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By Countercurrents.org

To bring down Syrian president Bashar Assad, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have united with an aggressive new strategy for the on-going proxy war in Syria. The pact was sealed in early-March when Turkish president Erdogan flew to Riyadh to meet Saudi king Salman. The new virtual military alliance adds Saudi money to Turkey’s logistical support. At the same time, Jordan is facing new complication with the proxy war.

The new Turkish-Saudi proxy war plan has led to a new joint command center in the northeastern Syrian province of Idlib. A coalition of groups including Nusra and other Islamist brigades such as Ahrar al-Sham that the U.S. views as extremist has become over-active. The alliance is calling itself “Conquest Army”.

Citing Turkish officials an AP news report said:

Turkey and Saudi Arabia have forged a strategic alliance. The alliance has strengthened proxy fighters against Assad.

The two countries, according to the news report, consider the U.S. is in indecision on Assad, the two countries’ common enemy. For years, the two countries were at odds on the question of dealing with Assad, their common enemy. But their mutual frustration with what they consider American indecision has brought them into the strategic alliance.

The report said:

The reported Turkish-Saudi strategic alliance is a provoking concern in the U.S. as the U.S. does not want rebel groups including the al-Qaida linked Nusra Front uniting to topple Assad.

It said:

“The Obama administration worries that the revived rebel alliance could potentially put a more dangerous radical Islamist regime in Assad’s place, just as the U.S. is focused on bringing down the Islamic State group.”

Citing a U.S. official the AP report said:

The U.S. is concerned that the new alliance is helping Nusra gain territory in Syria.

The Istanbul datelined report said:

“The coordination between Turkey and Saudi Arabia reflects renewed urgency and impatience with the Obama administration’s policy in the region.”

Citing Turkish officials the report added:

Saudi Arabia previously distanced and kept away funding from some anti-Assad Islamist groups at Washington’s urging.

Saudi Arabia and Turkey also differed about the role of the international Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Syrian opposition. Turkey supports the group while the Saudi monarchy considers it a threat to its rule at home; that has translated into differences on the ground — until recently.

Indicating further shifts in the broader scenario in the region the report said:

“Turkish officials say the Obama administration has disengaged from Syria as it focuses on rapprochement with Iran. While the U.S. administration is focused on degrading the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, they say it has no coherent strategy for ending the rule of Assad, Iran’s key ally in the region.

“The new Turkish and Saudi push suggests that they view Assad as a bigger threat to the region than groups like Nusra. Turkish officials discount the possibility that Nusra will ever be in a position to hold sway over much of Syria.”

It added:

“The Saudi shift appears to be part of broader proxy war against Iran that includes Saudi-led air strikes in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels.”

According to the report, Turkey provides logistical and intelligence support to some members of the coalition. Turkey does not view Nusra as a security threat and therefore does not impede it. Turkey and Saudi Arabia have moved to bolster Ahrar al-Sham at Nusra’s expense. This strays from the U.S. line that al-Sham is an extremist group, but Turkish officials say they distinguish between international jihadist groups and others with more localized aims. They place al-Sham in the latter category.

One Turkish official said that the CIA has even lately halted its support for anti-Assad groups in northern Iraq. U.S. trainers are now in Turkey on a train-and-equip program aimed at adding fighters to counter the Islamic State group and bolster moderate forces in Syria, but Turkish officials are skeptical that it will amount to much.

Usama Abu Zeid, a legal adviser to the Free Syrian Army, confirmed that the new coordination between Turkey and Saudi Arabia — as well as Qatar — had facilitated the rebel advance.

The AP report cited Joshua Landis, director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma:

“It’s a different world now in Syria, because the Saudi pocketbook has opened and the Americans can’t tell them not to do it. It’s quite clear that Salman has prioritized efforts against Iran over those against the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Landis said it is a dangerous game — especially for Turkey.

“The cautionary tale is that every power in the Middle East has tried to harness the power of Islamists to their own ends,” he said, noting that Assad’s government also backed Islamists in Iraq who later turned their guns on him. “It always seems to blow back.”

Jordan’s complication

The rise of Islamist militias in the rebels’ ranks has led Jordan to switch its focus to counter-terrorism. The U.S. ally is now ready to pull the plug on the rebels.

A report by The Christian Science Monitor said:

Alarmed by the strength of Islamist militants in the rebels’ ranks and their recent seizure of a critical Jordanian border crossing, Jordanian officials say their priorities have changed from unseating president Assad to taking the fight to jihadists including the self-declared Islamic State. Now Jordan wants to train thousands of tribal fighters in eastern Syria, potentially opening up a new front against IS (Islamist State).

The Free Syrian Army, a group considered secular, is teaming up with Islamist militias deemed a threat to Jordan.

The CSM report cited Hassan Abu Haniya, a political analyst and expert on jihadist movements: “There is a fear and frustration in Jordan that rather than moderate forces, support for the rebels in the south has only strengthened extremist groups such as Al Qaeda.”

The “Syria crisis: Spooked by rebel gains, Jordan doubles down on Islamic State” headlined report said:

On April 4, a coalition of rebel forces captured the Nassib crossing between Jordan and Syria, the last lifeline between the two countries.

However, Jordanian officials were alarmed when it became clear that rather than the FSA, Jabhat al Nusra, Al Qaeda’s branch in Syria, had taken over the border crossing. For the first time, Syria jihadists had reached Jordanian soil.

Nusra fighters in southern Syria number roughly 10,000, compared to some 60,000 FSA fighters. But while the FSA has larger numbers, it relies on Nusra’s superior weaponry during joint operations such as the capture of the border crossing from Syrian regime forces. Nusra fighters have also been on the front line in rebel offensives in Idlib.

The report by Taylor Luck said:

The US has also cooled on working with the FSA. In recent months, US military officials have distanced themselves from the FSA.

Citing Cmdr. Elissa Smith, a Pentagon spokesperson the report said:

The US goal is to train 5,400 “moderate” Syrian forces in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar.

Citing FSA commanders the report said:

Since the border seizure, travel between Jordan and Syria has become “difficult” and prominent FSA commanders have been prevented from returning to Jordan.

“The border remains closed and our forces are being left to fend for themselves,” says Assad al Zoubi, commander of the FSA’s southern forces.

According to Zoubi, the rebel forces receive “minimum” financial aid from Saudi Arabia, which along with Turkey and Qatar has been a reliable backer of anti-Assad fighters.

It’s unclear to what extent Jordan’s policy shift could blunt the FSA’s momentum in Syria. For the last three years it afforded the FSA nearly unfettered movement of arms and fighters while a large portion of the FSA command is based in Jordan, including Zoubi. Jordan played host to the training of FSA officers, reportedly by the CIA, and turned a blind eye to rebel recruitment in Syrian refugee camps.

The May 4, 2015 datelined report said:

Over the past year, Jordan has begun to put a much higher priority on containing jihadist movements in Syria than on defeating the Assad regime. Jordan’s official position is that it supports a “political solution to end the violence” in Syria.

Observers and officials say Washington’s focus on fighting Islamic State is one factor in the policy shift. Jordan is a major recipient of US military aid and a partner in the aerial bombing campaign against IS.

The other factor is growing unease among Jordanian officials that aid and arms to moderate Syrian groups are falling into the hands of jihadist forces.

It cited Jawad Anani, a Jordanian senator and former foreign minister: “Jordan’s new main priority and the US’s main priority is fighting terrorism, namely ISIS. Jordan no longer wants to be drawn into supporting any side in this [Syrian] conflict.”

Jordan’s tribal allies

The report said:

Now Jordan is turning to Syrian tribes and other social forces that have not been corrupted or tainted by ties with jihadist movements.

Jordan is reaching out to Syrian tribes and civilians. It’s offering support in their fight to regain towns and villages overrun by IS – a preemptive step to prevent jihadists from threatening Jordan’s borders.

“We are helping Syrian civilians and tribes in the Eastern region to take back their towns and villages that have been taken over by ISIS,” says Mohammed al-Momani, Jordanian government spokesman and minister of media affairs.

“This is a new, international effort to help the Syrian people and is part of the war on terror and terrorist organizations.”

US defense officials declined to comment on Jordan’s training program for tribals. Jordanian officials insist that their strategy already has buy-in from the US and other allies, who are keen to find potential partners in Syria willing to fight against Islamic State.

Jordanian officials hope tribal forces would be more reliable than the FSA and other forces that have come to rely on the better-armed jihadist militias. They argue that tribal structures are easier to manage from afar, and that tribal sheikhs have the authority to lead the fight and not succumb to the internecine politics that hobbled the FSA.

Islamic State has also made inroads into tribes in eastern Syria, both by coercion and by inspiration. In what may be a nascent US strategy, Jordanian officials reckon that playing to tribal affiliations in Syria could encourage defections and weaken IS’s hold over the population.

Jordanian officials refuse to go into detail on the scope and timing of the training, citing security concerns.

However, Syrian tribal sources claim they have been approached by Jordanian security services to provide “thousands” of potential fighters to take part in the training. As many as 5,000 tribal fighters and civilians could be involved, and tribal leaders have been offered the backing of coalition air power.

