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By Patrick Martin

Speaking at the end of a day-long series of meetings in Baghdad, US Secretary of State John Kerry warned Monday that President Obama could order military strikes against Sunni militants without waiting for the political restructuring of the Iraqi government that Washington has been demanding.

Kerry underscored the debacle facing the regime of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, which has lost control of a third of the country’s territory to a Sunni uprising headed by the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Shams (ISIS), an Islamic fundamentalist group with roots in Al Qaeda.

Indicating that US military action could come quickly, Kerry said that any decision by Obama to order an attack should not be considered an act of “support for the existing prime minister or for one sect or another.”

Pentagon officials also announced Monday that the Iraqi government had agreed to provide immunity from prosecution for all US military personnel deployed to Iraq in the course of the present crisis. This was the principal issue that blocked the conclusion of a Status of Forces Agreement between the US and Iraq in 2011, leading to the complete removal of all US troops from the country.

The US military has insisted on having such an agreement in place, ratified by the Iraqi parliament, to insure that no US officers or soldiers could face prosecution for war crimes. With that obstacle cleared, the 300 US Special Forces troops ordered to Iraq by Obama will begin arriving later this week to review the status of Iraqi Army units and gather targeting information for bomb and missile strikes.

Referring to the ISIS offensive, Kerry said, “They do pose a threat,” adding, “They cannot be given safe haven anywhere.” Given that the group controls significant territory in both eastern Syria and western Iraq, this statement amounts to a declaration that the US is preparing military action against Syria as well.

Underscoring the threat of a wider war, Israeli warplanes and missiles struck nine targets within Syria Monday, the biggest military action by Israel against Syria in the three years of mounting civil war in that country. The Israeli Defense Forces claimed the attack was retaliation for an incident in which an Israeli teenager was killed near the Syrian border, allegedly by an anti-tank missile. The IDF policy is to treat any armed attack from Syria, whether conducted by Assad supporters or rebels, as an official government action, and to target the Syrian military in response.

On the day of Kerry’s visit to the Iraqi capital, ISIS forces were consolidating their hold on nearly the entire western border of Iraq, after capturing key positions in a series of bloody battles on Saturday night and Sunday. Insurgents seized the towns of Qaim and al-Waleed, the last major Baghdad-controlled crossings into Syria.

Another ISIS force took Rutba, in the southwest corner of Anbar province, and attacked the town of Turabil, the main border crossing point into Jordan.

If the ISIS forces continue moving south, they would reach the Iraqi border with Saudi Arabia, which in alliance with the United States has financed and armed the organization and other Sunni Islamist groups as part of the operation in Syria.

There are no longer any effective Iraqi military forces along the entire stretch of border with Syria. The only remaining crossing point between Iraq and Syria not under ISIS control is held by the peshmerga, the militia force loyal to the Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq.

Iraqi military officials said they were trying to make a last stand in Sunni-populated Anbar province by concentrating their forces in the town of Haditha—site of one of the most notorious US war crimes during the occupation—and also the location of Iraq’s largest dam, controlling the flow of water for the Euphrates River, whose valley comprises the bulk of arable land in Iraq.

The conditions under which the US secretary of state visited Baghdad demonstrate the precarious state of the Maliki regime and its American patrons. Kerry was conveyed secretly to the center of the city, and filmed descending from his helicopter wearing a flak jacket, in a scene reminiscent of the last days of the US puppet regime in Vietnam. He did not spend the night in the Iraqi capital, instead flying to Amman, Jordan, where armed attacks were believed less likely.

Kerry met with Maliki and his top military and political aides, reportedly emphasizing the necessity for a political restructuring that would likely include the replacement of the prime minister by a Shiite figure less hated by the Sunni minority, and the incorporation of Sunni tribal and political leaders into the government. He later met with the leaders of Sunni, Kurdish and Shiite parties, including both allies of Maliki and bitter opponents.

Maliki has so far rebuffed demands that he step down, seeking instead to mobilize Shiite religious leaders and sectarian militias to bolster the crumbling military apparatus. On Saturday, tens of thousands of members of the Mehdi Army, the militia loyal to Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, marched through eastern Baghdad in an armed show of force.

The preferred US mechanism for engineering Maliki’s removal is a provision in the Iraqi constitution requiring parliament to convene and begin formation of a new government by July, following the elections held April 30. Maliki’s Shiite-based State of Law party won only 92 of the 325 seats. It is the largest single bloc, but would require support from Kurdish, Sunni or rival Shiite factions to establish a majority.

In 2010, after a similar splintered result in the parliamentary voting, Maliki simply ignored the constitutional requirement and held onto power until his rivals agreed to rubber-stamp a second term in office. This time around, both Washington and Maliki’s political enemies at home are using the constitutional deadline to provide leverage for his removal.

The official statement issued by the US and Iraq after Monday’s talks noted that Kerry “appreciated the Iraqi leaders’ commitment to the political process and its constitutional required dates.” Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top Shiite cleric, seemed to give his backing to this maneuver, issuing an appeal read during Friday prayers calling on parliament to meet the constitutional deadline for forming a new government.

If the constitutional ploy fails, however, US support for the removal of Maliki by extralegal methods is certainly possible. There is little doubt that one reason Kerry chose to stop over in Cairo on his way to Baghdad, bestowing US benediction on the bloodstained military ruler and new president, former general Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was to send a message to Maliki.

Al-Sisi wields supreme power after the military ouster of elected president Mohamed Mursi, which the US State Department assiduously refused to designate as a coup. The same thing could take place in Iraq, if Maliki proves obdurate.

For the time being, however, the Iraqi military is incapable of defending its own bases, let alone overthrowing the government. A scathing report in the Washington Post Monday was headlined, “Iraqi military facing ‘psychological collapse’ after losses, desertions,” and cited US analysts suggesting that complete dissolution of the army was possible.

Meanwhile a US senator blurted out the dirty secret of American policy in Iraq and Syria, during appearances on two Sunday morning television talk shows. Speaking on both NBC’s “Meet the Press” and CNN’s “State of the Union,” Kentucky Republican Rand Paul said that the crisis in Iraq was the result of the US arming of ISIS in the civil war in Syria against the Assad regime.

“I think we have to understand first how we got here,” he said on CNN. “We have been arming ISIS in Syria.” He continued, “We are where we are because we armed the Syrian rebels. We have been fighting alongside al Qaeda, fighting alongside ISIS. ISIS is now emboldened and in two countries. But here’s the anomaly. We’re with ISIS in Syria. We’re on the same side of the war. So, those who want to get involved to stop ISIS in Iraq are allied with ISIS in Syria. That is the real contradiction to this whole policy. “

Paul went on to endorse the policy being pursued by Obama in Iraq now, in sending in special forces to prepare for air strikes, thus demonstrating the bipartisan support of every Democrat and every Republican in Washington for the new crimes being prepared by American imperialism.

24 June, 2014
WSWS.org

 

 

By Sulak Sivaraksa.

At first sight, the most recent coup d’état on 22 May 2014 seemed to have learned admirably well from the failures of the previous coup in 2006. But what have and what haven’t the military leaders learned from the 2006 coup? Here are some observations.

1) The martial law was declared two days in advance of the actual seizure of state power. The Senate was allowed to linger on for a brief while and was subsequently dissolved. Power was seized and monopolized by one leader. Royal endorsement only came on 26 May at a ceremony in which the king was not present. The president of the Privy Council didn’t seem to play any role in this process too. And the junta leaders didn’t have an audience with the king. These measures were taken to show that there wasn’t any connection between the monarchy and the coup; the military alone was responsible for it. Whether or not this is plausible is entirely a different matter.
2) This time the coup group, officially known as the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO), didn’t appoint a prime minister to govern on their behalf. The junta has moved swiftly to undermine or destroy Thaksin Shinawatra’s power-base by transferring to inactive posts the Ministry of Defense permanent secretary and the National Police Chief—along with a number of senior police officers and provincial governors who are said to be connected to Thaksin. We will have to see whether or not the military junta will be successful in eradicating Thaksin and Co.’s political power this time; the 2006 coup failed dismally in this feat.

3) The junta’s appointment of MR Pridiyathorn Devakula and Somkid Jatusipitak as advisors to handle economic and foreign affairs matters respectively is interesting. Both men belong to the opposite poles. They are however honest and highly competent. It will be interesting to see if they can work together and whether or not NCPO listens to their advices. Professor Yongyut Yuttawong is also capable and upholds a strong sense of ethics. Ultimately, how many more qualified technocrats will be enlisted to work for NCPO—aside from the legal experts who have served under every recent military dictatorship?

4) We have to wait and see whether or not the new set of administrators will courageously work to dismantle structural injustice and to what extent they understand the sources of poverty, oppression and exploitation faced by the majority of people in the country. Moreover, will they continue to denigrate local knowledge forms as well as autonomy? Will they attempt to move beyond the populist and corrupt policies of Thaksin and Yingluck?

NCPO’s plans to construct roads and dams around Bangkok may prove as disastrous as Yingluck’s approval of a massive budget for dam construction in the name of flood relief. Is it far-fetched to demand that NCPO call for a referendum before launching any massive construction projects?

5) The creation of the Military Court is a double-edged dagger. If the objective is to improve the justice process in the country, then it must be accompanied by the nourishment of mindfulness, emancipatory knowledge, and tolerance—and not to say of a major overhaul of the education and Sangha systems. I’m afraid these issues are not on the priority list of NCPO.

6) Summoning individuals to report to the junta or detaining them seems to have spiraled out of control. It may lead to a culture of misinforming and denouncing innocent persons, a kind of McCarthyism. The sooner this path is avoided, the better. (The suspension of US military aid to Thailand is simply a weak PR ploy. The US has always had deep ties with every postwar military dictatorship in the country.)

7) As shocking as this may sound but the present military leaders should look to Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat as a role model. Despite his terrifying flaws Sarit was also pretty clever. Sarit’s closest confidant as well as advisor was very talented. The Field Marshal was able to make highly competent individuals work for the wellbeing of the country such as Puey Ungphakorn in the domain of finance and economics and Tawee Boonyaket in the field of constitutional drafting.

8) NCPO won some praise as it disbursed payment to rice farmers under the rice pledging scheme of the previous government. But in the wake of the 2006 coup in an effort to reduce public dissent, the price of certain essential commodities was also cut. The 2006 coup-makers justified their action under the pretext of fighting corruption. Arguably, they ended up being even more corrupt than the deposed government.

9) Hopefully, the drafting of a new constitution and formation of a civilian government will not take an inordinate amount of time as during the Sarit years. Likewise, let’s hope that oppositional intellectuals and politicians will not be liquidated as during the Sarit dictatorship.

10) The Sangha Act of 1962 issued by Sarit is a root cause of the Sangha’s downfall in the country. If this Act is not amended or revoked, the future of Buddhism looks bleak in the kingdom.

Sulak Sivaraksa

PS

Perhaps, the leader of NCPO should take the time to study the life of Pompey, a great military-general-turned-political-leader. In his biography of Pompey Plutarch writes:

“Life out of uniform can have the dangerous effect of weakening the reputation of famous generals…. They are poorly adapted to the equality of democratic politics. Such men claim the same precedence in civilian life that they enjoy on the battlefield…. So when people find a man with a brilliant military record playing an active part in public life they undermine and humiliate him. But if he renounces and withdraws from politics, they maintain his reputation and ability and no longer envy him.” Anthony Everitt adds that “The trouble was that Pompey was a poor political tactician and also uninspiring public speaker.”

I am aware that the leader of NCPO doesn’t have the time to read this article. But if his trustworthy and clever subordinates alert him to the message in this postscript it may be beneficial to the present situation.

The English name of คสช is National Council for Peace and Order. Its Latin equivalent would be “otium cum dignitate.” That is, peace/leisure (otium) is inextricable from dignity (dignitate). If human rights are trammeled on and freedom of expression is denied, then an order is peaceful only in name. It will be a false peace.

25 June 2014

 

 

 

 

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers

Ending Empire and the War Culture that Supports It are as Important as Confronting Wall Street

Take action: We can stop the next Iraq War. A majority of Americans oppose a military attack. Contact Congress tell them to warn President Obama: a military attack violates the Constitution and is an impeachable offense.

In the last week, there has been a rapid march toward military action in Iraq despite widespread opposition to more war among the US population for a variety of reasons. One concern is that it would require more military spending despite immense and unmet needs for funding in a broad array of areas at home. Unlike any other policy area, there never seems to be a lack of funds for a military attack or even a war. The military-industrial complex has a powerful hold on US lawmakers.

