of the “War on Terror” Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan”, March 2015: http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/body-count.pdf .

[21]. “Afghan Holocaust Afghan Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/

[22]. “Muslim Holocaust Muslim Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/muslimholocaustmuslimgenocide/ ).

[23]. Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes an avoidable mortality-related history of every country since Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on he web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/body-count-global-avoidable-mortality_05.html .

[24]. “List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita .

[25]. UN Population Division 2015 Revision of World Population Prospects: http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/ .

[26]. Gideon Polya,”Appalling Paris Atrocity – Non-State Terrorist Blowback For US Alliance And French State Terrorism Atrocities”, Countercurrents, 16 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya161115.htm .

[27]. Gideon Polya, “Horrendous US state terrorism and French state terrorism led to the appalling non-state terrorist Paris atrocity”, Gideon Polya Writing, 2015-11-18 : https://sites.google.com/site/gideonpolyawriting/2015-11-18 .

[28]. Gideon Polya, “US Profits From Jihadist Terrorism”, Countercurrents, 19 November, 2004: http://www.countercurrents.org/us-polya191104.htm .

[29]. Gideon Polya, “Fundamentalist America Has Trashed Secular Governance, Modernity, Democracy, Women’s Rights And Children’s Rights In The Muslim World”, Countercurrents, 21 May, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya210515.htm .

Dr Gideon Polya has been teaching science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003). He has published “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com/ ); see also his contributions “Australian complicity in Iraq mass mortality” in “Lies, Deep Fries & Statistics” (edited by Robyn Williams, ABC Books, Sydney, 2007: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-complicity-in-iraq-mass-mortality/3369002#transcript

) and “Ongoing Palestinian Genocide” in “The Plight of the Palestinians (edited by William Cook, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2010: http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/4047-the-plight-of-the-palestinians.html ). He has published a revised and updated 2008 version of his 1998 book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History” (see: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/ ) as biofuel-, globalization- and climate-driven global food price increases threaten a greater famine catastrophe than the man-made famine in British-ruled India that killed 6-7 million Indians in the “forgotten” World War 2 Bengal Famine (see recent BBC broadcast involving Dr Polya, Economics Nobel Laureate Professor Amartya Sen and others: http://www.open.edu/openlearn/history-the-arts/history/social-economic-history/listen-the-bengal-famine ). When words fail one can say it in pictures – for images of Gideon Polya’s huge paintings for the Planet, Peace, Mother and Child see: http://sites.google.com/site/artforpeaceplanetmotherchild/ and http://www.flickr.com/photos/gideonpolya/ .
22 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By John Pilger

In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on the rubble of Syria, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make one almost nostalgic for Kissinger’s murderous honesty.

As a witness to the human consequences of aerial savagery – including the beheading of victims, their parts festooning trees and fields – I am not surprised by the disregard of memory and history, yet again. A telling example is the rise to power of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, who had much in common with today’s Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They, too, were ruthless medievalists who began as a small sect. They, too, were the product of an American-made apocalypse, this time in Asia.

According to Pol Pot, his movement had consisted of “fewer than 5,000 poorly armed guerrillas uncertain about their strategy, tactics, loyalty and leaders”. Once Nixon’s and Kissinger’s B-52 bombers had gone to work as part of “Operation Menu”, the west’s ultimate demon could not believe his luck. The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors “froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told… That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over.” A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the “first stage in a decade of genocide”. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed. Under their bombs, the Khmer Rouge grew to a formidable army of 200,000.

ISIS has a similar past and present. By most scholarly measure, Bush and Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the deaths of at least 700,000 people – in a country that had no history of jihadism. The Kurds had done territorial and political deals; Sunni and Shia had class and sectarian differences, but they were at peace; intermarriage was common. Three years before the invasion, I drove the length of Iraq without fear. On the way I met people proud, above all, to be Iraqis, the heirs of a civilization that seemed, for them, a presence.