Talks have not, however, broached the issue of weapons supplies.

“We have 50,000 tribal fighters ready and willing to secure the borders in Iraq and fight extremist groups,” says Mohammed Azzab Al Darwoush, member of the Syrian Tribal Council and patriarch of the largest tribe in Homs.

“But we need weapons to break free from the Islamic State’s hold,” says Mr. Darwoush, one of several Syrian tribal leaders reportedly approached by Jordanian authorities.

Saudi Arabia has long used Jordan as a rear base for anti-Assad rebels.

8 May 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

By Bryan MacDonald

Barack Obama’s decision to play political games with the 70th anniversary of Victory Day was probably intended as a snub to Vladimir Putin. However, it’s actually an outrageous insult to the Russian people.

I remember my first Russian May 9th very well. For the simple reason that following a rather raucous Saturday night, I plain forgot about it. Waking up slightly the worst for wear, I took Kris Kristofferson’s advice and flung on my “cleanest, dirty shirt” before heading to downtown Khabarovsk on that Sunday morning sidewalk. The problem was that the otherwise innocent garment was something I’d picked up at World Cup 2006 in Berlin. Emblazoned across the front were the words, “Deutschland” and on the rear “Germany” for those who had initially missed the point.

Dozily trotting down the Far Eastern capital’s wide central thoroughfare, Karl Marx Street, I noticed a few strange looks alright. By the time I passed the viewing platform at Lenin Square, my paranoia levels had peaked as people kept smiling at me, a very un-Russian trait. Eventually, I reached the Steakhouse where I’d arranged to meet my friend Vova and his buddy Max. Seeing my attire, they both laughed so hard that they doubled over.

“Oh my god! Is there a shop open, I need to buy a new T-Shirt,” I nervously said.

“No, you don’t. It’s just funny. You are not doing anything wrong,” Vova replied.

“Are you sure? I won’t get attacked by Russian nationalists or anything?”

“Not unless you put über alles after the Deutschland!”

In my homeland, St Patrick’s Day is a very big deal. The Irish have a love/hate attitude to it and many resent its association with heavy drinking. However, it remains our national holiday and despite the odd cringe, we are proud of its global appeal. To be honest, I’m not sure how safe it would be to wear an England soccer shirt in Dublin or a provincial Irish city on March 17. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t personally be inclined to volunteer as a guinea pig either.

Russians respect Germany

The point here is that Russians, despite the horrors of the “Great Patriotic War,” as its known there, don’t hate Germans. In actual fact, they quite like them. I can only give my personal experience, but I find that when you ask Russians which foreign country they most admire, a few will plump for the USA, a couple more for Japan or France but the majority will say Germany. Back home, I’d have to travel a long way before I’d find an Irishman who would admit to reverence for England.

Angela Merkel knows this too. She also understands how much “Victory Day” means to Russians. For that reason, despite humungous pressure from the US, which effectively colonizes her nation militarily, she will visit Moscow this weekend to commemorate the dead. The Chancellor is skipping the army parade on the 9th and instead will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with President Putin the following day. Of course, a lot of Russians feel she should appear at both events. Indeed, one Vadim Raskin, a doctor from Novokuznetsk, organized a campaign which saw thousands write to her Berlin address expressing dismay.

While Merkel feels that the blowback from the Ukraine crisis means she can’t attend the military display, she’s at least acknowledging Russia’s gigantic war sacrifice. Smaller NATO members, Greece and the Czech Republic, are sending their heads of state and Slovakia will be represented by its Prime Minister, Robert Fico. Many in Moscow, including President Putin, accuse the US of coercing other European states not to send delegations.

However, while Europe cowers under American duress, the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa will be present in Moscow. What should have been a day for solemn commemoration of humanity’s most tragic waste of life, has been turned into an interstate ‘brannigan’, worthy of a putative new Cold War. The man responsible for this is Barack Obama. It’s less the “audacity of hope” and more the timidity of doltishness.

Obama’s own goal

Like an Englishman taking a penalty at a World Cup, Obama has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and handed his great rival, Vladimir Putin, the moral high ground. Let me explain why the White House’s petty snub is a major strategic blunder and also an error of principle.

What most European and North American commentators don’t fully understand is just how all-consuming memories of the “Great Patriotic War” are for Russians. Defeating German fascism and repelling the Nazi invasion is regarded as their finest hour as a people. Some in the West may perceive Yuri Gagarin’s first space flight as the crowning glory, but the natives don’t. There’s a simple reason for this, almost every Russian either has a living or dead relative who fought in the conflict. On the other hand, not many Russians can boast of a family member who has been to outer space.

The UK and the USA also lean heavily on the memory of World War Two, the latter aided by Hollywood which often re-writes the accepted history. While both made huge contributions to the war effort, even the most myopic would not dare suggest that either’s suffering was comparable to what the USSR endured. Total Soviet deaths numbered around 27 million.

By comparison, Britain lost 450,000 and the USA 420,000. The main aggressor, Germany, counted around six million casualties. In 2004, Russian historian Vadim Erlikhman estimated that around 14 million of the Soviet fallen were from Russia with other massive losses sustained by Ukraine (6.8 million) and Belarus (2.3 million). The central Asian countries, former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan suffered greater loss of life than the UK or USA. Poland was also a victim of the war. In 1987, Dachau survivor Franciszek Proch concluded that 3.3 million ethnic Polish and 2.5 million Polish Jews died.

Obama – hope we can’t believe in

For Barack Obama to use the specter of a civil war in a failed, corrupt state on the edge of Europe as an excuse to water the graves of Russia’s war dead is an absurdity. Especially after his own representatives promoted the violent coup – against a freely elected government – which created the conditions for the conflict.

A man who likes to preach about democracy and freedom should surely realize that those values he, outwardly, holds dear survive in part because of the Russian and Soviet sacrifice 70 years ago. I actually suspect he doesn’t acknowledge this. US policy towards Moscow is so harebrained that one would venture that a team of monkeys, armed with ‘ogham’ stones, would do a better job than the State Department’s current Russia team.

A country that celebrates its own national holidays with such fervor as the Americans exhibit on Thanksgiving and the 4th of July should be aware of how other nations feel about theirs. That said, Victory Day is more than a regular national holiday. It’s living, breathing history.

This 70th anniversary is probably the last major milestone that a significant number of veterans will be able to attend. The fact that Barack Obama was unable to find it in his heart to come to Moscow and doff his cap to men and women who did more for the values he purports to hold dear than he ever will, speaks volumes about his character. The worst American President since Jimmy Carter has not only destroyed relations between the White House and the Kremlin, he may also have obliterated any residual goodwill that still existed from the ordinary Russian people towards America. That’s a poisonous legacy.

Bryan MacDonald is an Irish writer and commentator focusing on Russia and its hinterlands and international geo-politics.

6 May 2015

By Eric Zuesse

The Obama-proposed international-trade deals, if passed into law, will lead to “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots,” says Alfred De Zayas, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order.

These two mammoth trade-pacts, one (TTIP) for Atlantic nations, and the other (TTP) for Pacific nations excluding China (since Obama is against China), would transfer regulations of corporations to corporations themselves, and away from democratically elected governments. Regulation of working conditions and of the environment, as well as of product-safety including toxic foods and poisonous air and other consumer issues, would be placed into the hands of panels whose members will be appointed by large international corporations. Their decisions will remove the power of democratically elected governments to control these things. “Red tape” that’s imposed by elected national governments would be eliminated — replaced by the international mega-corporate version.

De Zayas was quoted in Britain’s Guardian on May 4th as saying also that, “The bottom line is that these agreements must be revised, modified or terminated,” because they would vastly harm publics everywhere, even though they would enormously benefit the top executives of corporations by giving them control as a sort of corporate-imposed world government, answerable to the people who control those corporations.

Obama is pushing for international cartels to replace important functions of today’s national governments, and De Zayas is saying that, “We don’t want an international order akin to post-democracy or post-law.”

De Zayas told the Guardian that the panels that are proposed to be at the very center of these trade-pacts “constitute an attempt to escape the jurisdiction of national courts and bypass the obligation of all states to ensure that all legal cases are tried before independent tribunals that are public, transparent, accountable and appealable.”

That is, in fact, the motivation behind these deals. Costs get transferred from corporations onto consumers, workers, and the environment, while profits are increased for the corporation’s investors, and CEO pay will soar. In fact, the EU’s own study of the economic impact of the TTIP with America, calculated “economic gains as a whole for the EU (€119 billion a year) and US (€95 billion a year). This translates to an extra €545 in disposable income each year for a family of 4 in the EU, on average, and €655 per family in the US. … Income gains are a result of increased trade. EU exports to the US would go up by 28%, equivalent to an additional €187 billion worth of exports of EU goods and services. Overall, total exports would increase 6% in the EU and 8% in the US.” According to the analysis, no one would lose anything. For example, tariffs would be reduced but income taxes and other taxes that the public pays wouldn’t be increased in order to make up for that loss of income to the state from reduced tariffs. Not at all. Instead: “As much as 80% of the total potential gains come from cutting costs imposed by bureaucracy and regulations, as well as from liberalising trade in services and public procurement.”