The hawks in Congress are exerting tremendous pressure for military action in Iraq to prevent ISIS and former members of Saddam Hussein’s government from taking control. On Thursday President Obama delivered a statement describing the steps he is taking on Iraq. These include:

– Reinforcing the US Embassy in Iraq by removing some Americans stationed there and adding military troops to protect it;

– Significantly increasing intelligence and surveillance to understand what ISIS is doing as well as what the US can do to counter their influence;

– Increasing support for the Iraq military, including sending 300 soldiers to Iraq to “advise” them and set up joint operation centers in Baghdad and northern Iraq;

– Repositioning additional US military assets in the region so that “ going forward, we will be prepared to take targeted and precise military action…”

– And finally, pursuing diplomacy in the region to support stability in Iraq.

While this is not the military attack that hawks are urging, it certainly is a policy that moves in that direction. This week, President Obama told congressional leaders that he did not need any authorization for the use of military force from Congress, but that he would keep congressional leadership informed of his actions.

Protests around the United States

The American public is sick and tired of war. It is a mistake for President Obama to decide that he can take military action in Iraq without congressional or UN approval . He likely made this decision because he knows that if Congress were allowed to consider the issue, there would be a tidal wave of opposition from constituents in an election year. If Congress really functioned as a check and balance, it would be warning President Obama that a military attack without congressional approval is an impeachable offense; that the Constitution is clear – only Congress has the power to declare war and a military attack is an act of war. The silence of Congress will mean complicity in another illegal military action and will again reveal the bi-partisan nature of the war machine.

If unchecked, it seems the most likely scenario is that the President will build intelligence to justify further intervention and will then use drones to bomb Iraq. The President, with the support of groups like Human Rights Watch, acts as if unmanned bombing is a legal military attack even though his drone policy is being questioned by the UN, the legal community and the public. This will ultimately lead to another US war in Iraq.

Perhaps this is the President’s desired purpose. The goal of having US military bases in Iraq to control the region, which is the center of the Middle East at a time when oil is desperately needed, has not been achieved. A justification for intervention would provide an excuse to re-occupy those bases.

If we re-occupy Iraq, we can expect a long-term presence. The (currently) most likely next president, Hillary Clinton, has a track record as a hawk. She has already signaled to the military-industrial complex that she is open to more war. Clinton recently said she was even open to staying in Afghanistan beyond President Obama’s already-too-slow exit from that country.

Opponents of war organized opposition quickly. This week Veterans For Peace (VFP) held nationwide protests against war in Iraq along with Military Families Speak Out and other organizations. They also protested the failure to adequately fund the Veterans Administration and to take care of current veterans when they return from war. VFP warned the President that military attacks will just add to the disaster in Iraq, result in the loss of more American and Iraqi lives and create more wounded veterans. They put out an action alert that included a variety steps people can take to oppose a military attack in Iraq and that listed the many organizations petitioning the government against war.

Iraq Veterans Against the War have spoken out against another military engagement in Iraq. They spoke as experienced veterans, writing:

“Many of our members deployed to Iraq during the recent US occupation. Those of us who were there know firsthand that US military solutions in Iraq do not serve the interests of the Iraqi people. We advocate for the self-determination of all people, in this case the people of Iraq. Any solution to this crisis must come from them. When the United States invaded and occupied Iraq, the formerly secular country was destabilized. The United States and the Department of Defense intentionally created and agitated sectarian divisions that would not have otherwise existed. The result of this is what we see today, and Iraqi civilians are paying for it.”

Americans are also protesting members of the previous administration. This week protesters disrupted a speech by Condolezza Rice at Norwich University in Vermont with a mic check which in part said: “I come here today to charge Condolezza Rice for having participated in and perpetrated crimes against humanity in the name of the citizens of the United States.” This is not the first protest against Rice. She was protested at the University Of Minnesota in April. Also at Rutgers, students protested Rice being invited to speak at their commencement. As a result of opposition by students and faculty , Rice declined to speak.

As Robert Brune of the DC Media Group points out , the Iraq War was based on lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction and now we see the lie of ‘the successful surge’ being exposed by the current violence. Too many lives have been lost, too much treasure has been squandered and there has been too much intrusion into Iraq and other nations.

Most Americans know that the current violence in Iraq is the result of the US invasion and US strategies that increased sectarian divisions in the country. As a result, we know that more military violence will continue to make things worse.

The chaos in Iraq demonstrates that those who opposed the war were right . Many people predicted that invasion and occupation of Iraq were likely to result in a civil war and ongoing bloodshed as well as anti-Americanism and strengthening those who hate US Empire. The media is trying hard to ignore those lessons by highlighting the voices that were wrong – the people who supported the Iraq War. American people across the political spectrum are not being fooled. They can see reality despite the media mythmaking.

Why Is It So Difficult to Learn from the Failure of War?

War and militarism are deeply ingrained in the American psyche. We call it War Culture. Youth are taught to admire the heroes of war and are rarely told of the long history of US war crimes. Just this week Occupy.com reported that in Dayton, Ohio youth in K through 12 are being pushed to build drones by the US military. With this report we added a Disney Junior video of a cartoon glorifying drone characters that spy on people and includes images of youth appearing in its bullseye. These are two examples of many of how early the pro-war brainwashing begins in the United States.

There is a lot of money to be made in war and militarism. The Congress is currently debating the military spending bill. Military spending makes up more than half of all US discretionary spending. This is particularly horrid at a time when the US economy continues to flounder, when there is no full employment program, when there is record poverty, when infrastructure is crumbling and when the country needs to transition to a new energy economy, among many other urgent domestic needs.

It is not only the obvious expensive weapons systems that are always over budget and corporations like Halliburton that make billions rebuilding nations destroyed by the US military – and the deep corruption in those industries, but this week we got a glimpse of another military profit center, the Police Industrial Complex. This is big business and includes vehicles , weapons and sophisticated surveillance technology . Even corporations are joining in the frenzy. A coal company purchased drones that fire pepper spray and bullets to be used against protesters. And a private corporation in Brazil received $22 million to provide weapons and gear used against World Cup protesters.

Part of the problem is that the American people are consistently lied to about war. Chelsea Manning, who is serving decades in prison for exposing the truth about the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote a column in the New York Times about the Fog of War . Manning gave multiple examples of how the media is manipulated and controlled by the US military resulting in the American people being told false information about what is really occurring in wars. Manning reports “The more I made these daily comparisons between the news back in the States and the military and diplomatic reports available to me as an analyst, the more aware I became of the disparity.” Manning also notes there was never more than 12 hand-picked journalists embedded to cover a country of 31 million and more than 100,000 US troops.

The government and media work to manipulate the views of Americans because if the Americans new the truth they would be even more angry at the US war machine. As long-time military writer Tom Engelhardt writes , the United States has a war record of unparalleled failure. What major war has the United States been on the winning side of since World War II?

People have the Power to End War

Thanks to whistleblowers and new media outlets like Wikileaks, the truth is being exposed and propaganda is starting to fail. Unprecedented efforts by the US and its allies to suppress leaks have taken a toll on proponents of the truth but have largely been unsuccessful. Rather than shrinking, support for whistleblowers is growing.

Julian Assange, publisher and editor-in-chief of Wikileaks, marked two years of asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London this week. On his behalf , international organizations are petitioning the United Nations to protect Assange’s human rights. And new organizations to aid whistleblowers, ExposeFacts.org and the Courage Foundation , were launched this month. A new tool for whistleblowers called Secure Drop is being provided by media outlets such as the New York Times and The Guardian .

People have more power to end war and the destructive empire economy than we realize, although opponents of peace are aware of it. The US Department of Defense has been studying social unrest through its Minerva Research Initiative since 2008 and soldiers are preparing to suppress protests inside the US.

We can harness our power by working together across borders and by sharing our knowledge and tools. In a recent interview by Nafeez Ahmed of former CIA official Robert David Steele, Steele points out that open source technology is a key to defeating corrupt centralized power. Ahmed writes, “Open source everything, in this context, offers us the chance to build on what we’ve learned through industrialisation, to learn from our mistakes, and catalyse the re-opening of the commons, in the process breaking the grip of defunct power structures and enabling the possibility of prosperity for all.”

We must have a bold vision of what we wish to achieve – a world without war in which people participate in decisions that affect their lives. Movements to achieve these ends are growing globally. Jerome Roos tells us in his review of a new book on democracy by Marina Sitrin and Dario Azzelini that there are ‘laboratories of democracy’ all over the world. And World Beyond War is working to create a new global coalition to abolish war.

The growing movement for social, economic and environmental justice in the United States has done much to focus attention on the wealth divide and corrupt economy controlled by Wall Street. Likewise, we must also focus on the Empire economy and the War Culture that supports it. Through increased awareness and collaborative popular action we can weaken these pillars of power and build a just and peaceful society. We have the power if we choose to use it.

Take action: We can stop the next Iraq War. A majority of Americans oppose a military attack. Contact Congress tell them to warn President Obama: a military attack violates the Constitution and is an impeachable offense.

This article is produced by Popular Resistance in conjunction with AlterNet . It is a weekly review of the activities of the resistance movement. Sign up for the daily news digest of Popular Resistance, here.

Kevin Zeese, JD and Margaret Flowers, MD are organizers of PopularResistance.org ; they co-direct It’s Our Economy and co-host Clearing the FOG .

23 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By James Cogan
The Obama administration is responding to the uprising in Iraq led by the Sunni extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) with intrigues and provocations that can lead only to yet more death and destruction in both Iraq and Syria, and risk triggering open war with Iran.

The weekend visit of Secretary of State John Kerry to Egypt, to embrace the dictatorship of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, effectively scuttled the tentative move by the White House toward a rapprochement with the regime in Tehran. Washington is instead pursuing an agenda in the Middle East that dovetails with the interests of Israel, the ruling elite and military in Egypt, and the reactionary Sunni monarchies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. It will rest upon these forces, its traditional allies in imposing its imperialist dictates throughout region, to try and salvage its position in the Middle East.

Since Friday, both Kerry and President Obama have left no doubt that Washington is conspiring to oust Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, an Iranian-supported Shiite fundamentalist politician who took office in 2006 with Washington’s backing. The American political and media establishment is blaming Maliki for the religious and ethnic conflicts that US imperialism consciously fomented in Iraq to secure its grip over the country. Over one million Iraqis lost their lives due to the US military repression and sectarian bloodshed that consolidated the position of the Shiite-dominated government that Maliki heads.

On Friday, Obama attempted to rewrite history, telling CNN: “We gave Iraq a chance to have an inclusive democracy, to work across sectarian lines to provide a better future for their children, and unfortunately what we’ve seen is a breakdown of trust… Part of the task now is to see whether Iraqi leaders are prepared to rise above sectarian motivations, come together, compromise. If they can’t, there’s not going to be a military solution to this problem… There’s no amount of American firepower that’s going to be able to hold the country together and I’ve made that very clear to Mr. Maliki and all the other leadership inside Iraq… They don’t have a lot of time.”

On Sunday, Kerry declared: “The United States would like the Iraqi people to find leadership that is prepared to represent all of the people of Iraq, that is prepared to be inclusive and share power.” The US, he went on, “was not responsible for what happened in Libya and nor is it responsible for what is happening in Iraq today.”

The messages from the Obama administration are both incendiary and politically incoherent. According to Washington, the Shiite ruling elite that it elevated into power must make a “compromise” with the forces that have aligned with ISIS over recent weeks to rebel against Baghdad and carve out control over large areas of the country. It must make a deal with their Sunni-based rivals, who have been marginalised both during and following the US occupation.

The power-sharing arrangement that Washington is demanding, however, amounts to the de-facto partition of the country through the establishment of autonomous zones in the Sunni-populated areas, modelled on the Kurdish Regional Government that rules over the three majority-Kurdish provinces.

Maliki’s removal would be aimed at establishing a government that not only gives a blanket endorsement to Obama’s plans for revived US military operations in the country, but also allows the US, Egypt and the Gulf states to arm, supply and provide safe havens inside Iraq to the Sunni-based rebels that are seeking the overthrow of the Iranian-backed Syrian government of President Bashir al-Assad.

Kerry declared on Sunday that the US is “discouraging any kind of support to entities where it is unsure where the money is going… and that goes to any government, any charity, or any individual.” The truth, however, is that the proxy war fought on behalf of the US and European powers to overthrow Assad created the conditions in which ISIS gained adherents, weapons and resources. The militants who have seized Iraqi cities and towns were assembled and equipped in Syria. From the beginnings of the Syrian civil war, Sunni extremists have been the main component of the forces fighting Assad’s military.