Bush and Blair blew all this to bits. Iraq is now a nest of jihadism. Al-Qaeda – like Pol Pot’s “jihadists” – seized the opportunity provided by the onslaught of ‘Shock and Awe’ and the civil war that followed. “Rebel” Syria offered even greater rewards, with CIA and Gulf state ratlines of weapons, logistics and money running through Turkey. The arrival of foreign recruits was inevitable. A former British ambassador, Oliver Miles, wrote, “The [Cameron] government seems to be following the example of Tony Blair, who ignored consistent advice from the Foreign Office, MI5 and MI6 that our Middle East policy – and in particular our Middle East wars – had been a principal driver in the recruitment of Muslims in Britain for terrorism here.”

ISIS is the progeny of those in Washington, London and Paris who, in conspiring to destroy Iraq, Syria and Libya, committed an epic crime against humanity. Like Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, ISIS are the mutations of a western state terror dispensed by a venal imperial elite undeterred by the consequences of actions taken at great remove in distance and culture. Their culpability is unmentionable in “our” societies, making accomplices of those who suppress this critical truth.

It is 23 years since a holocaust enveloped Iraq, immediately after the first Gulf War, when the US and Britain hijacked the United Nations Security Council and imposed punitive “sanctions” on the Iraqi population – ironically, reinforcing the domestic authority of Saddam Hussein. It was like a medieval siege. Almost everything that sustained a modern state was, in the jargon, “blocked” – from chlorine for making the water supply safe to school pencils, parts for X-ray machines, common painkillers and drugs to combat previously unknown cancers carried in the dust from the southern battlefields contaminated with Depleted Uranium. Just before Christmas 1999, the Department of Trade and Industry in London restricted the export of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Kim Howells, parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Blair government, explained why. “The children’s vaccines”, he said, “were capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction”. The British Government could get away with such an outrage because media reporting of Iraq – much of it manipulated by the Foreign Office – blamed Saddam Hussein for everything.

Under a bogus “humanitarian” Oil for Food Programme, $100 was allotted for each Iraqi to live on for a year. This figure had to pay for the entire society’s infrastructure and essential services, such as power and water. “Imagine,” the UN Assistant Secretary General, Hans Von Sponeck, told me, “setting that pittance against the lack of clean water, and the fact that the majority of sick people cannot afford treatment, and the sheer trauma of getting from day to day, and you have a glimpse of the nightmare. And make no mistake, this is deliberate. I have not in the past wanted to use the word genocide, but now it is unavoidable.” Disgusted, Von Sponeck resigned as UN Humanitarian Co-ordinator in Iraq. His predecessor, Denis Halliday, an equally distinguished senior UN official, had also resigned. “I was instructed,” Halliday said, “to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults.”

A study by the United Nations Children’s Fund, Unicef, found that between 1991 and 1998, the height of the blockade, there were 500,000 “excess” deaths of Iraqi infants under the age of five. An American TV reporter put this to Madeleine Albright, US Ambassador to the United Nations, asking her, “Is the price worth it?” Albright replied, “We think the price is worth it.”

In 2007, the senior British official responsible for the sanctions, Carne Ross, known as “Mr. Iraq”, told a parliamentary selection committee, “[The US and UK governments] effectively denied the entire population a means to live.” When I interviewed Carne Ross three years later, he was consumed by regret and contrition. “I feel ashamed,” he said. He is today a rare truth-teller of how governments deceive and how a compliant media plays a critical role in disseminating and maintaining the deception. “We would feed [journalists] factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he said, “or we’d freeze them out.” Last year, a not untypical headline in the Guardian read: “Faced with the horror of Isis we must act.” The “we must act” is a ghost risen, a warning of the suppression of informed memory, facts, lessons learned and regrets or shame. The author of the article was Peter Hain, the former Foreign Office minister responsible for Iraq under Blair. In 1998, when Denis Halliday revealed the extent of the suffering in Iraq for which the Blair Government shared primary responsibility, Hain abused him on the BBC’s Newsnight as an “apologist for Saddam”. In 2003, Hain backed Blair’s invasion of stricken Iraq on the basis of transparent lies. At a subsequent Labour Party conference, he dismissed the invasion as a “fringe issue”.