In other words: government regulations of product-safety and the environment and workers’ rights are a terrible waste, which would be eliminated and handled more efficiently by letting international corporations themselves handle those things, according to the EU’s study. And “liberalising trade in services and public procurement” would cut “red tape” that has prevented government officials who are the purchasers in “public procurement” from getting high-paid corporate directorships, etc. under the existing regulatory structures in democratic nations where the public, the voters, can hold their own government accountable for such corruption. If these functions become the domain of the international corporations themselves, then existing regulations and the government employees who enforce them can be eliminated. Accountability, in other words, is such a waste, for the inside investors in large corporations. They don’t need it; they fight against it. They are fighting against it. They don’t even want accountability to their own outside investors, who might want them removed from corporate management.

The EU simply doesn’t mention the downsides. And they also don’t mention that, “Obama’s TTIP Trade Deal w. Europe Would Be Disastrous for Europe, Says the First Independent Study.” That study wasn’t paid for by the EU, so they just ignore it. (They even ignore that it found that America’s international corporations would benefit even more from the deal than would Europe’s international corporations, which is the exact opposite result than the EU’s own study calculated. President Obama performs brilliantly for America’s billionaires, even though most of them are Republicans.) The economist who did that study wasn’t paid by anybody to do it. Occasionally, a study like that is performed by an economist. However, paid-for studies get far more publicity, because the findings are then heavily promoted by the sponsoring organization — after all, it’s propaganda.

On 23 January 2015, Britain’s Financial Times bannered, “Davos 2015: Businesses rally support for transatlantic trade deal.” Attendees there would pop the champagne corks if these deals pass.

David Korten at YES! magazine, headlined on 15 April 2015, “A Trade Rule that Makes It Illegal to Favor Local Business? Newest Leak Shows TPP Would Do That And More.” He stated, in common language, a recently-leaked (from wikileaks) chapter of the TPP, the treaty’s Investment chapter. Key provisions of it are:

Favoring local ownership is prohibited. …
Corporations must be paid to stop polluting. [Yes: Obama demands that corporations possess an actual right to pollute! It’s in the contract!! Ignore his mere rhetoric.] …
Three [corporate] lawyers will decide who’s right in secret tribunals. …
Speculative money must remain free [of governmental regulation] …
Corporate interests come before national ones. …
Then, there’s a sixth basic provision: to “prohibit governments from requiring that a foreign investor be under any obligation to serve the host country’s people or national interest.”

And that’s just one chapter of the proposed document. No wonder, then, why the billionaires at Davos are eager for Obama to ram this secret treaty through Congress. (Their people were in on the drafting of this proposed treaty, so Davosians didn’t need Julian Assange’s organization for them to know what the treaty contains. Only we do. And so now we understand why Obama wants to imprison or execute Assange.)

In the United States, congressional Republicans are almost unanimously in support of Obama’s trade-deals, but most congressional Democrats are opposed to these deals. President Obama doesn’t even enforce the workers’ rights provisions in the existing NAFTA and other existing trade-deals. Murders of labor union officials are prohibited under NAFTA but the Obama Administration ignores them. On April 22nd, Huffington Post bannered, “AFL-CIO’s Trumka: USTR Told Us Murder Isn’t A Violation Under U.S. Trade Deals” and quoted an AFL-CIO official, “‘The question is whether USTR [Obama’s U.S. Trade Representative, the same man who is negotiating both the TPP and the TTIP] considers murder to be a violation of the labor chapter. That is the question,’ she said. ‘The point is that USTR has informed us that labor-related violence does not constitute an actionable violation of the labor provisions [of NAFTA]’.” Obama relies almost entirely upon congressional Republicans for support of his proposed trade-deals, and of his existing trade-policies (such as non-enforcement of NAFTA). The only real question is whether congressional Democrats will be able to block his deals. When American voters in 2014 elected Republicans to majorities in both houses, the result was to ease the way for passage of Obama’s proposed international-trade deals. Harry Reid controlled the Senate and blocked them, but he was now replaced by the Republican Mitch McConnell, who is trying to win Senate approval for the TTIP. Reid, now as the Minority Leader, is still doing the best he can to block that; he just doesn’t have the power he did when he was Majority Leader.

Within the general American public, however, there seems to be more support for the TTIP among Democrats than among Republicans. On 9 April 2014, Pew Research Center issued a poll that was sponsored by the pro-deal Bertlelsmann Foundation, headlined “Support in Principle for U.S.-EU Trade Pact,” and the poll’s key question was: “Q3 As you may know, the U.S. and the EU are negotiating a free trade agreement called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP. Do you think this trade agreement will be a good thing for our country or a bad thing?” In the United States, 53% of respondents marked “Good thing,” 20% marked “Bad thing,” and 14% marked “Haven’t heard enough.” (Most of the others marked “Don’t know.”) Whereas 53% of all respondents said “Good thing,” 60% of Democratic respondents did, but only 44% of Republican ones did. That’s a 16% difference — substantial. Thus, apparently, at least as of a year ago, when a member of the public heard “TTIP,” the person mainly thought that it came from Obama (which it does), and that Obama is a Democrat (which he isn’t, except in rhetoric, but members of Congress are different; they know that he’s not, even if the public don’t); and, so, Republican voters were far less supportive of TTIP than were Democratic voters. The general public judged the deal by the nominal party of the person who initiated and is negotiating it. This is why, whereas in Congress, Republicans almost unanimously want TTIP to pass, and most Democrats want it to fail, the situation among the voting public is in the exact opposite direction: overwhelmingly favorable to the deal among Democrats, but only slightly favorable to the deal among Republicans. On the other hand, all Republican U.S. Presidential candidates support Obama’s trade-deals in principle and they only want him to speed up his getting other nations’ leaders to sign onto to them — as if he even has the power to do that.

If the TTIP and the TPP pass and become law, then historians will almost certainly remember Obama far more for those international trade-deals than for Obamacare or anything else, because of the enormous global political change they will bring. And Obama will then probably be generally regarded as the worst President in U.S. history, because he will then have done more to bring back dictatorship as the global norm and ended democracy, than any other nation’s leader, in all of history, ever did.

The evidence strongly supports Alfred De Zayas’s statement, that these trade-deals would produce “a dystopian future in which corporations and not democratically elected governments call the shots.” His statement was alarming, but not at all alarmist.

De Zayas is the chief UN official responsible for “reporting” on proposed international-trade treaties. As the likelihood of Obama’s proposed treaties passing has increased, he has become increasingly vocal about what their implications would be, for the UN’s founding vision of gradual evolution toward a democratic world-government — something comprehensive like what is now being suddenly rammed through, but democratic instead of fascist, and thus more the opposite of Obama’s vision instead of similar to it. On April 23rd, Reuters headlined, “U.N. expert says secret trade deals threaten human rights,” and De Zayas spoke in far more measured terms, not nearly so direct. He said:

“I am concerned about the secrecy surrounding negotiations for trade treaties, which have excluded key stakeholder groups from the process, including labour unions, environmental protection groups, food-safety movements and health professionals”
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.
06 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org

 

 

By Patrick Martin

Some ten thousand troops began military exercises in Jordan on Tuesday, in the fifth annual “Eager Lion” war games led by the Pentagon. The drills are in preparation for a greatly expanded military conflict in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.

A total of nine Arab countries—Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Lebanon, and Iraq—join the US, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Belgium, Poland, Australia and Pakistan for the exercise.

But the US military will dominate Eager Lion, supplying 5,000 of the 10,000 troops, including headquarters, air, land, sea and special operations forces. During the two-week-long exercise, from May 5 through May 19, there will be more American troops in Jordan than in neighboring Iraq, where President Obama has dispatched some 3,000 troops to train Iraqi forces and conduct special operations warfare and airstrikes against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Maj. Gen. Rick Mattson, Director of Exercises and Training at the US Central Command, said the 2015 version of Eager Lion was the largest military exercise involving US and Jordanian armed forces since the series of drills began in 2011.

The military exercise is focused on counterterrorism, although that term has been stretched to include almost every facet of military operations short of using nuclear weapons. Mattson said, “Everything available is dedicated to the success of the exercise,” including B-52 strategic bombers, which will participate for the first time.

One element of the exercise will be a simulated bombing raid by a new US plane that will take off from the United States and fly directly to Jordan to drop bombs on a desert target.

Jordanian Brigadier General Fhad al-Damin told reporters the exercises would focus on border security and “combating terrorism,” clearly linking the war games to the ongoing conflict with ISIS, the fundamentalist Islamist group whose forces are just across Jordan’s borders with both Syria and Iraq.

According to a report Monday in the Christian Science Monitor, Jordan has stepped up its intervention against ISIS and the Al Nusra Front, the Al Qaeda affiliate in Syria, which recently took control of Nassib, on the border between Jordan and Syria, the last crossing point still in widespread use.

The Jordanian monarchy views the presence of ISIS and al-Nusra along its borders as the main threat to its security and continued rule, and has sought allies among tribal sheiks whose extended families live on both sides of the Syria-Jordan border, a vast and largely desert region.