Over the weekend, ISIS fighters took control of the border crossing between Iraq and Syria in the town of Al Qaim, along with several other towns along the Euphrates River, to facilitate even closer integration of its operations on either side of the border. From the cities they control in western Iraq such as Fallujah, ISIS fighters have now penetrated as close to Baghdad as the outer suburb of Abu Ghraib. In Syria, they are launching new offensives, using vehicles and weapons captured from US-equipped Iraqi army units.

As the trajectory of the US response to the debacle it faces in Iraq began to emerge over the weekend, the leading representatives of the Iranian regime issued bitter condemnations. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told Iranian news: “We are strongly opposed to US and other intervention in Iraq. We don’t approve of it as we believe the Iraqi government, nation and religious authorities are capable of ending the sedition.”

The US, Khamenei declared, “is seeking an Iraq under its hegemony and ruled by its stooges.”

Iranian president Hassan Rohani denounced, without naming them, the ruling elites of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for financing Sunni extremism in Syria, Iraq and throughout the region. “Those who spend their money and oil dollars to help terrorists today,” he stated, “know that tomorrow is your turn… Stop it. Stop the bloodshed.”

To comply with Obama’s policies in regards to both Iraq and Syria, an administration in Baghdad would have to appeal for US military support to carry out bloody purges against the Shiite factions that are linked with Tehran, sympathetic to Assad in Syria, and exert enormous sway within the Iraqi military, state bureaucracy and major Shiite population centres. On Saturday, one of the largest, the movement led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, paraded tens of thousands of its Mehdi Army militiamen through the streets of Baghdad, Najaf, Karbala, Amarah, Basra and other majority Shiite cities. Even in Kirkuk, the northern oil city that was occupied by Kurdish troops to prevent ISIS entering it, Sadrist militiamen marched in a show in strength.

The Shiite militia mobilisation centred on pledges to defend various Shiite shrines that ISIS has threatened to destroy, but anti-US slogans were also prominent in the demonstrations. In the early stages of the occupation, Sadr called for resistance, with the Mehdi Army actively supporting Sunni insurgents and ultimately fighting a series of pitched battles with American troops in 2004. After Sadr’s movement made a political agreement to support and participate in a Shiite-dominated puppet government, more radical off-shoots continued to wage guerrilla war over the following years, allegedly with the assistance of the Iranian military.

The inexorable logic of the developing situation, a confrontation with Shiite forces inside Iraq and with Iran by the US and its regional allies, was openly advocated yesterday by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayu. Speaking on US television, he labelled both ISIS and Iran as “enemies of the United States.” Advising Obama, Netanayu declared: “There are two actions you have to take: one is to take the actions that you deem necessary to counter this ISIS takeover of Iraq, and the second is not to allow Iran to dominate Iraq the way it dominated Lebanon and Syria.”

23 June, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Father Dave

Father Dave’s take on what is going on

So many crazy things are happening in the hell that is flowing from Syria into Iraq at the moment that it’s hard to know what is going on. As Christians we need to make a meaningful response to all this bloodshed and violence but it’s so hard to know where to start. Let’s begin then by anchoring ourselves to one unambiguous truth – that the U.S. and NATO are NOT particularly concerned about what ISIS will do to Iraq, despite all rhetoric to the contrary.

Why can we start with this as our bedrock truth? Because the Lord Jesus gave us a guiding principle that allows us to cut through all the propaganda that clouds such issues: “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6:21). This is as true of countries as it is of individuals. It isn’t our rhetoric that indicates where our heart is. It’s our wallet!

If you want to know where the heart of the U.S. and NATO are don’t listen to their rhetoric. Rather, watch what they do and see where they invest their money! In the case of the ongoing violence across the Levant, there is no ambiguity. The U.S. has been continuing to pour money into their her allies in the region – Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and at least two out of three of the above are actively funding offshoots of Al Qaeda – ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra – and have been doing so for years!

Yes, there seems to have been a marked change in the policies of both NATO and the U.S. recently. While Britain had been portraying the ISIS team as the spiritual descendants of Robin Hood and his merry men engaged in ridding Sherwood Forrest of its evil prince, last week the Brits suddenly decided that ISIS was a terrorist organisation after all! Likewise, whereas the U.S. had been looking on happily as those merry rebels employed sophisticated American weaponry against Assad, now all the smiles have been replaced with looks of shock and horror as those weapons are turned upon Iraq!

But the shock is only apparent. The looks of horror are hollow. The rhetoric is empty. How do we know? Watch where they are putting their money! Are funds being withdrawn from ISIS’s main funding agencies? Are the Saudi’s being summoned to the Whitehouse to answer for their role in this new round of violence? Has anything of substance actually changed?

Some have suggested that this entire ISIS invasion has been orchestrated by the U.S. as another attempt to accomplish regime change in Syria. This is unlikely, I think. The U.S. no longer has the financial resources to roll out such an ingenious plan of destruction. Of course, even if ISIS’s latest movements were not supervised by the US they may have provided Washington with the opportunity to start reigning death on all the ISIS-controlled regions, including Syria. Happy days in the Whitehouse?

Well … I don’t think we are going to see the U.S. or NATO put troops on the ground any time soon. The outcry from their relative constituencies will be far too great to ignore and, again, who can afford this sort of foreign adventure at the moment? We may well see a token number of tomahawk missiles fired off in the general direction of ISIS and/or Assad – a sufficient number to satisfy the shareholders of the major arms manufacturers – but none of the major Western war-lords can manage another full-scale invasion right now.

Besides all this, regime change in Syria was never Obama’s end-game in the Levant any more than the defeat of ISIS is now. Iran was always the real target and this latest development may give the U.S. a direct shot at Iran!

For those who aren’t familiar with the war that’s been waged on Iran by the U.S. and her allies for the last 60-something years, here’s a bit of history:

 In 1951 Mohammad Mosaddegh was elected Prime Minister of Iran and introduced a number of social reforms, including the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry, formerly under the control of the British since 1913.

 In 1953 M16 and the CIA organised a coup that removed the democratically elected government and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (the Shah) as Iran’s sole monarch. The Shah redirected control of Iran’s oil back to the Brits and the Americans.

 The much-hated Shah was eventually overthrown in the Iranian revolution of 1979, establishing Iran as an Islamic state under the rule of Ayatollah Khomeini, resulting in the US and Britain once again losing control of their oil!

The history of the relationship between the U.S. and Iran since that time has been one of unrelenting aggression of the former to the latter. Sometimes this has been overt, as with U.S. support for Saddam Husain in the Iran-Iraq war (that cost over a million lives). Sometimes this has been covert, such as through CIA efforts to fan the flames of sectarian division between Sunni and Shia (with the fabulous results that are now plain for all to see). Always it has been economic, with sanctions having been in place since the first days of the Iranian revolution – sanctions that not only inhibit trade but prevent the sick from accessing medicines and teenagers from accessing Facebook!

Why has Iran always been such a hated enemy of the U.S. ever since the days when it was a model secular democracy? It’s all there in Matthew chapter 6. The Iranians have treasure, and lots of it, and the U.S. and NATO have always had their hearts set on it! Moreover, if left unmolested, Iran would quickly become the most powerful economic force in the Levant, and so it poses an economic threat (nb. ‘economic’ not ‘existential’) to America’s and NATO’s middle-eastern allies.

Understanding the economic threat posed by Iran to the traditional economic power-players of the region is the key to comprehending much of the violence that has taken place across the region over the last generation, and most obviously in the last three years. In truth, no one in the West would have been remotely interested in the antics of Bashar Al Assad had Syria not been Iran’s closest ally? Likewise Hezbollah’s activities in the region would have gone largely unnoticed had she not been Iran’s only other ally. Iran is the target. The rest are just the supporting cast, and this latest development with ISIS and Iraq opens up entirely new opportunities for US-Iranian violence!

But of course the rhetoric is all the other way. There is talk of Washington and Tehran working together! It seems that both great powers now have a common enemy and that circumstances have serendipitously pulled them together to fight against terrorism side-by-side. Don’t believe it!

I’ll wager that the U.S. is not going to support Iranian military incursions into Iraq except perhaps by clapping and cheering (in a very muted kind of way). I don’t think this new era of US-Iranian cooperation is going to cost the US partner anything. Conversely, we may see Iran bleed to death economically through involvement in another protracted war, with Washington mouthing regret while continuing to indirectly fuel the furnace!

Perhaps I’m wrong. I hope and pray that I’m wrong. I hope and pray that Iran and the U.S. and all the countries represented in NATO will enter a new era of cooperation and dialogue and friendship. If you listen to the rhetoric that seems to be highly likely. But I haven’t seen anyone take their hands off their wallets yet! Western money is still pouring into Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and through them into the pockets and cartridge-boxes of ISIS. Until I see a change in spending habits I’m not ready to believe in a change of heart.

Father Dave.

21 June 2014
www.prayersforsyria.com

By Bill Van Auken
With nearly 600 Green Beret “advisors” and other US troops in or set to be sent to Iraq over the coming days, the Pentagon announced Friday that it is negotiating rules of engagement that the regime in Baghdad rejected two-and-a-half years ago, before the final pullout of the American military.

Key among these provisions, according to Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Kirby, is blanket immunity from Iraqi or international law relating to the slaying of Iraqi civilians or other war crimes.

It was the refusal of the government headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to accept such provisions in 2011 that scuttled negotiations on a status of forces agreement that would have kept some 10,000 US troops indefinitely deployed at a number of strategic Iraqi bases.

The Pentagon spokesman attempted to deflect suggestions that the Obama administration is exploiting the debacle in Iraq to blackmail the teetering regime headed by Maliki into submitting to US terms, thus paving the way for the permanent bases that Washington initially sought.

“What we were talking post-2011 was a fairly sizable force of American troops that would remain in Iraq for a long period of time,” Kirby said. “What we are talking about here is a very small number, up to 300, whose mission will be of a limited duration.”

Anyone familiar with the history of the period leading up to the US war in Vietnam, however, knows full well that the dispatch of “advisors” to a war-torn country in Washington’s crosshairs can quickly lead to the deployment of a very “sizable force of American troops.”

There is every reason to suspect that President Barack Obama, who won his first election to the US presidency by posturing as an opponent of the Iraq war, is heading down just such a path.

In his statement delivered at the White House on Thursday Obama attempted to sell the renewed deployment of US forces in Iraq as part of Washington’s global war on terrorism—he repeated the words “terrorism” or “terrorist” 10 times in the short briefing. In reality, however, the US ruling establishment’s response to the collapse of the US-trained Iraqi military in the face of broad-based insurgency by Iraq’s Sunni minority is directed at pursuing far broader aims, both regionally and globally.

While claiming that the advances made by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in northern and western Iraq pose an eventual threat of terrorist attacks on the “homeland,” Obama added that Washington had “strategic interests in stability in the region.”

Spelling these out, he added that “obviously issues like energy and global energy markets continues [sic] to be important.”

In other words, the latest intervention—like the catastrophic nearly nine-year-long war and occupation that preceded it—is ultimately about oil and who controls this strategic resource.

It was to establish American imperialist hegemony over the oil reserves of the Persian Gulf that Washington launched its war based on lies in March 2003, killing upwards of a million Iraqis and sacrificing the lives of some US 4,500 troops in the process. US imperialism has never given up on this goal, even while forced to pursue it by other means.

Even as Obama was speaking, the Islamist insurgents were overrunning Iraq’s largest oil refinery in Beiji, 155 miles north of Baghdad. The loss of the facility, which is directed to domestic consumption, spells gasoline and power shortages for the embattled country.

The US intervention in Iraq is part of a broader intervention into a developing region-wide war that has been ignited by a succession of American military operations, ranging from the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the use of Islamist militias as proxy forces in the 2011 US-NATO war for regime change in Libya and the instigation and support for the ongoing sectarian civil war in Syria by Washington and its allies, including Saudi Arabia and the other Sunni Persian Gulf monarchies.

Even as ISIS fighters were encircling the last holdouts among the government troops at the Beiji refinery Friday, the Syrian government reported a terrorist car bombing in the central city of Hama, which killed at least 34 and wounded some 50 more. The Al-Nusra front, an Al Qaeda affiliate that has clashed with ISIS for control of turf in Syria, claimed responsibility for the atrocity.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, another suicide bomber, apparently linked to ISIS, attacked a checkpoint in the Beqaa Valley, killing two people and wounding dozens. The apparent target of the bombing was Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, a Shiite official who is director of Lebanon’s General Security Directorate. On the same day in Beirut, police rounded up 20 members of ISIS who were suspected of preparing further assassination attempts.