Here was Hain demanding “air strikes, drones, military equipment and other support” for those “facing genocide” in Iraq and Syria. This will further “the imperative of a political solution”. The day Hain’s article appeared, Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck happened to be in London and came to visit me. They were not shocked by the lethal hypocrisy of a politician, but lamented the enduring, almost inexplicable absence of intelligent diplomacy in negotiating a semblance of truce. Across the world, from Northern Ireland to Nepal, those regarding each other as terrorists and heretics have faced each other across a table. Why not now in Iraq and Syria? Instead, there is a vapid, almost sociopathic verboseness from Cameron, Hollande, Obama and their “coalition of the willing” as they prescribe more violence delivered from 30,000 feet on places where the blood of previous adventures never dried. They seem to relish their own violence and stupidityso much they want it to overthrow their one potentially valuable ally, the government in Syria.

This is nothing new, as the following leaked UK-US intelligence file illustrates:

“In order to facilitate the action of liberative [sic] forces… a special effort should be made to eliminate certain key individuals [and] to proceed with internal disturbances in Syria. CIA is prepared, and SIS (MI6) will attempt to mount minor sabotage and coup de main [sic] incidents within Syria, working through contacts with individuals… a necessary degree of fear… frontier and [staged] border clashes [will] provide a pretext for intervention… the CIA and SIS should use… capabilities in both psychological and action fields to augment tension.”

That was written in 1957, although it could have been written yesterday. In the imperial world, nothing essentially changes. In 2013, the former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas revealed that “two years before the Arab spring”, he was told in London that a war on Syria was planned. “I am going to tell you something,” he said in an interview with the French TV channel LPC, “I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria… Britain was organising an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer Minister for Foreign Affairs, if I would like to participate… This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned.”

The only effective opponents of ISIS are accredited demons of the west – Syria, Iran, Hezbollah and now Russia. The obstacle is Turkey, an “ally” and a member of Nato, which has conspired with the CIA, MI6 and the Gulf medievalists to channel support to the Syrian “rebels”, including those now calling themselves ISIS. Supporting Turkey in its long-held ambition for regional dominance by overthrowing the Assad government beckons a major conventional war and the horrific dismemberment of the most ethnically diverse state in the Middle East.

A truce – however difficult to negotiate and achieve – is the only way out of this maze; otherwise, the atrocities in Paris and Beirut will be repeated. Together with a truce, the leading perpetrators and overseers of violence in the Middle East – the Americans and Europeans – must themselves “de-radicalise” and demonstrate a good faith to alienated Muslim communities everywhere, including those at home. There should be an immediate cessation of all shipments of war materials to Israel and recognition of the State of Palestine. The issue of Palestine is the region’s most festering open wound, and the oft-stated justification for the rise of Islamic extremism. Osama bin Laden made that clear. Palestine also offers hope. Give justice to the Palestinians and you begin to change the world around them.

More than 40 years ago, the Nixon-Kissinger bombing of Cambodia unleashed a torrent of suffering from which that country has never recovered. The same is true of the Blair-Bush crime in Iraq, and the Nato and “coalition” crimes in Libya and Syria. With impeccable timing, Henry Kissinger’s latest self-serving tome has been released with its satirical title, “World Order”. In one fawning review, Kissinger is described as a “key shaper of a world order that remained stable for a quarter of a century”. Tell that to the people of Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Chile, East Timor and all the other victims of his “statecraft”. Only when “we” recognise the war criminals in our midst and stop denying ourselves the truth will the blood begin to dry.

John Pilger is an Australian journalist and documentary maker, based in London. He has twice won Britain’s Journalist of the Year Award, and his documentaries have received academy awards in Britain and the US. Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
21 November, 2015
Johnpilger.com