According to the Monitor, “Jordan is reaching out to Syrian tribes and civilians. It’s offering support in their fight to regain towns and villages overrun by IS—a preemptive step to prevent jihadists from threatening Jordan’s borders.” Jordan has offered air support from the US-led coalition that is bombing ISIS targets in both Syria and Iraq.

Perfecting his technique of telling barefaced lies to reporters who know he is lying and take dictation anyway, General Mattson declared, “Eager Lion has nothing to do with what is currently happening in the region,” a reference to ongoing US-led or US-backed military operations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the Strait of Hormuz and across North Africa.

A look at the map demonstrates how preposterous that claim is. Jordan is of central importance to the US-led imperialist intervention in the Middle East. It lies just south of Syria and west of Iraq, both key battlefields against ISIS, east of Israel and north of Saudi Arabia.

Moreover, nearly all the countries joining in Eager Lion are engaged in one or another of the US-led and US-supported military operations throughout the Middle East.

In Iraq, Britain, France, Canada, and Australia are participating either in airstrikes against ISIS or training of Iraqi combat units, or both.

In Syria, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Jordan have joined in US-led airstrikes, mainly against ISIS targets but in a few cases against the al-Nusra Front. On Friday, a US airstrike killed at least 64 civilians in the Syrian Arab village of Bir Mahali.

In Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf sheikdoms and Egypt are all engaged in airstrikes against Houthi rebels who ousted the US-installed president, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi. There are reports that Saudi and other special forces troops may be operating inside Yemen as well, and that Saudi warplanes have used US-supplied cluster bombs against Yemeni cities.

UAE, Qatari and Egyptian warplanes have struck Islamic fundamentalist militia targets in Libya as well, and the Egyptian military is fighting Islamist rebels among the Bedouin tribes who live in the Sinai Peninsula, near the Israeli-Egyptian border.

Add to this the enormous US military presence in the Persian Gulf, including major bases in Kuwait (Army), Qatar (Air Force) and Bahrain (Navy), as well as a French base in the UAE and US and British bases in Oman, along with regular US Navy patrols of the Strait of Hormuz, separating Iran and Oman.

The Middle East is a powder keg, and American imperialism is the leading arsonist, both in deploying its own military forces and selling vast (and highly profitable) caches of weapons to its client states throughout the region. That list, of course, includes the state of Israel, the most heavily armed in the region, with an estimated stockpile of at least 250 nuclear bombs, along with missiles, warplanes and submarines capable of delivering them.

The opening of the war games in Jordan follows reports in the New York Times and Washington Post that members of the US-led “coalition” against ISIS are pressing for an extension of military operations against the Islamists into other countries, including Libya and the Sinai region of Egypt, as well as unspecified repressive measures in Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Yemen.

Meanwhile, the US continues to strike targets in Yemen with drone-fired missiles operated from the American military base in Djibouti, just across the Red Sea. Secretary of State John Kerry will visit the base this week, in a sign of the stepped-up concern in the Obama administration over the deteriorating position of US-backed forces in Yemen.

Also, the Egyptian military junta announced Sunday that it had extended by three months the deployment of “some elements of the armed forces” abroad, i.e., in Yemen. The action came a day after President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi visited Saudi Arabia, where he discussed both the war in Yemen and Saudi financial subsidies to the bloodstained military dictatorship in Egypt.

06 May, 2015
WSWS.org

 

By Sputniknews.com

Speaking to Radio Sputnik, Spanish historian Daniel Trujillo Sanz observed that he is seeing a “disturbing” revision of history in Western countries regarding the Second World War, with facts “being distorted in such a way as to make Russia out to be an old enemy of the West.”

Sanz was reached for comment regarding a recent ICM Research poll for Sputnik News Agency which found that only 13 percent of Western Europeans believe that the Soviet Union played a key role in the liberation of Europe from Nazism during the Second World War.

The historian explained that “in the West, a revision of history is well underway. This process has reached a disturbing scale. Facts about the Second World War are being distorted in such a way as to make Russia out to be an old enemy of the West.”

Sanz noted that, “in this sense, I am extremely concerned about the refusal by a number of European leaders to come to Moscow on May 9. In this way, they are giving an official carte-blanche for a further revision of history.”

Sanz told Sputnik that he believes that the deaths of tens of millions of people have been turned into a political tool, aimed against Russia and the memory of the Soviet contribution to victory:

“History has been turned into a political tool, and it does not seem to bother anyone that the distortion of the facts offends the memory of the millions who died in the bloodiest conflict in human history. Any historian knows that about 80 percent of German losses are attributable to the Soviet army. Soviet military and civilian losses were incommensurably greater than those taken by their allies. Moreover, the battles serving as the key turning points in the war were won by [the Soviet Union]: the fight for Moscow, for Stalingrad, the Battle of Kursk, Operation Bagration and the capture of Berlin.”

Regarding the Allied landing in Normandy, Sanz noted that “of course the Allied landing in Normandy hastened the surrender of Germany, but the scale of the operation is not comparable with any of the aforementioned battles.”

Spanish historian David de Caixal agreed with his colleague, telling Sputnik that “I consider the rewriting of history to be unacceptable; historical facts must not be distorted for the sake of political expediency. Whether one likes it or not, the Soviet Union doubtlessly made a decisive contribution to victory over Nazism and the liberation of Europe.”

29 April 2015

http://sputniknews.com/

By Eric Zuesse

The May 2nd Ukrainian massacre of anti-regime pamphleteers last year at the Odessa Trade Unions Building, burning these pamphleteers alive there, was crucial to the Obama Administration’s solidification of its control over Ukraine. That massacre was designed to, and it did, terrorize the residents in all areas of Ukraine which had voted overwhelmingly for the man whom Obama had just ousted, Viktor Yanukovych. Especially in the Donbass region, Yanokovych had received 90%+ of the votes. In Odessa, he had received three-quarters of the votes. (Later will be explained why this terror against the residents of such regions was necessary for Obama’s purpose of solidifying his control over Ukraine’s government.)

So, the shocking methods of executing these people, and its being done in public and with no blockage of video images being recorded of these events by their many witnesses, and with the newly-installed Obama government in Kiev doing nothing whatsoever to prosecute any of these horrific murderers, there was a clear message being sent to the people who had voted for Yanukovych: If you resist the new authorities in any way, this is how you will be treated by them. This is how you will be treated (and that video was posted to the Internet by the perpetrators and their supporters, by headlining, “48 Russian Subversives Burned To Death In Fire At Trade Unions Building Fire In Odessa,” so that any other ‘Russian Subversives’ would have no doubt. However, those victims’ identities were subsequently published, and all of the victims were actually Odessa locals, none were Russians. The perpetrators were racist fascists, after all; and, so, being a ‘Russian’ meant, to them, being from a hated ethnicity, not necessarily being a citizen of Russia.) Terror was the obvious purpose here, and Obama was behind it, but nazis were in front of it, and they were proud of their handiwork — proud enough to film it and then to display it to the public.

If the President that you had voted for were subsequently to be overthrown in an extremely bloody coup — or even if it had happened in an authentic revolution — then how would you feel? And, if, two months later, people who were peacefully printing and distributing flyers against the illegally installed replacement regime were publicly treated this way, then would you want to be ruled by that regime?

Yanukovych had been elected in 2010 in an election that was declared free and fair by international observers; and, furthermore, according to wikipedia, “All exit polls conducted during the final round of voting reported a win for Viktor Yanukovych over Yulia Tymoshenko.[162][163][164].” But, starting in Spring of 2013, which was as soon as Obama got into position all of his key foreign-affairs appointees for his second Presidential term, after the 2012 U.S. election, the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine immediately started organizing, for Maidan square in Kiev, public demonstrations to bring Yanukovych down, and they placed at the head of this operation the co-founder of the Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine, Andriy Parubiy, a man who had long studied Hitler’s methods of political organization. The troops, actually mercenaries, that provided the snipers who fired down onto the demonstrators and police in Maidan square in Kiev in February 2014 and pretended to be from Yanukovych’s security forces, were trained not by Parubiy but instead by Dmitriy Yarosh, who was the head of Ukraine’s other large racist-fascist, or nazi, organization, the Right Sector, whose CIA-and-oligarch-backed army numbered probably between 7,000 and 10,000. Yarosh selected the best of them for this operation. Whereas Parubiy was the main political organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right, Yarosh was the main military organizer and trainer of Ukraine’s far-right.

So, Obama’s operation to oust Yanukovych was fully dependent upon Ukraine’s far-right, which was the only nazi movement that still retained deep and strong roots anywhere in Europe after World War II. Obama built his takeover of Ukraine upon people like this. As is clear there, they were very well trained. Yarosh had been training them for more than a decade. (He had been doing it even prior to the breakup of the Soviet Union.) Yarosh had carefully studied successful coups; he knew how to do it. Just as Obama had very skillfully selected his political campaign team for his 2008 White House run, he very carefully selected his American team for what would become the chief feature of his second-term foreign policy: his war against Russia, central to which was his campaign to install rabid haters of Russia into control of Ukraine, right next door to Russia (in the hope of ultimately placing missiles there, against Russia). He had groomed Dick Cheney’s former foreign-affairs advisor Victoria Nuland as the spokesperson for Hillary Clinton’s State Department (Nuland and Clinton were also personal friends of each other, so she was a skillful choice for this post), and then he boosted Nuland in the second term to the State Department post which oversaw all policymaking on Ukraine. Likewise Obama boosted Geoffrey Pyatt into the Ambassadorship in Ukraine, as the operative there to carry out Nuland’s instructions. Nuland made the decision to base the Maidan demonstrations upon the political skill of Paribuy and the paramilitary muscle of Yarosh. They headed her Ukrainian team.