While claiming that its intervention in Iraq is meant to quash ISIS, the reality is that this Islamist militia is Washington’s own Frankenstein’s monster. It was forged first through the US military destruction of Iraqi society and the divide-and-rule strategy of the American occupation that fueled the bitter sectarian bloodbath that wracked the country. While suppressed in Iraq, this tendency had a dramatic resurgence in Syria as the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and other regimes in the region funneled arms and other support to the Islamist-dominated “rebels” carrying out the sectarian war for regime change against the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

Last September, the Obama administration was forced—in the face of massive popular opposition—to back down from its plan to carry out US air strikes against the Assad regime, and in support of the ISIS and other Islamist formations. Now it is preparing to reverse this humiliating climbdown on the pretext of pursuing the ISIS both in Iraq and across the border in Syria.

US officials speaking to the Washington Post Thursday said that the administration sees Iraq and Syria as “a single challenge.” Under the pretext of fighting terrorism, such an intervention will be directed primarily at furthering the drive to topple the Assad government.

This position received support Thursday from Senator John McCain, a prominent critic of Obama’s Iraq policy, who stated his agreement that “we are going to have to act in Syria as well.”

Also noteworthy in terms of support was a statement issued following Obama’s press conference by Anthony Cordesman, a military strategist for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who has advised the Pentagon on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“The President’s decision to send 300 more US military advisors to Iraq is a key first step in dealing with the crisis,” Cordesman wrote. “It ensures that the United States as well as Iran will have a presence on the ground, while any US use of airpower alone would have effectively empowered Iran’s Revolutionary Guards because they would have been present with Iraqi forces.”

This points to another major strategic aim in the Iraq intervention, which is to weaken Iranian influence in the country as part of an overarching strategy of subduing every power that poses an impediment to US imperialism’s drive for global hegemony. This undoubtedly is a primary consideration as well in the ever more open campaign by Washington to oust Maliki—who was originally put in office by the US occupation—and replace him with a more pliant regime that will align itself with Washington against Tehran.

Thus, for all Obama’s talk about taking “targeted and precise military action,” the reality is that US imperialism is once again embarking on an aggressive policy that has the potential to ignite a regional and even world war.

21 June, 2014
WSWS.org

 

By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
“A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” John F. Kennedy

Terrorism*, directly or sponsored, has long been America’s weapon of mass destruction – its weapon of choice. As a strategy, it outdates ‘human rights’ and ‘democracy promotion’ and has proven itself to be far more effective by creating mayhem and fear, removing resistance to intervention. The events of 9/11 justified this age-old tactic. Although the tentacles of America’s terror tactic reach back far and spread wide, this article seeks to address the presence of ISIL (or ISIS).

As of writing this essay, it has become public knowledge that the group referred to as ISIS was trained by the United States to topple Syria’s President Assad. The purpose of this article is to give a comprehensive, chronological overview of events leading to the present day crisis, which by necessity may repeat some of the points raised in various excellent articles on ISIS.

This essay will be in two parts.

Part I. Prologue; Terror in Iraq

Scholars have opined that America’s crisis began in the 1970’s with the “Vietnam Syndrome” and America’s efforts to curb third world countries wishing to break away from the status quo system. None had the impact of the 1979 Iranian Revolution that ousted the American-backed Shah — the lynchpin of U.S. strategy in the Persian Gulf. In the following decades, the United States sought to reestablish its hegemony, in particular in the Persian Gulf region.

It was due to America’s desire to establish sole control over the Persian Gulf region that it was showed no interest in the Soviet Union proposed the neutralization of the Gulf, with no alliances, no bases, no intervention in the region in 1980 and at the onset of the Iran-Iraq war [i]. To the contrary, the United States used the war as a lever to establish of military bases in the Persian Gulf states.

The Saudi monarchy, threatened by the Iranian revolution, and reassured by President Reagan that “we will not permit” Saudi Arabia “to be an Iran”[ii], made way for US bases on it is soil in 1985, making room for others to follow suit. America’s efforts with the Shah’s cooperation to alienate Iranians and Arabs to Israel’s benefit continued unabated.

Thus, it is worthwhile recapping here that the cooperation among the Arab states against Iran was fear of communism and the potential of an uprising against the ruling monarchies.

The 1991 [Persian] Gulf War was an important and tragic war with heavy casualties on the Iraqi side. However, for the sake of brevity it will not be discussed here other than to point out the most pertinent facts; the war was based on deception, Saudi Arabia paid $36 billion of US $60 billion costs, and US forces were deployed in Saudi Arabia. It is perhaps worthwhile pointing out that shortly before the end of the war, the American government allowed Israel to designate 100 targets inside Iraq for the coalition to destroy.[iii]Following the war, Iraq was subjected to deathly immoral sanctions with a death toll of over one million, half of them being children. The no-fly zone and its daily bombings left a vulnerable and devastated country in its trail, with no room for resistance to future incursions.

Not unrelated to current events is the fact that in the same year, The Jerusalem Report[iv]published that the idea of radical Islam replacing communism had taken seed among the Israeli right. The basis of the idea was founded on the neoconservatives fear that with the demise of the Soviet Union, and the splintering of the America’s right wing faction, there would no longer be an unconditional support for a U.S.-Israel alliance. Islam replaced communism as ogre du jour and gave neocons in Washington a decade to expand and promote the newfound ‘threat’.

The 90’s would see the virtual completion of media take-over by neocons made possible with the 1980’s regulation changes in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that allowed mergers and acquisitions. Washington think tanks became home to many more influential neoconservatives such as Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, and Richard Perle who had made their way to the AEI from the Jerusalem-based think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies (IASPS). IASPS has published numerous strategy papers, chief among them “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” in 1996 – viewed by scholars and activist as the blueprint to the 2003 Iraq attack and invasion.

September 11, 2001 triggered the events years in the making.

Two short days later, on September 13, 2001, while the nation was recovering from the shock of 9/11, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) already had a statement available as to how the U.S. should proceed. Saddam’s fate, or rather Iraq’s fate was already sealed. JINSA “recommended” that Iraq be invaded militarily. The policy also called for America to be involved in disputes far and wide for the unforeseen future not only in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also in countries such as Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Sudan, the Palestinian Authority, Libya, Algeria – and eventually, Saudi Arabia and Egyp[v]. No doubt the Saudis were not copied on the policy recommendations for even though they were included in the list of target countries, the Saudi monarchy fully cooperated with advancing terrorism as a weapon of mass destruction and warfare

PART II. Terror in Iraq; Invasion

It is common knowledge by now that Saudi Arabia partnered with the neocons and pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Taking on their usual role of gas station attendants, they pumped oil to fuel America’s war. “Bandar promised President Bush that Saudi Arabia will lower oil prices in the months before the election – to ensure the U.S. economy is strong on election day”. Their cooperation was not without its awards. There is ample literature available on the revelations made about the Carlysle Group and war profiteering. Additionally, less than a month after the illegal attack on Iraq, American forces were moved from Saudi Arabia to Qatar.

Saudis were further rewarded when in 2004, pro-Saudi, anti-Iranian Ayad Allawi, head of INA (Iraqi National Accord) backed by Saudi Arabia, UK and US was appointed as prime minister. His first order of the day was to re-establish diplomatic ties between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Dubbed ‘Saddam without a moustache’ and accused of being a US puppet, he was voted out in 2005. (In 2009, “Alawi launched al-Iraqiya (Iraqi National Movement)). The Saudi/US/British backed Allawi is once again in vogue and a platform is made readily available to him to comment on Iraq and promote himself in opposition to the elected President Nouri al-Maliki).

In the ‘war on terror’, the first order of the day for the US-led occupation forces was to give ‘special status protection’ to the terrorist group, Mojahedeen-e Khalg (MEK). US was grateful to the MEK for fighting alongside Saddam Hossein against Iran during the 8-year war, and for their 2000 attack on a government complex in Tehran which housed the Supreme Leader and the President. Thus, the US and Israel made long term plans for the terrorist group which included fabricating information about Iran’s civilian nuclear program (Gareth Porter).

The US also starting building elaborate bases in occupied Iraq. Contrary to their official narrative, Washington elite had plans to stay. The Americans built several ‘enduring’ bases soon upon arrival – each base arrogantly bearing an English name in Arab land. These were mini cities with their own coutnry club style amenities — swimming pools, theaters, golf, coffee shops, fast food chains, and so on. This was clearly an occupation mission.

According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served in the office of the Secretary of Defense, “the neoconservative architects of the Iraq invasion definitely foresaw a permanent, large-scale presence and view the bases as vital both for protecting Israel and as launchpads for operations in Syria and Iran.” Kwiatkowski was right – this timeline coincided with Washington’s support of opposition groups in Syria and sending MEK terrorists to Iran.

But Iran and Syria were only part of the equation. America had global designs. As a former senior Defense Department official observed during the 8-year long Iran-Iraq war: ‘To all intents and purposes,[Persian] Gulf waters now extend from the Straits of Malacca to the South Atlantic.’[vi]

But occupation of Iraq would not be the predicted ‘cake walk’ . The “Mother of all Bombs” dropped on Iraq, the indiscriminate killings, destruction of Iraq’s ancient sites, and abuses such as the Abu Gharib scandal pushed Iraqis to fight against their “liberators”.

Narratives of crimes committed by US-led forces and their intentions had to be stopped. Journalism became a hazardous occupation as US forces bombed, killed, or shut down papers critical of their occupation and actrocities. Among the most vocal was Muqtada al-Sadr who, giving voice to the Iraqi people, condemned the occupation and oppression in his newspaper– al Hawza. The U.S. forces shut down his paper. He did not surrender his will to fight.

The rising death toll, abuse, and carnage united Iraqis against the American occupiers. Reporting from Baghdad in May 2004, Dahr Jamail cites Imam Al- Adhamy who told him: “what is happening is happening to all of Iraq. There is no difference now between Sunni and Shia, Arab and Kurd. We have all been invaded.”

Hence it became pertinent to undermine their unity and have Iraqis turn on each other instead of fighting the occupiers. This tactic was not new to America. During the bloody Iran-Iraq war, the United States was providing arms and intelligence to both sides. When asked what the logic was in aiding both sides in the bloody war, a former official replied: “You had to have been there” vii. (This strategy is once again at play with the emergence of ISIL. “Many ordinary Sunni Baghdadis, the advance of Isis is cause for alarm mixed with a vague hope that somehow Isis and Shia Muslims may severely damage each other, to the general benefit of moderate Sunnis.”)

In this regards, none proved more helpful than King Abdullah of Jordan in delivering a strategy for the division of Iraqis with his concept of a “Shia Crescent” in late 2004. This inflammatory notion would lay the groundwork for a Sunni-Shia (and Kurd) division. (To understand Jordan’s cooperation and interests, it is important to read the aforementioned IASPS strategy paper “A Clean Break…” ) The mainstream media and collaborators in Iraq and the region spread the concept like wild fire, burning bridges among the various sects. (Click HERE to read an article that accurately refutes the myth of ‘Shia rising’).

In 2005, as anti-war protests spread across America, under direction of the Bush State Department the press was busy creating “happy” news to garner support for the illegal occupation of Iraq[viii. Meanwhile in Iraq, efforts were underway to keep the Iraqis united. In October 2005, then Iraqi president Jalal Talabani announced at a press conference a compromise plan that had been applauded by Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish leaders alike. The threat of a united resistance to the occupation was reemerging. Extraordinary events would once again disrupt the fragile coalition.

Curiously (or not), in December 2005, it was announced that elite Israeli military were training the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In January 2006, Saudi Arabia planned on securing and upgrading a fence intended to seal the Iraq-Saudi border to stop the flow of ‘terrorists’. In February 2006, one of Shia Islam’s holiest shrines, the Askariya shrine in Samarra was bombed. Without questioning or heeding witnesses, the bombing was quickly blamed on Sunnis. Violence and revenge killing erupted.

In May 2006, Joe Biden suggested splitting Iraq into three parts. In August, Vali Nasr, adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations released his book ‘The Shia Revival’. The flames of a dangerous and irreversible divide were being fanned. On December 30, 2006, Saddam Hossein was hung on Eid ul-Adha inside the Green Zone. The timing of his execution further exasperated the divide as it was a holy day of celebration for the Sunnis, yet the timeline had not yet commenced for the Shiites – it would commence the following day. This was perceived as a gift to the Shia’s further alienating the Sunnis and destabilizing Iraq.