Wikipedia says of Parubiy, and of Obama’s other Ukrainian operatives:

Parubiy co-led the Orange Revolution in 2004.[5][11] In the 2007 parliamentary elections he was voted into theUkrainian parliament on an Our Ukraine–People’s Self-Defense Bloc ticket. He then became a member of the deputy group that would later become For Ukraine!.[5] Parubiy stayed with Our Ukraine and became a member of its political council.[12]

In February 2010 Parubiy asked the European Parliament to reconsider its negative reaction to former Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko’s decision to award Stepan Bandera, the leader of the [racist-fascist] Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the title of Hero of Ukraine.[13]

In early February 2012 Parubiy left Our Ukraine because their “views diverged”.[14] In 2012 he was re-elected into parliament on the party list of “Fatherland”.[15] [Yulia Tymoshenko heads the Fatherland Party; and she had been Obama’s choice to become the next President of Ukraine, but she was too far-right for even the far-right voters of northwestern Ukraine, so Poroshenko won instead.]

From December 2013 to February 2014 Parubiy was a commandant of Euromaidan.[16] He was coordinator of thevolunteer security corps for the mainstream protesters.[17] He was then appointed Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine.[6] This appointed was approved by (then) new Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on June 16, 2014.[18]

As Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Parubiy oversaw the “anti–terrorist” operation againstpro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.[19]

Working directly under Parubiy in that “anti-terrorist operation” or “ATO,” was Yarosh, who in an interview with Newsweek, said that he has “been training paramilitary troops for almost 25 years,” and that his “divisions are constantly growing all over Ukraine, but over 10,000 people for sure.”

On May 14th of last year, there appeared, at Oriental Review, an important news report, “Bloodbath in Odessa Guided by Interim Rulers of Ukraine,” which described the roles of Yarosh, and of these others. It opened: “The information provided below was obtained from an insider in one of Ukraine’s law-enforcement agencies, who wished to remain anonymous for obvious reasons.” It said:

“Ten days before the tragedy a secret meeting was held in Kiev, chaired by the incumbent president Olexander Turchinov, to prepare a special operation in Odessa. Present were minister of internal affairs Arsen Avakov, the head of the Ukrainian Security Service Valentin Nalivaychenko, and the secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Andriy Parubiy. Ukrainian oligarch Ihor Kolomoiskiy, the Kiev-appointed head of regional administration of the Dnepropetrovsk region, was consulted in regard to the operation.

During that meeting Arsen Avakov has reportedly came up with the idea of using football hooligans, known as “ultras,” in the operation. Ever since his time as the head of the Kharkov regional administration he has worked closely with the fans leaders, whom he continued to sponsor even fromhis new home in Italy.

Kolomoisky temporarily delivered his private “Dnieper-1” Battalion under the command of law-enforcement officials in Odessa and also authorized a cash payment of $5,000 for “each pro-Russian separatist” killed during the special operation.

Mykola Volvov was wanted by the Ukrainian police since 2012 for fraud.

A couple of days before the operation in Odessa Andriy Parubiy brought dozens of bullet-proof vests to local ultra-nationalists. This video shows an episode of handing the vests to the local Maidan activists in Odessa. Take note of the person who receives the load. He is Mykola Volkov, a local hard-core criminal who would be repeatedly screened during the assault on Trade Unionist House gun-shooting at the people and reporting about the “incident” by phone to an official in Kiev.

Preparations

Ultranationalist militants from the extremist Ukrainian National Assembly (UNA-UNSO), who could be recognized by their red armbands, were also used during the operation. They were assigned a key role in the staging of the provocations: they masqueraded as the defenders of the tent city on Kulikovo Field, and then lured its occupants into the House of Trade Unions to be slaughtered.

Fifteen roadblocks were set up outside of Odessa, secured by militants under the personal command of Kolomoisky’s “Dnieper-1” Battalion, as well as Right Sector’s thugs from Dnepropetrovsk and the western regions of Ukraine. In addition, two military units from the Self-Defense of Maidan arrived in Odessa, under the command of the acting head of the administration of the president, Sergey Pashinsky – the same man who was caught with a sniper rifle in the trunk of his car on Feb. 18 on Independence Square (Maidan) in Kiev. Pashinsky later claimed that he had not been fully informed about the plans for the operation and had dispatched his men only to “protect the people of Odessa.” Thus, there were a total of about 1,400 fighters from other regions of Ukraine in the vicinity at the time – thus countering the idea that there were “residents of Odessa” who burned down the House of Trade Unions.

Deputy chief of Odessa police and principle coordinator of the operation Dmitry Fucheji mysteriously dissappeared soon after the tradegy in Odessa.

The role of the Odessa police forces in the operation was personally directed by the head of the regional police, Petr Lutsyuk, and his deputy Dmitry Fucheji. Lutsyuk was assigned the task of neutralizing Odessa’s regional governor, Vladimir Nemirovsky, to prevent him from putting together an independent strategy that could disrupt the operation. Fucheji led the militants right to Greek Square where he was allegedly “wounded” (in order to evade responsibility for subsequent events).

The operation was originally scheduled for May 2 – the day of a soccer match, which would justify the presence of a large number of sports fans (“ultras”) downtown and would also mean there would be a minimal number of Odessa residents on the streets who were not involved in the operation, since the majority of the city’s population would be out of town enjoying their May Day holidays.

It should also be noted that Kolomoysky himself was directly connected to the U.S. White House.

If not for this horrific massacre, then the voters in the anti-coup regions would have remained inside the Ukrainian electorate, participants in the May 25th Presidential election to succeed Yanukovych as Ukraine’s new President: they would have been Ukrainian voters because the public sentiment in those regions still was not yet predominantly for separating from Ukraine; it was instead for the creation of a federal system that would have granted Donbass, Odessa, and the other anti-coup areas, some degree of autonomy. But that way, with the moderating influence of the voters in the far southeast, the resulting national government wouldn’t have been rabidly anti-Russian, and so wouldn’t have been, like the present one is, obsessed to kill Russians and to join NATO, for a NATO war against Russia. Obama needed to get rid of those voters. He needed them not to participate in the 25 May 2014 election. The May 2nd massacre was the way to do that. Here was the electoral turnout in the 25 May Ukrainian Presidential election. As you can see, almost all of the voters in that election were located in the parts of Ukraine that had voted overwhelmingly for Yulia Tymoshenko in the 2010 election, against Yanukovych.

Obama did his best to get the nazi queen Tymoshenko elected as Ukraine’s President; but, now that she was publicly and openly campaigning as the rabid anti-Russian that she had always been, and now that even many Ukrainian conservatives had qualms about going to war against Russia, since there was now so much political rhetoric favoring doing that, Poroshenko won, Tymoshenko lost. Poroshenko had played his cards just right: having been a supporter of the Maidan and of the overthrow of Yanukovych but not publicly associated with the nazis. He was even one of the people who informed the EU’s investigator that the coup was a coup, no authentic revolution.

Publicly, Poroshenko gave no hint that he knew that Yanukovych had been framed for the February sniper-attacks that had been organized by the U.S. White House and that the overthrow had been a coup. In fact, on May 6th, just days after the massacre, and less than a month before the 2014 Presidential election, Poroshenko said, “Proof was presented at the Verkhovna Rada’s session behind closed doors today that what happened at the House of Unions can be called a terrorist attack.” (This had to be “behind closed doors” because it was fictitious and thus needed to be blocked from being examined by the public.) By that time, the polls already showed that he was going to win the election, and he knew that his only real audience was the man sitting in the U.S. White House.

Obama didn’t get the more overt anti-Russian President that he had wanted, but he still controls Ukraine. The installation by Nuland of Arseniy Yatsenyuk as the ‘temporary’ new Prime Minister to lead Ukraine after the coup, until a new President would be elected on May 25th, turned out to be permanent, instead of temporary. And Petro Poroshenko can’t do anything that Obama doesn’t want him to do. So: Obama still remains the virtual Emperor of Ukraine.

The people of Ukraine shouldn’t praise or blame either their Prime Minister or their (perhaps merely nominal) President for what has been happening in their country after the coup; they should instead praise or blame those men’s master: Barack Obama. He’s the person who made Yatsenyuk the Prime Minister, and who controls Poroshenko even though he didn’t prefer him over Tymoshenko.

Ukraine is just part of the American Empire now. Any Ukrainian who doesn’t recognize that would have to be a fool. It’s the outright nazi part of the American Empire, but it’s part of the American Empire nonetheless. Obama is the first U.S. President to install a racist-fascist, or nazi, regime, anywhere; and he did it in Ukraine, which has long been the ripest place in the world for doing that sort of thing. The May 2nd massacre was an important part of the entire operation. This is why that important massacre is ignored as much as it can be, in the U.S.

It’s important history, but it’s history that 99% of Americans are blocked from knowing. So: pass this article along to everyone you know (and, via facebook etc., even to some people you don’t know); and they, too, will then have access to the documentation that’s linked-to here, just as you did.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.

01 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Kenny Coyle

On the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, April 30, 2015, the momentous events that made it possible are recalled

Forty years ago, on the morning of April 30 1975, a column of tanks broke down the gates of the presidential palace in Saigon, the headquarters of the Republic of (South) Vietnam.

In the space of an hour or so, the new flag of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam was hoisted over the palace, signalling the end of 101 years of Vietnam’s colonisation, war and division.
The final assault by the Vietnam People’s Army (VPA) and its allies in the National Liberation Front (NLF) took just 55 days — exactly the same length of time, noted Vietnamese military legend General Vo Nguyen Giap, as the historic siege of Dien Bien Phu, which had ended French colonial rule in 1954.

The speed of the Ho Chi Minh Campaign, as it was named, took both sides by surprise.

Military strategists in the North had estimated that military victory would be achieved only in 1976.

In the South, the delusional military dictatorship in Saigon had dismissed any idea that the regime would ever fall despite the withdrawal of US military forces.

Generous military aid from Washington, amounting to $1.6 billion a year, was considered sufficient to see off the communists.

In 1973, US president Richard Nixon had agreed withdrawal terms with North Vietnam in Paris and promised: “Peace with honour,” although it’s fair to say that “Tricky Dicky” was a stranger to both of those concepts.

The Paris deal was described as “half-peace, half-war” by one commentator.

The agreement did not require that the liberation forces withdraw from territory in South Vietnam.

This allowed the southern-based anti-imperialist NLF to regroup its forces and expand its networks in the countryside and major towns.

The US was soon embroiled in a crisis of its own making. Nixon was impeached over the Watergate scandal and resigned in August 1974.

A massive wave of revulsion and cynicism about the US Establishment engulfed those hitherto supportive or indifferent to the war.

The loyal core of US anti-war activists was now joined by mainstream US opinion.
The same year, US government aid to the puppet regime in Saigon was halved and the possibility of a new US invasion receded.

Vietnamese communist leader Pham Van Dong remarked sardonically that: “The Americans will not send back GIs even if we offer them candy.”

In January 1975, a force of just 8,000 VPA soldiers and NLF fighters took the city of Phuoc Binh, capital of the province of Phuoc Long, after a fortnight of fighting.

Other provincial capitals began to fall in quick succession, one after another. In total, all 43 southern provinces were “lost” in less than two months.

But as the legendary Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett remarked: “There is no explanation for the fact that the loss of a provincial capital is synonymous with the loss of an entire province other than that the province had been ‘lost’ for years.”

The speed with which liberation forces advanced had another explanation that eluded both the South Vietnamese regime and its US advisers.

They had calculated that the VPA would be forced to station a regiment in each new province. What happened instead was that local people’s committees took over provincial administration.

Local NLF units emerged from the underground and joined up with many South Vietnamese troops who chose to go over to the side of the liberation forces.

Vast amounts of US-supplied weaponry fell into the VPA’s hands, easing logistical concerns over the lengthening supply chains from the northern bases.

The VPA created an entire squadron from captured South Vietnamese A-37 Dragonfly fighter-bombers.

In April 1975, a unit of specially retrained Vietnam People’s Air Force pilots flew them in formation over Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut airport, where the remnants of the Saigon regime’s air force were based and through which the elite planned to escape in the event of defeat.

When challenged by the air traffic control tower to identify which unit they belonged to, a pilot replied sarcastically: “A Made in the USA squadron!” before bombing the runway and enemy planes below.

Specialist VPA commando units, called dac cong, were used to penetrate enemy positions, gather intelligence, sabotage the Saigon regime’s defences and make contact with underground NLF units. They were devastatingly effective, sowing confusion and panic in the disintegrating ranks of their enemies.

Underground NLF activists were instructed to launch urban insurrections in the heart of the towns and cities.

The term “people’s war” was no military cliche but a fundamental political strategy developed by Vietnamese communists over generations.

VPA and NLF forces swelled, reaching 15 full divisions by the end of April 1975.

The new challenge for the Vietnamese military leadership was how to co-ordinate this unanticipated larger force and to strike before the summer monsoon season began toward the end of May.

The victory of April 30 was the culmination of decades of struggle and years of planning.

It was, as Vietnamese communist leader Le Duan noted, the combination of a remarkable series of political alliances.

First the core worker-peasant alliance was extended to the urban intelligentsia. A second factor was the support offered by the socialist countries, and this at a time when the Sino-Soviet split created enormous but not yet disastrous challenges.

Third, was the solidarity of the democratic and progressive forces within the imperialist camp itself, first and foremost the heroic anti-war movement within the US, but also extending to peace and anti-imperialist forces across western Europe and Australia, whose campaigns had limited and blocked more intensified conflict.

To any visitor to today’s Vietnam, it’s difficult to imagine just how much death and destruction was inflicted upon the country.

Controversy rages around the exact number of deaths. Vietnamese sources estimate a total loss of around three million people between the end of the French colonial war in 1954 and 1975.

US academic and British Medical Journal surveys put the number of deaths between 1965-75 alone at approximately 1.5 million.

The US air force dropped 7.8 million tons of bombs on Vietnam, more than the combined total dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II. Around the same tonnage again was fired from land and sea units.
An estimated 800,000 tons failed to detonate, contaminating around 20 per cent of its land.

More than 100,000 people have been killed or injured since 1975 by these delayed parcels of death.

Added to this was the widespread use of chemical warfare, napalm and Agent Orange, both of which had been trialled by Britain during its colonial war in Malaya.

The US Department of Veterans Affairs lists 15 diseases associated with the defoliant Agent Orange, ranging from lung cancer to leukaemia, which can be cited by former US service personnel to claim benefits.

All the while, US war crimes against the Vietnamese population, from generation to generation, remain unpunished.

Nine US corporations were given contracts to produce Agent Orange. Two are household names — Dow Chemical, the official chemical sponsor of the London Olympics, and Monsanto, best known today for its genetically modified foods.

The war cast a dark shadow over every Vietnamese family — the losses created one million widows and 880,000 orphans.

In the North, 4,000 out of 6,000 villages were destroyed and 29 provincial capitals were bombed, 12 of which were razed to the ground.

Six major cities, including the capital Hanoi and the major port of Haiphong, were seriously damaged.

The US cynically targeted North Vietnam’s economy, hoping to starve its people into submission.

A total of 400 factories and industrial enterprises were eliminated. The numbers of bridges, dams and dykes destroyed are incalculable.

Neither should we forget that the “American war” also enlisted the forces of its allies. South Korean forces, brutalised by their own civil war and fanatically anti-communist, were responsible for at least half a dozen massacres of Vietnamese civilians.

Australians, New Zealanders, Filipinos, Thais and soldiers from Chiang Kai-shek’s Taiwan took part in the conflict.

Even after its humiliating defeat, the US maintained a vindictive economic embargo against Vietnam until 1994.

Vietnam’s victory in 1975 was a triumph for all those who cherished solidarity and resistance against a seemingly invincible imperial power.

The struggle of the Vietnamese people for reunification and independence was, in the words of Che Guevara, the battle of “a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes of a whole world of forgotten peoples.”

Today’s [April 30] anniversary marks not simply an astonishing military success but the affirmation of the unbreakable spirit of these “forgotten peoples.”
Four decades later, let’s ensure that the heroism and sacrifices of the Vietnamese people are not only remembered with reverence but celebrated with pride.
01 May, 2015
Morning Star

 

By Countercurrents.org

Baltimore blazes in protest. Schools, businesses and train stations have been shut down in the city notorious for poverty and unemployment. A state of emergency has been declared and National Guards have been deployed. Two dozen people were arrested. The protests erupted in violent force after funeral of a 25-year black man who died after he was injured in police custody.

Enraged people hurled bricks, looted businesses and set fires in Baltimore on Monday in violence that injured at least seven police officers following the funeral of the black man who died. Protesters ransacked shops and trashed police vehicles. Other cars were set on fire.

National Guard troops fanned out through the city, shield-bearing police officers blocked the streets and firefighters doused still-simmering blazes early Tuesday as a growing area of Baltimore shuddered from riots following the funeral of a black man who died in police custody.

Media reports from the U.S. said:

The disturbances broke out just a few blocks from the funeral of Freddie Gray and then spread through parts of Baltimore in the most violent U.S. demonstrations since looting in Ferguson, Missouri, last year. Part of Baltimore was plunged into chaos

Maryland Governor Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency in the port city of 662,000 people 40 miles (64 km) from the nation’s capital and activated the National Guard as firefighters tried to extinguish fires set by protesters with baseball bats. A weeklong, daily curfew was imposed beginning Tuesday from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. Authorities were struggling to quell pockets of unrest.