In 2007, President Bush ordered a ‘surge’ and 30,000 additional troops would be housed in the bases in order to provide ‘security’ and to help create a “…unified, democratic federal Iraq that can govern itself, defend itself, and sustain itself, and is an ally in the War on Terror.” Askariya was bombed a second time. The troops managed to drag the Iraqi Christians into the sectarian division by pushing Christianity on Moslems

In 2008, the incumbent Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki opposed a permanent US presence and instead signed an Agreement (SOFA) that would see the removal of all US troops from Iraq by December 2011.

This timeline brings us to the arming of ISIL terrorists in Syria by the United States and allies who have been engaged in terror activities both inside Syria and Iraq. The motives are clear. To remove Assad, drag Iran (and Hezbollah) into this quagmire with the intention of bleeding all sides. It would also justify American presence to combat ‘terrorists’ and foreign fighters so that America can re-occupy its bases and dominate the Persian Gulf region as planned.

To sum up, neoconservatives had long sought to dominate the Persian Gulf and use it as a launch pad in their grand strategy of global dominance. When fear of communism and inter-state wars ceased to justify this agenda, 9/11 came to the rescue. Sectarian division eliminated resistance to the plan. As renowned strategist, Michael Porter said: “Finally, strategy must have continuity. It can’t be constantly reinvented.” ISIL is that continuation.

Finally, the brutal activities of the ISIL will also serve as a warning to Afghanistan’s reluctance to sign a SOFA. It is imperative to point out here that 9/11 was a pretext for the invasion of Afghanistan. Afghanistan will be the topic of a future article.

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups in influencing

* Although there is no universal definition of terrorism, Title 22 of the U.S. Code, Section 2656f(d) defines terrorism as “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents, usually intended to influence an audience.”

22 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Nicola Nasser

Excluding “boots on the ground” and leaving combat missions to local and regional “partners,” President Barak Obama and his administration say the United States keeps “all options on the table” to respond militarily to the terrorists’ threat to “American interests” in Iraq, which are now in “danger.”

Similarly, former UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair, on TV screens and in print has recently urged western governments to “put aside the differences of the past and act now” and to intervene militarily in Iraq “to save the future” because “we do have interests in this.”

Both men refrained from indicating what are exactly the “American” and “western” interests in Iraq that need military intervention to defend, but the major prize of their invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the country’s hydrocarbon assets. There lies their “interests.

On June 13 however, Obama hinted to a possible major “disruption” in Iraqi oil output and urged “other producers in the Gulf” to be “able to pick up the slack.”

The United States has already moved the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush, escorted by the guided-missile cruiser USS Philippine Sea and the guided-missile destroyer USS Truxtun, from the northern Arabian Sea into the Arabian Gulf (Persian according to Iran) “to protect American lives, citizens and interests in Iraq,” according to Rear Admiral John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, on June 14. Media is reporting that U.S. intelligence units and air reconnaissance are already operating in Iraq.

The unfolding collapse of the U.S. proxy government in Baghdad has cut short a process of legalizing the de-nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry in Iraq, which became within reach with the latest electoral victory of the Iraqi prime minister since 2006, Noori al-Maliki.

Anti-American armed resistance to the U.S. proxy ruling regime in Baghdad, especially the Baath-led backbone, is on record as seeking to return to the status quo ante with regard to the country’s strategic hydrocarbon assets, i.e. nationalization.

De-nationalization and privatization of the Iraqi oil and gas industry began with the U.S.-led invasion of the country in 2003. Al-Maliki for eight years could not pass a hydrocarbons law through the parliament. Popular opposition and a political system based on sectarian distribution of power and “federal” distribution of oil revenues blocked its adoption. Ruling by political majority instead by sectarian consensus was al-Maliki’s declared hope to enact the law.

Al-Maliki’s plans towards this end together with his political ambitions for a third term were cut short by the fall to armed opposition on this June 10 of Mosul, the capital of the northern Ninawa governorate and second only to Baghdad as Iraq’s largest metropolitan area.

Three days on, with the fighting moving on to the gates of Baghdad, “the most important priority for Baghdad right now is to secure its capital and oil infrastructure,” a Stratfor analysis on June 11 concluded.

The raging war in Iraq now will determine whether Iraqi hydrocarbons are a national asset or multinational loot. Any U.S. military support to the regime it installed in Baghdad should be viewed within this context. Meanwhile this national wealth is still being pillaged as spoils of war.

Al-Maliki is not now preoccupied even with maintaining Iraq as OPEC’s No. 2 oil producer, but with maintaining a level of oil output sufficient to bring in enough revenues to finance a defensive war that left his capital besieged and his government with southern Iraq only to rule, may be not for too long.

Even this modest goal is in doubt. Al-Maliki is left with oil exports from the south only, the disruption of which is highly possible any time now.

Worries that fighting would spread to the southern city of Basra or Baghdad have already sent oil prices to nine-month high on Thursday.

Legalizing the de-nationalization of Iraqi hydrocarbon industry has thus become more elusive than it has ever been since 2003.

On June 1 forty two years ago the process of the nationalization of the hydrocarbon industry kicked off in Iraq. Now Iraq is an open field for looting its only strategic asset.

On April 15 last year the CNN, reviewing “The Iraq war, 10 years on,” reported: “Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil.”

“Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms,” the CNN report concluded, indicating that, “From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West’s largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq. So have a slew of American oil service companies, including Halliburton, the Texas-based firm Dick Cheney ran before becoming George W. Bush’s running mate in 2000.

The international rush for the Iraqi “black gold” by trans-national oil and gas corporations is at its height with no national law or competent central authority to regulate it.

Iraq’s “oil industry” now “operates, gold rush–style, in an almost complete absence of oversight or regulation,” Greg Muttitt wrote in The Nation on August 23, 2012.

Nothing changed since except that the “rush” was accelerating and the de-nationalization process was taking roots, squandering the bloody sacrifices of the Iraqis over eighty two years to uproot the foreign hold on their major strategic asset. The ongoing fighting is threatening to cut this process short.

Tip of iceberg

Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq has been awarding hydrocarbon contracts to foreign firms independently without reference to the central government in Baghdad.

Since early 2014, it has been pumping crude to Turkey via its own independent pipeline built last December. On this June 4, Turkey and the KRG announced the signing of a 50-year deal to export Iraqi oil from Kurdistan via Turkey.

Hussein al-Shahristani, Iraq’s deputy prime minister, threatened legal action against firms that purchased “smuggled oil” via the Turkish-KRG arrangements; he accused Turkey of “greed” and trying “to lay (its) hands on cheap Iraqi oil.
Baghdad filed for arbitration against Turkey’s state-owned pipeline operator BOTAS with the International Court of Arbitration of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris.

Baghdad says those Turkish-KRG arrangements are illegal and unconstitutional, but its own contract awarding is also unlawful. Should a change of guard occur in Baghdad, al-Maliki and his government would be held accountable and probably prosecuted.

The dispute between Baghdad on the one hand and Turkey and the KRG on the other is only the surfacing tip of the iceberg of the “gold rush–style” looting of Iraq’s national wealth.

One of the main priorities of al-Maliki all along has been to legalize the de-nationalization and privatization process.

Muttitt, author of Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in Occupied Iraq, wrote a few months before al-Maliki assumed his first premiership that American and British governments made sure the candidates for prime minister knew what their first priority had to be: To pass a law legalizing the return of the foreign multinationals. This would be the vital biggest prize of the U.S. 2003 invasion.

Al-Maliki is the right man to secure a pro-privatization government in Baghdad. Thomas L. Friedman described him in the New York Times on this June 4 as “our guy,” “an American-installed autocrat” and a “big gift” the U.S. occupation “left behind in Iraq.”

Various drafts of hydrocarbon privatization laws failed to gain consensus among the proxy sectarian parties to the U.S.-engineered “political process” and the “federal” entities of Iraq’s U.S.-drafted constitution.

Al-Maliki’s government endorsed the first draft of a privatization law in February 2007 and on August 28, 2011 endorsed an amended draft which the parliament has yet to adopt.

Iraqi trade unions, amid popular protests, opposed and fought the privatization draft laws. Their offices were raided, computers confiscated, equipment smashed and their leaders arrested and prosecuted. Nonetheless, the parliament could not pass the law.

Al-Maliki government began awarding contracts to international oil and gas giants without a law in place. They are illegal contracts, but valid as long as there is a pro-privatization government in Baghdad.

U.S. Executive Order 13303

Former British and U.S. leaders of the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair and George Bush junior, were on record to deny that the invasion had anything to do with oil, but the U.S. President Barak Obama has just refuted their claim.

On last May 16, Obama signed an Executive Order to extend the national emergency with respect to Iraq for one year. His predecessor Bush signed this “order” for the first time on May 22, 2003 “to deal with the … threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by obstacles to the continued reconstruction of Iraq.”

Details of Bush’s Executive Order (EO) No. 13303 are still kept out of media spotlight. It declared that future legal claims on Iraq’s oil wealth constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.”

Section 1(b) eliminates all judicial process for “all Iraqi petroleum and petroleum products, and interests therein, and proceeds, obligations or any financial instruments of any nature whatsoever arising from or related to the sale or marketing thereof, and interests therein, in which any foreign country or a national thereof has any interest, that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of United States persons.”

EO 13303 was rubber-stamped by the UN Security Council Resolution No. 1483, which protected the U.S.-controlled governmental institutions in Iraq.

Muttitt wrote in August 2012: “In 2011, after nearly nine years of war and occupation, U.S. troops finally left Iraq. In their place, Big Oil is now present in force.”

“Big Oil” is now the only guarantor of the survival of the U.S. proxy government in Baghdad, but the survival of “Big Oil” itself is now threatened by the escalating and rapidly expanding armed opposition.

Obama said the “threats” and “obstacles” to U.S, interests in Iraq have not changed eleven years after the invasion; Iraq has not enacted yet a hydrocarbon law to legalize the privatization of its oil and gas industry.

The developments of the last week in Iraq vindicate Obama’s renewal of EO 13303. The U.S. war on Iraq is not over and it is not won yet. Hence Obama’s recent extension of the national emergency with respect to Iraq for one year.

Since Great Britain granted Iraq its restricted independence in 1932, the nationalization of Iraqi oil wealth was the national and popular battle cry for complete sovereignty. It is now the battle cry of the armed opposition.

Iraq has been targeted by western powers since the “republic” under the late Abd al-Karim Qasim enacted law No. 80 of 1961, which deprived foreign companies of the right to explore in 99.5% of the Iraqi territory, but mainly since the Baath regime led by the late Saddam Hussein decided to nationalize the hydrocarbon industry on June 1, 1972.

Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.

20 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Shamus Cooke

Is Iraq following Syria into the genocidal abyss? There have already been reported massacres on both sides, and more should be expected as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) seeks to consolidate its victories while the Iraqi government mobilizes to reclaim what was lost.

But don’t believe for a second that the overwhelming majority of Iraqis have any interest in such a war. ISIS has a thin social base and is incapable of representing Iraqi Sunni Muslims. There is, of course, plenty of anti-government sentiment in Iraq, especially among the Sunni population. Tapping into this dissatisfaction and steering it into the dead end of sectarian warfare is the specialty of ISIS and its allies, who have zero progressive substance in their vision.

And while it’s true that other groups and militias have stepped into some of the void left by the fleeing Iraqi army, there is no mistaking that ISIS remains the leader of this insurgency, and carries a strict sectarian philosophy incompatible with the Baathists or other anti-government groups that may be opportunistically seeking temporary alliances.

One way ISIS gains some popular support is through its resources: ISIS is a well-funded, well-armed organization that gains many of its fighters by promising a fat paycheck, or equally importantly, promising a shot at survival amid war. ISIS is essentially a minority of religious fanatics leading a mercenary army.

But you wouldn’t know this from watching the news, which falsely portrays ISIS as representing Iraqi Sunni Muslims in general, a stinging insult to the global Sunni community who are disgusted by ISIS’ atrocities.

As many commentators exaggerate ISIS’ popularity in Iraq, they also misdiagnose the blame for the war by exaggerating the role of the Iraqi government. The media is bizarrely spinning the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, as the principal culprit in this war.

This skewed perspective requires, in part, that the media ignore the recent Iraqi elections, which gave al-Maliki’s coalition a big victory, while proving that al-Maliki is the least hated politician in Iraq.

It’s likely that al-Maliki’s victory was a result of many people voting “no” against the anti-government insurgency, just like Assad’s popularity soared in Syria when it became clear that the rebels were dominated by al-Qaeda-style extremists.