Gray’s death on April 19 reignited a public outcry over police treatment of African-Americans that flared last year after the killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, New York City and elsewhere.

After more than an hour of mayhem, hundreds of police moved into glass-strewn streets that witnessed the worst of the violence. Police used pepper spray on protesters. A part of the demonstrators sacked check-cashing and liquor stores.

Police helicopters buzzed overhead while protesters cut a fire department hose. Local and state police in riot gear struggled to restore order as the rioters veered off in different directions, refusing to heed dispersal orders. Earlier, firefighters fought a fire at a CVS pharmacy looted. Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said authorities had had a “very trying and disappointing day.”

The violence that started in West Baltimore on Monday afternoon — within a mile of where Freddie Gray was arrested and placed into a police van earlier this month — had by midnight spread to East Baltimore and neighborhoods close to downtown and near the baseball stadium.

“All this had to happen, people getting tired of the police killing the young black guys for no reason. … It is a sad day but it had to happen,” said Tony Luster, 40, who is on disability and was out on the street watching the police line.

Wary of violent clashes between black youths and police, pastors and community leaders moved into the area to try to calm tensions. Gray’s family had pleaded for peaceful demonstrations.

Thousands had converged on New Shiloh Baptist church in Baltimore’s poverty-ridden Sandtown neighborhood earlier Monday to pay final respects to Gray.

“Today of all days, the family was clear this was a day of sacred closure,” pastor Jamal Bryant of the city’s Empowerment Temple mega-church, who delivered the eulogy, told reporters as the violence spiraled.

“So for us to come out of the burial and walk into this is absolutely inexcusable. I’m asking every young person to go back home.”

At the funeral, Gray’s body was in a white casket. Crowds swayed to hymns at the service, chanting, “Justice shall prevail, peace will prevail” in the church, where a photo of Gray — — was displayed among floral wreaths.

Fear of unrest prompted the University of Maryland’s downtown campus, corporate offices and the city’s famous Lexington Market to shut down early.

President Barack Obama was briefed on the rapidly evolving situation by his newly sworn in Attorney General Loretta Lynch and city mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the White House said.

On Saturday, 34 people were arrested, and six police officers injured, when violence erupted after an orderly rally for Gray outside Baltimore city hall.

Civil rights activist Jesse Jackson denounced the “epidemic of murders in the country.” “We have become too violent, too full of hate,” Jackson told reporters before the service. “We need training, employment, housing, access to health, a reconstruction project. Poverty is a weapon of mass destruction.”

Gray’s arrest was caught on video by bystanders, and he can be heard howling in apparent pain as his limp body is dragged into the van. Police confirmed Gray requested medical help and an inhaler after he was detained and acknowledged that he should have received medical attention sooner.

Six officers have been suspended with pay pending the outcome of a police investigation that is to be submitted to state prosecutors by Friday.

The US Justice Department, which was already looking into Baltimore’s use of force, has also opened its own civil rights probe.

Maryland Congressman Elijah Cummings and about 200 others, including ministers, tried unsuccessfully to quell the violence at one point Monday night, marching arm-in-arm through a neighborhood littered with broken glass, flattened aluminum cans and other debris. As they got close to a line of police officers, the marchers went down on their knees. They then rose to their feet and walked until they were face-to-face with the police officers in a tight formation and wearing riot gear.

Monday’s riot was the latest flare-up over the death of Gray and came amid a national debate over police use of force following the high-profile deaths of several black men in encounters with police — from the Brown death in Ferguson to the deaths of Eric Garner in New York and Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina.

28 April 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Countercurrents.org

Death toll in the Nepal earthquake could reach 10,000 as rescue teams have started reaching isolated mountain villages. Entire mountain villages have been razed to the ground and millions of people are starving as they are cut off from all food supply and communication. Wet weather and cold are making life intolerable. An estimated 8 million people have been affected. Moreover, in the earthquake, 61 people died in India, and China reported 25 people died in Tibet.

Survivors are telling: “We have no shelter, no food and all the bodies are scattered around.” Now, for days, survivors are struggling under open sky with fear of epidemic looking larger.

Media reports said:

The official death toll from the Nepal earthquake has soared past 4,000 people by noon of April 28, 2015. The Nepalese prime minister Sushil Koirala has warned the toll could reach 10,000.

People are still being pulled from the rubble more than 50 hours after the tragedy. Water, food and electricity are in short supply and there are fears of outbreaks of diseases.

People are growing increasingly frustrated by what they say has been a slow government response. Huge numbers of people facing another night in the open or with minimal shelter, amid forecast heavy rain.

The situation is critical in the remote rural regions towards the epicenter of Saturday’s quake. But outside the capital, many of the worst-hit villages in the ridges around Katmandu remain a black hole, surrounded by landslides that make them inaccessible even to the country’s armed forces. Landslides and other destruction delayed attempts to reach the district earlier, but Gorkha, close to the epicenter, is feared to have extensive damage.

The Nepali authorities have begun airdropping packages of tarpaulins, dry food and medicine into mountain villages, but an attempt to land helicopters was abandoned.

The government is only gradually getting a grasp of the destruction in these isolated places. It is nearly impossible to identify which villages are most in need, and how many may be dead or injured.

The chief bureaucrat in Gorkha district, Uddhav Timilsina, said rescue crews were unable even to distribute relief, because they are confronting as many as eight to 10 landslides between one village and its nearest neighbor. He said 250 deaths had been reported so far, but that it would take more time to get an accurate count. “Phone lines are down, electricity is out, roads are blocked, so what can we do?” he said.

1,300 houses in Saurpani, but one resident, Shankar Thapa, said, “all the houses collapsed.” “The whole valley has been destroyed.” He added that it seemed unlikely that more than a few of the 600 residents of Langtang would have survived.

Rebecca McAteer, an American doctor who was one of the first to arrive in the district of Gorkha, told 90% of houses there were “just flattened”. She said most residents were older men and women and children, as the younger men had left to find work elsewhere. Many have also lost livestock and have little food.

A district official, Surya Mohan Adhikari, told that villages around the epicenter were very difficult to reach – cut off by landslides – and that bad weather was hampering helicopter access.

In one village, every home had been damaged or destroyed. Residents of Barkobot village in Sindhupalchowk district said they had had no aid despite being just an hour and a half on good roads from Kathmandu. But helicopters have begun ferrying wounded from Gorkha.

Heavy rain has added to the hardship of thousands of people forced to sleep rough for fourth night. Water, food and power are scarce, raising fears of waterborne diseases.

An estimated 8 million people have been affected by the quake in 39 of Nepal’s districts, and more than 1.4 million need food assistance, including 750,000 who live near the quake’s epicenter in poor quality housing.

People aren’t able to wash their hands before eating, women have no feminine supplies. Even when people have toilets, they are getting clogged up or over used.

People, women and children, the very old the very young, who have lost everything are sleeping outside in the rain.

The heavy equipment for search and rescue, etc. is having trouble getting through the narrow roads in Kathmandu Valley.

As emergency teams reach the areas around the epicenter of the Nepal earthquake, many are warning of scenes of complete devastation.

There is possibility of “high and significant damage” in the regions closest to the earthquake’s epicenter, Gorkha and Lamjung.

There are villages where 70% of the houses have been destroyed.

The epicenter of the earthquake was Gorkha, though very few images have emerged from the region Parts of Gorkha district, like the village of Paslang, have been completely leveled

Mr. Timalsina said 223 people had been confirmed dead in the district but he said “the number would go up because there are thousands who are injured”.

On Monday, an Indian journalist flew over the damage in Gorkha in an Indian army helicopter. The footage shows many low-lying houses, seemingly cut off in the middle of mountains and reduced to rubble.

The journalist, Jugal Purohit, said: “What we are witnessing here are villages completely devastated, destroyed and, in a sense, rubbed off the map of Nepal.”

Matt Darvas, of the charity World Vision, is in the town of Pokhara, further west from the epicenter. He told: “I spoke to one man. He had been [evacuated] in to the hospital where I was, in the very first helicopter. “In his village of 1,100 homes, almost every home was decimated. He estimated 90%. That’s a village of over 2,000 people. “There could be many other villages in a similar case where the entire village is all but gone.”

Teams from many major charities have so far been unable to reach the more outlying areas of the country, but have plans to do so as soon as possible. Many are working with regional partners who are based in western Nepal.

But access to areas such as Gorkha and Lamjung, that are hilly, isolated and heavily forested, was difficult even before the earthquake that caused landslides to block roads.

Mr. Darvas said some parts of Gorkha could take up to five days to reach.

Flattened villages

Sukamaya Tamang, whose parents and brothers are stranded in one of the worst-hit districts, said families there had been left to fend for themselves, with no government help reaching them so far.
Tamang’s family is stranded in Sindulpalchowk, some 100 km from the epicenter of the quake, where homes and roads have been destroyed.

“There are a cluster of nine villages and they have been all flattened out,” said Tamang, who managed to speak to her brother over the phone at their village.

Tamang, 25, said the village has been banding together to care for the injured and help to cremate the dead.