Also like Assad, al-Maliki’s opponents are divided without a clear political vision, making many Sunnis feel like politics isn’t working. This has pushed some Sunnis into the arms of the insurrectionists, who also lack vision but at least do something.

There are significant religious divisions in Iraq, and it’s true that al-Maliki is guilty of sectarianism by strengthening his mostly-Shia base at the expense of the former Baath Party members, who are mostly Sunni. But by focusing the analysis here the big picture gets fuzzy.

The anti-al-Maliki emphasis helps minimize the fact that ISIS is essentially acting as an invading army from rebel-controlled Syria. This is the motor force of the war, and thus strange that the Obama administration is instead focusing his criticism on al-Maliki while Iraq is being invaded by perhaps the most powerful terrorist organization on earth.

ISIS does have Iraqi roots, being born out of the struggle against the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But ISIS was all but extinguished in Iraq when the U.S. paid other Sunni groups to fight it, driving ISIS into Syria.

In Syria ISIS was instantly transformed from a U.S. enemy to an unofficial ally, since both ISIS and the U.S. were targeting the Assad government for destruction.

During ISIS’ Syrian growth spurt, the Obama administration consciously minimized or completely overlooked the role of ISIS and the other al-Qaeda linked Syrian “rebels” — such as Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham — who were getting the majority of the Gulf state cash and guns, ensuring that they would be the dominant rebel force in Syria.

Obama essentially used the Syrian extremist groups as leverage against Assad, allowing the U.S. and Gulf states to dump huge sums of money into the terrorist group’s coffers. It was hoped that if the rebels were strong enough, Assad’s inner circle would turn against him and install a more U.S. friendly government — regime change accomplished.

This failed Syrian tactic seems to be working in Iraq. Long before ISIS waged its recent assault, al-Maliki was begging the Obama administration for more military aid, which was refused. And when the ISIS attack started Obama declared, mid invasion, that al-Maliki would not receive further aid until he was more “inclusive” as a leader, while giving the Iraqi leader no specific suggestions. Obama’s intent was to send a strong message to the Iraqi government: “replace al-Maliki” or face ISIS alone.

As The New York Times recently noted, “…the Obama administration has made no secret of its exasperation with Mr. Maliki.” Obama wanted a more “reliable” leader in Iraq, with the front-runner being the pro-U.S. Ahmad Chalabi. The Iraq government seems to have gotten the hint, according to the New York Times:

“Alarmed over the Sunni insurgent mayhem convulsing Iraq, the country’s political leaders are actively jockeying to replace Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, Iraqi officials said Thursday.” The article implied that the Obama Administration was deeply involved in the discussion.

It’s possible that a behind the scenes agreement has already been reached, since Obama all of a sudden decided to send 300 American “military advisers” to aid the Iraqi Government fight against ISIS.

It’s possible that if al-Maliki is replaced there will be a temporary stabilization in Iraq, as some Sunni groups will be more open to negotiate with a new Shia leader, especially since the more intelligent Iraqi Sunnis will see ISIS as a bigger threat than any Shia-led government.

But ISIS has already been unleashed, ensuring that sectarian tensions will be exacerbated no matter who runs Iraq. The fundamentalist sectarian philosophy of ISIS and other Jihadi groups reflects the ideology of their financial backers, the Gulf state monarchies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, etc., whose authoritarian rule is rooted in an especially oppressive form of Islam, ideally suited for the needs of these dictatorships.

Saudi sheikhs encourage impressionable, unemployed Saudi youth to fight abroad in conflicts they don’t understand, to impose a Islamic philosophy foreign to Syria and Iraq that labels Shia Muslims as infidels worthy of death.

The invasion by ISIS has triggered a large-scale Shia sectarian response, since Shia Muslims have seen what ISIS does to Shia “heretics” in Syria, and are thus mobilizing to protect themselves and to drive ISIS out of Iraq.

There is plenty of disastrous potential in this dynamic. Sectarian tensions will rise further still, and many innocent people will die in the process. Shia militias have committed atrocities in Iraq in the recent past as Baghdad underwent a Shia-led ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods, partially in response to the al-Qaeda (Sunni)-led bombing campaign. And if ISIS is only met with a Shia sectarian response, other Sunnis will be reluctantly pushed ISIS’ arms, since they are the only effective fighting group.

Those who mislabel the ISIS invasion as a “Sunni uprising” forget that movements are defined by who leads them and what their goals are. A movement led by ISIS, which seeks to instill a Taliban-style dictatorship, will by rejected by the vast majority of Sunnis and Shias, just as they have been rejected in Syria.

Calling recent events an anti-government uprising shields the principle culprits in this war, giving them crucial political cover, as was done in Syria. The politics of ISIS and other al-Qaeda linked groups are the political equivalent of European fascism, a bringing together of all the most reactionary groups towards the most right-wing, totalitarian aims. It is an ideology that must be rejected no matter what religion it covers itself with.

And while one can sympathize with anti-government sentiment, one cannot minimize the danger posed by ISIS. An ISIS-led government will resemble Taliban-era Afghanistan, and destroy civil liberties for Shia Muslims, women, workers, and minorities in general. Shiites and Sunnis must form an alliance to defend their basic civil rights in the face of the ISIS insurgency.”

Shia’s and Sunnis can unite in a common political vision as many did under pan-Arab socialist movement after the post-colonial years. A plan of unity can be translated into a social vision that ensures that all Iraq and Syrian people have sufficient food, housing, jobs, healthcare, and dignity, which are the core issues just under the surface of the sectarian fighting across the Middle East.

Without a new political vision based on uniting economic demands, the Middle East will continue to be a plaything for foreign interventions, constantly divided and conquered through religion.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org).

20 June, 2014
Countercurrents.org

 

By Jai Singh

Previous articles in this series: “Narendra Modi and the rise of India’s neo-fascist Far-Right”, and “Nazism and Narendra Modi: The ideological influence on India’s next Prime Minister”.

India’s new Prime Minister Narendra Modi is a member of both the Bharatiya Janata Party (“BJP”) and its neo-Nazi paramilitary “ideological fountainhead”, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (“RSS”). Modi is efficiently streamlining India’s new national government along with discussing a range of issues with senior ministers, as the “Modi Administration” begins in earnest. In terms of South Asia’s regional stability, progress and prosperity, Modi’s recent outreach towards neighbouring Pakistan’s government is encouraging; time will tell if his intentions are sincere. The same applies to Modi’s much-vaunted “development” plans.

Modi has also confirmed a series of meetings with international leaders during the next few months; he is planning to visit the United States (including a meeting with US President Barack Obama personally), Japan, Brazil, Australia, Bhutan, Nepal, and the ASEAN-India and East Asia summits. Modi will also attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York this September. Interestingly, Modi has not arranged to visit any countries in Europe.

Nevertheless, a series of problems have already arisen, which provides a revealing insight into the nature of Modi’s regime:

(i) For example, as recently summarised in the Hindustan Times, (a) an RSS national executive member has called for India’s intelligence agencies to terminate their investigations of multiple RSS terrorist attacks, (b) senior members of Modi’s new national government are calling for the termination of affirmative action initiatives for India’s religious minorities, with the new Minister for Minority Affairs making the bizarre claim that Muslims are not a minority in India despite the fact that they are only 14% of the total population, and (c) it turns out that Modi’s newly-appointed education minister falsified her own educational qualifications in affidavits.

(ii) Modi’s national government is recklessly endangering India’s national security by allowing 100% Foreign Direct Investment in the Defence sector. (India is the biggest weapons importer in the world, currently 75% from Russia, 7% from the United States, and 6% from Israel; details via The Economist here).

(iii) The Indian Express has exposed the fact that a leaked new report by India’s Intelligence Bureau (“IB”) has actually plagiarised a key part of a paranoid speech by Modi in 2006. The report blacklists a considerable number of reputable human rights organisations and environmental groups, including Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the child-support service Childline and the women’s trade union SEWA (which assists poor, illiterate self-employed Indian women), claiming that they pose a “threat to [India’s] national economic security” due to “foreign funding”. Extensive further details and analysis via the New York Times, DNA India and Yahoo News.

Extract from the aforementioned Indian Express article: On September 9, 2006, then Gujarat chief minister Modi had lashed out in a speech at a “wealthy” and “influential” class of NGOs [Non-Governmental Organisations] that “hire PR firms to continually build their image” with “money coming from abroad.”……[Modi continued]: “Another conspiracy — a vicious cycle is set up. Funds are obtained from abroad; an NGO is set up; a few articles are commissioned; a PR firm is recruited and, slowly, with the help of the media, an image is created. And then awards are procured from foreign countries to enhance this image. Such a vicious cycle, a network of finance-activity-award is set up and, once they have secured an award, no one in Hindustan dares raise a finger, no matter how many the failings of the awardee.”

Readers will note the irony of Modi’s conspiratorial claims, considering the contents of sections #16 and #19 in the main article below; the sections highlight the network of influential US and UK-based groups (including a giant Washington-based PR firm) which have recently been heavily involved in politically lobbying on Modi’s behalf here in the West and “creating” and “enhancing” his image; #16 also includes some details on the multimillion-dollar foreign funding of the RSS.

(iv) 30% of the ministers in Modi’s government are currently facing criminal charges, including murder, kidnapping, communal [sectarian] disharmony, and electoral violations. The new parliament also has the lowest number of Muslims in post-independence India’s history . Modi’s regime has reinstated corrupt and sectarian Gujarat police officers, along with appointing ministers who have been involved in sectarian violence.

(v) Modi has also not removed BJP minister Giriraj Singh; during the elections, Giriraj Singh claimed that “those [Indians] who want to stop Narendra Modi [from becoming Prime Minister] should go to Pakistan. In the coming days, they will have no place in India.” (He subsequently refused to retract his statements despite the outcry). Giriraj Singh also claimed that “all terrorists belong to one community” [ie. Muslims].

(vi) Sikh readers in particular may be aware of the fact that, as Gujarat’s Chief Minister, Modi tried to force a huge number of Sikh families in Gujarat to “go back” to Punjab even though they have been living in Gujarat as farmers for nearly 50 years. Serving the Sikh families eviction notices and freezing their financial assets, Modi’s state government intended to seize their land, claiming that a law from 1948 allows only Gujaratis to own land in the state.

Further to Modi’s election as Prime Minister, India’s new Attorney General, Mukul Rohatgi, is the lawyer who defended and facilitated the original acquittals of Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, two ringleaders of the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms (investigations of Tytler and Kumar were subsequently reopened). More recently, Rohatgi defended Modi’s Gujarat state government against prosecutions by victims of the 2002 riots.

(vii) The continuing epidemic of gang rapes (particularly of low-caste women) in India has received considerable domestic & international publicity, including forceful condemnations from the Obama Administration and the United Nations. One of Modi’s senior ministerial allies has publicly claimed that rape is “sometimes right, sometimes wrong”, and another has publicly claimed that rapes “do not happen deliberately. These types of incidents happen accidentally”. (In January 2013, current RSS head Mohan Bhagwat publicly claimed that “the influence of Western culture” was to blame for rapes in India; he also made the false claim that rapes in India occur only in cities, not villages). The recent murder of an Indian Muslim by members of a Hindu Nationalist organisation along with rioting by the latter in the city of Pune has also received wide publicity. Until very recently, Modi himself publicly remained completely silent about all of these issues, and belatedly spoke out only after widespread domestic and international criticism of his increasingly-conspicuous silence. One of Modi’s own senior ministers has subsequently been summoned to court as one of the accused in a major case involving rape, prostitution and blackmail.

There are a number of further facts that Modi’s lobbyists and pro-Modi media outlets are either reluctant to publicly disclose or are actively covering up. As with the material in the previous two articles in this series, as a contingency measure it is therefore imperative that Western governments, intelligence agencies and business leaders are apprised of the information documented below, especially in the United States and the United Kingdom.

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1. THE “BIG LIE” PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUE:

Narendra Modi’s network has been making successful use of the “Big Lie” propaganda technique pioneered by the Nazis:

(a) Firstly, the claim that India’s Supreme Court has “cleared” Modi of culpability in the Gujarat 2002 riots is still widely circulating (including in some sections of the Western media). This claim is completely false. In reality, not only has the Supreme Court accused Modi of being a “modern-day Nero” at the very least, but the report by the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigations Team (“SIT”) can be read in full online here. Amongst other things, the SIT report confirmed that Modi’s Gujarat state government was guilty of destroying a huge amount of incriminating evidence, including completely destroying the records of police communications and government meetings during the riots.

The SIT report also confirmed that there were multiple incidents where Modi’s conduct was divisive and prejudiced against Gujarat’s Muslim population; as Gujarat’s Chief Minister, Modi was therefore in violation of his constitutional duty to protect the life and property of every citizen of Gujarat state.

The SIT report also confirmed that (i) Modi claimed to have been unaware of the first massacre during the riots (at the Gulbarg Society area of Ahmedabad) for as long as 5 hours after the atrocity; Modi specifically claimed that he only heard about it during a meeting at his house that evening, (ii) there were numerous communications between police officers during the course of the siege and subsequent massacre, and (iii) Modi was praised for holding a series of meetings with police officers throughout the day in order to continuously monitor the violence. Readers will note the glaring contradiction in this narrative and can draw their own conclusions about the implications.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court also appointed an amicus curiae. Based on the SIT’s own findings, the senior Supreme Court lawyer and former Additional Solicitor General & Vice-President of the Supreme Court Bar Association has recommended that Modi should be put on trial and has concluded that there is indeed sufficient evidence to prosecute Modi on multiple criminal charges. Full details via the Times of India and Tehelka.

A case can of course also be made for prosecuting Modi and his accomplices via the International Criminal Court at The Hague and putting them on trial there.

(b) Secondly, the post-election claim that Modi has been “given a huge mandate by India’s 1 billion population” is being promoted by Modi’s propagandists and sympathetic sections of the Indian media (Modi himself has been making this claim too). In reality, 69% of voters in the election did not vote for Modi; in terms of the total number of eligible Indian voters, the percentage that did not vote for Modi rises to approximately 80%.

(c) Gujarat’s development under Modi’s state government has been considerably exaggerated; in fact, as recently documented by the New York Times, Modi repeatedly made major mistakes in hugely expensive local development projects, primarily due to his own character flaws. Furthermore, there are major health and malnutrition problems in Gujarat; as recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, approximately 50% of Gujarati children under 5 years old are stunted, 70% of Gujarati children under 5 years old are anaemic, and approximately 55% of Gujarati women are anaemic. For his part, Modi is on record as blaming widespread female malnutrition in Gujarat on what he claims is a combination of (i) “beauty-conscious middle-class” girls who don’t want to “get fat” and (ii) vegetarianism.

(d) The claim that Gujarat under Modi’s state government has been “free of sectarian violence since 2002” is completely false; in fact, rates of such violence in Gujarat are far higher than India’s national average. Statistical details via Firstpost here.

2. NARENDRA MODI’S STATEMENTS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES IN 2002:

Estimates of the number of Muslims murdered during the Gujarat 2002 riots range from 1000-2000, with victims ranging from the very young to the very old. Methods used to kill the men, women and children primarily involved hacking them to pieces and/or burning them alive (both individually and, in some instances, mass burnings). The riots also included mass rapes and sexual mutilation, again often involving the female victims subsequently being murdered. The RSS and affiliated groups were heavily involved in perpetrating these atrocities.

Celia Dugger was co-head of the New York Times’ South Asia bureau in 2002. She covered the riots and personally reported that Narendra Modi’s administration was deliberately failing to stop the violence; as mentioned by Celia Dugger in the NYT’s video here, “witnesses were telling [her] that they had begged the police to intervene and stop the mobs and that they stood by and that leaders of groups affiliated with the Bharatiya Janata Party were inciting violence”.

Celia Dugger personally interviewed Narendra Modi a couple of months after the riots. As included in the aforementioned NYT video:

“I asked [Modi] if he had any regrets about what had happened in his state in that period: Women openly raped, hundreds and hundreds of people were killed. He told me his greatest regret was that he didn’t manage the media very well. I left the interview feeling chilled by my interview with the Chief Minister. He had not shown any regret or expressed any empathy for those who had been slaughtered in his state on his watch”.

(Apart from the obvious callousness displayed, this also has ramifications for the Indian news media now that Modi is Prime Minister; see #11 below).

3. RSS AND NEO-NAZI RALLIES:

As comprehensively documented in the previous article in this series, the core ideology of the Far-Right paramilitary RSS (“Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh”) is directly and explicitly based on Hitler and Third Reich-era Nazism; in their extensive writings, the RSS’ Hitler-supporting ideological founders directly lifted Nazi propaganda and simply replaced “Germans” with “Hindus” and “Jews” with “Muslims”. The ideology is also virulently hostile towards Christians. Bear in mind that India’s 1.2-billion population currently includes 170 million Muslims and approximately 30 million Christians.

In his own writings, Narendra Modi is on record as describing the most influential Hitler-supporting RSS founder, M.S. Golwalkar, as “a guru worthy of worship”.

Golwalkar (1906-1973) is on record as repeatedly endorsing Hitler, the Nazis and their treatment of religious minorities. He never retracted any of these statements, not even after the horrors of the Holocaust. Quoting directly from Golwalkar’s own propaganda writings, numerous examples of his statements were documented in the previous article. In summary:

(a) Golwalkar promoted explicitly racial Far-Right propaganda and claimed that a “Nation” is based on 5 indivisible factors: Race, Religion, Culture, Language and Geography. Golwalkar claimed that Race and Religion are the dominant factors for the RSS;
(b) Golwalkar had contempt for educated Hindus;
(c) Golwalkar was opposed to inclusive, pluralistic democracy and territory-based nationality;
(d) Golwalkar claimed that non-Hindus in India “deserve no privileges, not even citizen’s rights”;
(e) Golwalkar glorified Nazi Germany and the persecution of Germany’s Jews, and stated that India should duplicate Hitler’s treatment of minority populations;
(f) Golwalkar misrepresented and slandered Judaism, Christianity and Islam;
(g) Golwalkar claimed that Hindus are differentiated from other religious groups before birth;
(h) Golwalkar claimed that the RSS aims to reconvert Indian Muslims and Christians to Hinduism;
(i) Golwalkar rejected the Indian nationality of all Indian non-Hindus;
(j) Golwalkar reiterated his opposition to territory-based nationality and Mahatma Gandhi’s principle of Hindu-Muslim unity;
(k) Golwalkar repeatedly wrote lengthy bigoted diatribes against both Christians and Muslims, explicitly declaring them to be “hostiles” within Indian society and claiming that Christians have proved to be “bloodsuckers” wherever they have gone in the world.

Narendra Modi has been an active member of the RSS for the entirety of his political career. In fact, the RSS explicitly describe Modi as a “pracharak” for the organisation; the literal translation of the word is “proselytiser”. Modi can be seen performing a modified Nazi salute alongside a number of other RSS members in one of the photos at the top of this article; the photo was taken at an RSS meeting near Ahmedabad in September 2009.

Video footage of a neo-Nazi rally by the RSS is available on Youtube here; the footage is from an “RSS Mega Convention” in Mangalore in 2013. From 3 min 40 s onwards, the thousands of uniformed RSS members standing in formation simultaneously perform a modified Nazi salute. Shortly afterwards, senior RSS leaders (including the current head of the RSS, Mohan Bhagwat) can also be seen performing that fascist salute. For obvious reasons, the whole thing looks chillingly familiar.

4. STRATEGY MEETINGS WITH THE RSS LEADERSHIP:

Narendra Modi and other senior members of the incoming new government (including the new Home Minister) were already having lengthy closed-door meetings with the RSS senior leadership during the weekend before the election results, specifically to discuss post-election strategy; details via Firstpost here and here. Modi was the first to do so, personally meeting Mohan Bhagwat for a detailed discussion. Bhagwat himself can be seen performing the aforementioned modified Nazi salute in the bottom-left photo in the image at the top of this article.

5. RSS CONTINUING TO DICTATE POLITICAL POLICY:

Narendra Modi’s team have subsequently continued to have meetings with the RSS. Furthermore, readers may be aware that there is already an escalating controversy involving the Indian state of Kashmir (also see the Kashmir Chief Minister’s tweet here); the RSS has publicly become directly involved in the issue.

6. RSS DOMINANCE OF THE NEW INDIAN GOVERNMENT:

As confirmed by Reuters, 17 of the 23 Cabinet-level senior ministers in Narendra Modi’s new government are current or former RSS members. This includes the new Home Minister Rajnath Singh and of course Modi himself.

7. THE RSS’ LONG-TERM STRATEGY IN INDIA:

A detailed Caravan investigative article on Mohan Bhagwat includes information on the RSS’ long-term gameplan. Extract:

“Between now and [2025], the organisation has planned a three-phase strategy aimed at expanding its work…..The RSS says it’s nearing the end of stage one; it seems that the next step, for which Bhagwat has been preparing the ground, is to win political power. If the BJP becomes dominant in the next government, the [RSS] juggernaut will likely begin rolling, entering a period of potentially unprecedented activity to fulfil its broader social goals.”

The aforementioned article also quotes Mohan Bhagwat making the following statements at a major RSS meeting in 2009:

“…..the evolution of the [RSS] shows that we are indeed marching ahead with our plan and reaching towards our goal consistently……We will overcome and surmount problems and try to accelerate the pace of our work effectively. The picture is clear in front of us. Not only the goal, the clear strategy, all the stages, methodology to reach there are all worked out and we have a clear cut plan before us.”

Similarly, other journalists have reported that a former Indian army officer who joined the RSS 10 years ago and is now conducting leadership camps for the RSS has stated:

“The [RSS’] strategy is to solidly consolidate its position and expand so powerfully across the country that no-one can shake it at least for the next 50 years. RSS believes in silent work and it has spread its activities in several areas all over the country.”

An RSS activist recently made the following statements to the Washington Post:

“We want people who subscribe to RSS’ philosophy of nationalism in every occupation, every department of the government, every industry, every sphere of society.”

8. RSS RECRUITMENT:

According to The Economist, the number of Indians joining the RSS is now 10,000 every month.

In March 2014, The Guardian reported that the RSS already had 40 million members in India. The organisation has at least 50,000 branches across the country, with meetings held daily. The RSS also has approximately 100 affiliate organisations. Furthermore, Bloomberg recently confirmed that the RSS is running a network of 18,000 schools across India.

9. NARENDRA MODI AND “TRIUMPH OF THE WILL”:

A major pro-Modi publication, “OPEN” Magazine, has published a glowing article about Narendra Modi titled “Triumph of the Will”. The article has been publicised on the magazine’s front cover, alongside a photo of Modi. Details via Al Jazeera here. The article’s title is of course the name of the most well-known pro-Hitler propaganda film from the Third Reich. This is not the first time that the magazine has used the “Triumph of the Will” caption for Modi.

10. SOCIAL ENGINEERING VIA PROPAGANDA FILMS:

Narendra Modi’s RSS-dominated team plans to set up a national government wing dedicated to developing & promoting propaganda films via India’s movie industry, in order to “bring a cultural awakening”. Details via the Hindustan Times here.

11. RESIGNATIONS OF ANTI-MODI JOURNALISTS AND CONSOLIDATION OF PRO-MODI INDUSTRIALISTS’ CONTROL OF INDIAN MEDIA:

(a) During Narendra Modi’s tenure as Gujarat’s Chief Minister, his state government actually accused journalists of sedition in order to silence their criticism of Modi’s regime, filing cases under a sedition law that India’s Supreme Court has ruled should only be used in cases of violent rebellion against the state.

(b) As discussed in Outlook India, a large-scale clampdown against senior anti-Modi journalists continued across India in the run-up to the national election. This included the targeting of very senior professional journalists at a number of prestigious news outlets; objective analysis and criticism of Modi has deliberately been silenced, accompanied by multiple high-level resignations. This has been particularly prevalent at all television channels, magazines and online outlets owned by Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance group. The industrialist Ambanis played a key role in facilitating Modi’s election victory. Further examples are available here, including screenshots of online statements by anti-Modi journalists such as CNN-IBN’s Sagarika Ghose who have subsequently found themselves silenced.

(c) According to Bloomberg, Reliance chairman Mukesh Ambani has added $6 billion to his fortune since Modi’s candidacy for PM was announced; Mukesh Ambani and his younger brother Anil Ambani each added nearly $1 billion and $600 million to their respective wealth on the day that Modi’s election victory was announced. Bloomberg has also recently reported that the Ambanis are actively censoring the exposure of their own questionable business activities; for example, the Ambanis are alleged to have successfully pressured the previous Indian government into doubling the price of natural gas in India.