Rescue helicopters have begun to reach survivors in Gorkha. Around noon, two helicopters brought in eight women from Ranachour village, two of them clutching babies to their breast, and a third heavily pregnant.

“There are many more injured people in my village,” said Sangita Shrestha, who was pregnant and visibly downcast as she got off the helicopter. She was quickly surrounded by Nepalese soldiers and policemen and ushered into a waiting van to be taken to a hospital.

The little town of Gorkha, the district’s administrative and trading center, is being used as a staging post to get rescuers and supplies to those remote communities.

Some villages were reachable only by air after landslides blocked mountain roads.

Some women who came off the helicopters were grimacing and crying in pain and unable to walk or speak, in agony three days after being injured in the quake.

Sita Karki winced when soldiers lifted her. Her broken and swollen legs had been tied together with crude wisps of hay twisted into a makeshift splint.

“When the earthquake hit, a wall fell on me and knocked me down. My legs are broken,” she said.

Most of the newer concrete buildings were intact after the quake but remote mountainside villages were reportedly devastated.

Reports from further north are very disturbing. Up to 75 percent of the buildings in Singla may have collapsed and the village, a two-day walk away, has been out of contact since Saturday night.

Local officials lost contact with military and police who set out for Singla. Helicopters have had to turn back because of clouds. A few SUVs with foreign tourists bringing basic aid supplies had begun to reach Gorkha by early evening.

Chaos has reigned at Kathmandu’s small airport since the earthquake, with the onslaught of relief flights causing major backups on the tarmac.

US soldiers

The Pentagon says two teams of U.S. Army Green Beret soldiers happened to be in Nepal when the deadly earthquake struck Saturday are staying to help with search and relief efforts. The 11-person crew of a C-130 cargo plane that brought them to Nepal also is remaining in case of a request to evacuate any American citizens.

Kathmandu shifted 10 feet

CBS News science contributor Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City College of New York, told “CBS This Morning”: “The city of Kathmandu shifted 10 feet — an entire city was shifted by the force of this earthquake.”

“May not be the big one”

An engineer who works on earthquake risks says the 7.8-magnitude temblor that struck on Saturday may not be the Big One for Nepal.

GeoHazards International’s Hari Kumar says: “We were expecting an 8-magnitude to happen along the Himalayas, this is not it.”

Immense seismic pressure is still building up along the Nepal-India border, and he says, “The stress which was developing west of this earthquake has not been released.”

The devastating earthquake was part of a pattern of major temblors that have become so predictable that many seismologists had been expecting this one — and at least one team of researchers warned just weeks ago that a major quake was due in the exact location where this one struck.

“We knew it was going to happen. We saw it in ’34,” USGS geologist Susan Hough told the Washington Post. “The earthquakes we expect to happen do happen.”

One team of researchers not only expected this earthquake to happen, but even pinpointed the location.

Laurent Bollinger of the CEA research agency in France told the BBC that his team had been digging trenches along the fault. Using carbon dating on charcoal samples found in the trenches, they discovered one segment that hadn’t moved in nearly 700 years.

The last time it did was in 1344, and it came 89 years after a segment of the fault east of Kathmandu moved — the same segment of the fault that moved 81 years ago in 1934.

As it’s common for strain to transfer from one part of a fault to another, Bollinger’s team warned at a Nepal Geological Society meeting in early April that the same pattern could occur again. And now that it has, Bollinger is warning that Saturday’s quake may not have been enough to relieve all the pressure.

“Early calculations suggest that Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake is probably not big enough to rupture all the way to the surface, so there is still likely to be more strain stored, and we should probably expect another big earthquake to the west and south of this one in the coming decades,” Bollinger told.

Saturday’s quake has had a far-reaching impact. Death tolls and casualty figures are likely to rise over the coming days, and the risk of landslides on slopes made unstable by the quake mean that the danger is far from passed.

In a sadly prescient turn of events, Laurent Bollinger, from the CEA research agency in France, and his colleagues, uncovered the historical pattern of earthquakes during fieldwork in Nepal last month, and anticipated a major earthquake in exactly the location where Saturday’s big tremor has taken place.

Down in the jungle in central southern Nepal, Bollinger’s team dug trenches across the country’s main earthquake fault (which runs for more than 1,000km from west to east), at the place where the fault meets the surface, and used fragments of charcoal buried within the fault to carbon-date when the fault had last moved.

Ancient texts mention a number of major earthquakes, but locating them on the ground is notoriously difficult.

Monsoon rains wash soils down the hillsides and dense jungle covers much of the land, quickly obscuring earthquake ruptures.

Bollinger’s group was able to show that this segment of fault had not moved for a long time.

“We showed that this fault was not responsible for the great earthquakes of 1505 and 1833, and that the last time it moved was most likely 1344,” says Bollinger, who presented his findings to the Nepal Geological Society two weeks ago.

Previously, the team had worked on the neighbouring segment of fault, which lies to the east of Kathmandu, and had shown that this segment experienced major quakes in 1255, and then more recently in 1934.

When Bollinger and his colleagues saw this historic pattern of events, they became greatly concerned.

“We could see that both Kathmandu and Pokhara would now be particularly exposed to earthquakes rupturing the main fault, where it likely last did in 1344, between the two cities,” explains Paul Tapponnier, from the Earth Observatory of Singapore, who was working with Bollinger.

When a large earthquake occurs, it is common for the movement to transfer strain further along the earthquake fault, and this seems to be what happened in 1255.

Over the following 89 years, strain accumulated in the neighbouring westerly segment of fault, finally rupturing in 1344.

Now, history has repeated itself, with the 1934 fault transferring strain westwards along the fault, which has finally been released today, 81 years later.

And, worryingly, the team warns there could be more to come.

“Early calculations suggest that Saturday’s magnitude-7.8 earthquake is probably not big enough to rupture all the way to the surface, so there is still likely to be more strain stored, and we should probably expect another big earthquake to the west and south of this one in the coming decades,” says Bollinger.

28 April, 2015
Countercurrents.org

By Father Dave

It was quite surreal – enjoying the sunshine as we stood on the doorstep of Yarmouk – an area that the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, recently described as Syria’s “deepest circle of hell”! Admittedly, we were on the right side of the dividing line between the ISIS-controlled section of Yarmouk and the greater area controlled by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA). Even so, we were “within sniper range”, or so we were warned.

I didn’t take the sniper warning too seriously until one of our guides pointed to a mosque that was only about 300 metres away. “They certainly have snipers in that minaret” he said. He spoke calmly, as tour-guides do when pointing out landmarks. And he wasn’t running for cover either, and neither were the children who were milling about with us at the end of the street. Presumably the takfiri had more important targets to occupy themselves with.

We went into a school, the entrance of which was only a few metres from where we were standing. It was a ‘safe place’ – a compound where the army had relocated families who had fled the ISIS advance. The complex was dotted with mothers with young children and elderly men. Nonetheless, it was evidently still functioning as a school too.

We didn’t speak to the leadership team initially but instead went out into the courtyard and got our boxing gear out. Within moments we had a team of children around us. At first they were reluctant to try on the gloves, but after the first brave recruit had given it a go, there was a predicable clamor of ‘me next’ that lasted until we had worked our way through the entire group.

I assume ‘me next’ was what they were saying anyway. I must learn some Arabic! I’m certain it wasn’t anything nasty. The kids were lovely. They were kids, though some of them must have already seen more than a lifetime’s quota of violence.

It was a fantastic experience – making it to Yarmouk, playing with the kids, laughing and taking photos with the SAA boys. It was exactly what we’d traveled half way around the world to do!

Of course we hadn’t just come to teach boxing. We’d come to see for ourselves the truth behind the media narrative. Various media sources were depicting the people of Yarmouk as the meat in the sandwich – hammered by ISIS on the one hand and pounded by the Syrian Arab Army on the other! From my friends in Syria though I’d been receiving a difference story – that the Syrian Arab Army was doing all it could to relocate people stuck in Yarmouk to safe places outside the firing zone. Of course we couldn’t see the whole of what was going on, but from our end of Yarmouk it was obvious at the Syrian Army was doing all it could to help these kids.

“We lack pillows” the School Principal said to me afterwards, as we debriefed in his office. “We have food and blankets now but no pillows”.

I don’t think he really expected me to bring a quantity of pillows with me on my next visit. Even so, he was focused on his job and ready to accept help from any source.

In truth, the greatest help we can give these people is not to send our troops into their country. Contrary to popular opinion, that’s not the sort of help they want from us.

That’s the update for now, fellow fighters. Thank you for your support in helping us get to Yarmouk.

I hope you can see the significance of this visit. Bringing some joy to these kids and leaving them with gloves and pads (courtesy of our friends at SMAI) was of great value but there is something of much greater significance I hope we can achieve for these children though this visit – namely, help discredit the media narrative that threatens to unleash further violence upon them!

Whatever you think of the Syrian government, it was crystal clear to me from our day in Yarmouk that these people do NOT want our foreign military intervention. That will only lead to more death and suffering.

I’ll be back to you soon. Until then I remain …

Your brother in the Good Fight,

Dave Smith, also known as Fighting Father Dave, is an Anglican Parish Priest, based in Australia.

28 April 2015