(d) After Modi’s election as Prime Minister, multiple senior anti-Modi journalists such as CNN-IBN’s Rajdeep Sardesai and Sagarika Ghose are continuing to resign as the Reliance group takes over the holding company Network 18, which includes the Indian news channels CNN-IBN and CNBC’s Indian affiliates, along with Forbes India, multiple business and news websites, and multiple entertainment channels. Details via Scroll.in and the Huffington Post. Extensive details on the exact sequence of events have been documented in Caravan here, including Network 18’s role as a major pro-Modi propaganda platform and the resulting impact on Indian news media coverage of Modi.

(e) A few years ago, Rajdeep Sardesai famously interviewed Modi about the Gujarat 2002 riots. As can be seen in the video clip available in this Outlook India article, “awkward questions by Rajdeep Sardesai are met with lengthy, awkward silence”. The same article also includes video footage of the famous incident when Sardesai’s CNN-IBN colleague Karan Thapar interviewed Modi in 2007; Thapar directly asked him “People still call you in your face a mass-murderer, and they accuse you of being prejudiced against Muslims. Do you have an image problem ?” One minute into the scheduled interview, Modi became visibly angry, asked for a glass of water, and then actually walked out of the interview (which was all caught on camera). According to Caravan:

…..the following day, Thapar said, he got a call from Modi: “He asked me, ‘Are you firing by resting your gun on my shoulder?’ and I said, ‘Didn’t I tell you it was better to complete the interview?’ He was okay by then, it seemed. He said when he came to Delhi next, we would have dinner together. And he would give me another interview. At some point he also said, ‘I love you.’”

However, despite repeated requests since 2007, Modi has never allowed Thapar to interview him again.

(f) Regular readers will recall that Modi has only recently publicly admitted that he is actually married. The aforementioned Caravan article also discusses what happened when an Indian Express journalist located Modi’s wife in 2002. Extract:

[The Indian Express journalist Darshan Desai] met [Modi’s wife], her brother and the headmaster of a primary school where she was teaching. None of them would agree to an interview, fearing retribution, and several local BJP men made it clear his questions were unwelcome and insisted he leave.

“I remember I had just reached home and removed my shoes when I got a call on my cell phone,” Desai told me. “The voice on the phone said in Gujarati, ‘The chief minister wants to speak with you.’ Soon, Modi came on the line. He said ‘Namaskar’, and then he asked: ‘So what is the agenda?’

“I said, ‘I didn’t quite get you.’ And he said, ‘You have written against me. Your newspaper even started Modi Meter,’ referring to a column my paper ran during the riots. I just kept quiet, and he said, ‘I’m aware what you’ve been up to today. What you’ve done today goes much beyond. That’s why I want to know what your agenda is.’ I wasn’t scared, but I remember being a little nervous, and I said, ‘I have no agenda. You can contact my editor.’ He just said, ‘Okay. Think it over,’ and hung up the phone.”

(g) In 2010, during a 90-minute interview with the Muslim editor of an Indian newspaper, Modi was asked if he dreamed of the Akhand Bharat (“Undivided India”) concept, which is strongly promoted by the RSS. The question was particularly relevant because, as detailed in Firstpost here, “a report in 2010 quoted the current RSS chief Dr Mohan Bhagwat as saying: “We should start thinking how to be Akhand Bharat once again,”…..The report added that “Bhagwat pointed out that all nations, including China, Russia and America, made no secret of stretching their land by harboring expansionist tendencies in the national interest — and to be stronger nations.”….”It is only this country where her own citizens live like refugees away from their homeland,” he said with respect to the Kashmiri Pandits. “Land,” he said, “is an important factor in today’s geo-politics.”

As quoted in the aforementioned Firstpost article, Modi’s response to the Muslim editor’s question about the RSS’ modern-day version of Lebensraum was to attack the editor himself, as follows:

”People who think of empire are talking of Akhand Bharat. In Pakistan, there is a movement to unite Pakistan, India and Bangladesh so that Muslims are in a majority. Your mouths are watering these days at the prospect of creating a Muslim-majority nation in the name of Akhand Bharat. And getting all Muslims together, with the Indian Muslims at their head, to create strife. Isn’t this a dream of yours?”

(h) As Prime Minister, Modi is currently continuing to centralise power and tighten his grip on the control of information by banning his entire Cabinet along with other senior officials from giving interviews to journalists. The only authorised sources of information from Modi’s regime will be official government spokespeople and Modi’s own Twitter account. (Modi has also recently warned his team about potential “sting operations”). This will effectively be a continuation of Modi’s policy when he was Chief Minister of Gujarat: members of his cabinet were not allowed to speak to journalists unless they had obtained prior permission from Modi, and customary press conferences following state government Cabinet meetings were either held by spokesmen or not even held at all (in other Indian states, such briefings are normally held by ministers).

12. NARENDRA MODI’S BEHAVIOUR TOWARDS CRITICAL INDIAN BUSINESS LEADERS:

As documented by Caravan here, Narendra Modi was present during a major conference of Indian business leaders in April 2002, when a forceful speech by a senior executive condemning the suffering of Muslims in Gujarat received a standing ovation and multiple famous industrialists explicitly questioned Modi’s own attitudes. In response, while on stage Modi furiously ranted: “You and your pseudo-secular friends can come to Gujarat if you want an answer. Talk to my people. Gujarat is the most peaceful state in the country.” Modi then turned to two of the most outspoken industrialists [Godrej and Bajaj; South Asian readers in particular will be familiar with them] and said, “Others have vested interest in maligning Gujarat. What is your interest ?”

After Modi returned to Gujarat, within a few days multiple Gujarati businessmen close to Modi retaliated against his corporate critics by setting up a rival organisation, involving 100 companies threatening to withdraw from the previous business group, claiming that the latter had “humiliated and insulted Modi and all Gujaratis”. A press statement was issued, swearing by the pride of Gujaratis, and demanding that the Gujarat chapter of the original business group should resign for “failing to protect the interests of the state”. In New Delhi, the BJP also began to limit the latter’s access to government ministers, thereby jeopardising one of the group’s primary roles as a lobbying organisation.

13. RSS TERRORISTS AND FALSE-FLAG ATTACKS IN INDIA:

There appear to be some internal clashes between India’s Supreme Court & National Investigations Agency and Narendra Modi’s incoming regime:

(a) A few days before the election results, the NIA publicly released a list of “Hindu Nationalist” terrorists. Details via India Today here; as the article also confirms, every single person on that list is a member of the RSS. The list includes senior RSS leader Swami Aseemanand; Modi is his most prominent political patron. As previously discussed on Loonwatch and in much more detail in Caravan magazine, Aseemanand was responsible for anti-Christian riots involving mass-murder, forced conversions to Hinduism, the destruction of dozens of churches, and the rape of nuns. Aseemanand is also on record as admitting that the RSS leadership personally authorised a series of terrorist attacks across India, deliberately targeting innocent Muslims for mass-murder.

(b) India’s Supreme Court subsequently made statements admonishing Modi’s conduct during investigations of other major terrorist attacks; one of these Supreme Court investigations in particular has confirmed that Gujarat’s state police deliberately framed innocent Muslims. Considering that the police were under the overall jurisdiction of Modi’s right-hand-man & fellow RSS member Amit Shah (Gujarat’s Home Minister at the time), Modi himself is now directly implicated in framing Muslims for what increasingly appear to be “false-flag” terrorist attacks, including the Godhra train attack in 2002 (the latter ostensibly triggered the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat). Details via the Indian Express here and here, via Firstpost here, and via the Times of India here.

(c) This backs up a BBC article from 2002: At the time, the BBC had obtained a leaked report from British officials in India, which stated that the Gujarat riots were “ethnic cleansing”, state-sponsored, planned months in advance, and that amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims would be impossible while Modi is in power.

14. HINDU RELIGIOUS LEADERS CONDEMN NARENDRA MODI:

In May 2014, the religious leaders at several major traditional Hindu monasteries belonging to the Advaita school of Hindu philosophy refused to endorse Narendra Modi’s candidacy for Prime Minister. Details via the Hindustan Times here. One of the Hindu leaders stated: “For me Modi is a grave sinner who has committed the highest sin in Hinduism, which is murder. He has blood on his hands and face.” The monasteries are in Dwarka and Puri in India, two of the seven holiest cities for Hindus. Dwarka itself is in Gujarat.

15. VARANASI: SUPPORT FOR NARENDRA MODI FROM THE LOCAL RSS AND BRAHMIN PRIESTS:

In conjunction with his campaign to become India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi also successfully campaigned to be the minister of Varanasi/Banares, Hinduism’s most important holy city. Modi’s election campaign was heavily supported by both the RSS in Varanasi and Brahmin priests at the city’s primary Hindu temple. Modi also publicly performed religious rituals in the area after his election victory (as filmed by both domestic and international news media).

(a) During the campaign, one of the local RSS leaders told journalists:

“We can all see it now, that it is happening — the change is happening…..What we believe is that we are the most advanced race in the entire world. We will convert the whole world into the Aryan race: So we have decided.”

The RSS is also planning to ban academic books that contradict the organisation’s own distorted claims about Hinduism, change Indian history books that depict Mughal emperors such as Akbar in a positive light, and so on.

Details via the New York Times here.

(b) Similarly, one of the aforementioned Brahmin priests told journalists that he “lamented the fact that all of India’s Muslims had not been sent to Pakistan in 1947; he spoke of the need, when Modi came to power, of one decisive riot that would show Muslims their place”. Details via OPEN magazine here.

(c) Regarding the India-wide campaign as a whole, extensive details on the highly-organised joint strategic coordination between Modi’s team and the RSS are available via NDTV here. This includes RSS-backed think-tanks who have organised meetings between Modi and Indian business leaders.

16. GROUPS LOBBYING FOR NARENDRA MODI IN THE WEST:

In April 2014, The Economic Times published an article exposing the organisations & individuals heavily involved in publicly whitewashing Narendra Modi’s image here in the West, especially the downplaying of Modi’s Nazism/RSS connection and extremist “Hindu Nationalist” agenda. Groups in the US have been particularly active in lobbying on Modi’s behalf, as follows:

(a) United States: Vivekananda International Foundation (VIF), a right-wing think-tank; former US Ambassador to India Robert Blackwill (now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations); the Washington-based lobbying giant APCO Worldwide (which already has a history of assisting dictators accused of major crimes against humanity); Indian Americans for Freedom; the RSS-linked Hindu American Foundation (HAF); and the US India Political Action Committee (USINPAC). Coordinating these efforts is the BJP’s Overseas Affairs cell and Overseas Friends of BJP.

(b) United Kingdom: According to the Economic Times article, “a major behind-the-scenes operator in these efforts has been UK-based lawyer Manoj Ladwa. Ladwa, who hails from Porbandar in Gujarat and is also the convener of Europe India Chambers of Commerce, is credited by party insiders as having laid much of the groundwork that led to the UK’s change of heart about Modi”. Ladwa was present in India on the day of the election results and was interviewed by NDTV journalist Barkha Dutt.

(c) As confirmed by the Financial Times, the UK’s Channel 4 News, Outlook India, the human rights group Awaaz, Frontline, and most recently by The Independent and Scroll.in, the RSS has been using front organisations in the US and UK to promote its propaganda in those countries and simultaneously raise millions of dollars to fund its activities in India.

Readers here in the West may be interested to know that multiple British citizens of Indian origin were also murdered by the rioters; a number of British Members of Parliament have correspondingly confirmed their support for prosecuting Modi and continuing to ban him from the UK “until he has been brought to account for his actions in fomenting racial and religious violence and bigotry”.

A case can be made for simultaneously prosecuting US and UK-based organisations & individuals if they are actually aware that Modi is indeed guilty of the various allegations regarding the Gujarat 2002 riots and yet are politically lobbying on Modi’s behalf, especially if they are also knowingly downplaying the RSS’ real ideology and any associated hidden agenda which Modi may have. Such US and UK-based organisations & individuals should also be prosecuted if Modi is responsible for any future atrocities and/or religious persecution in India.

17. US AND UK GOVERNMENTS’ PUBLIC RESPONSE TO NARENDRA MODI’S ELECTION VICTORY:

Prior to the election results, the US State Department publicly announced that the Obama Administration would “work very closely” with Modi if he won the election, including meetings in the US; it also mentioned that “there is more room to keep growing” what is now nearly $100 billion of India-US trade. (As confirmed by The Hindu, high-level trade meetings are already being planned, and the US-India Business Council has stated that bilateral trade could reach $500 billion over the next decade). Senior Western politicians including US President Barack Obama, British Prime Minister David Cameron and British opposition leader Ed Miliband have subsequently publicly congratulated Modi. President Obama and PM David Cameron have also invited Modi to visit Washington and London respectively (details via ABC News here, The Guardian here and Reuters here.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time after World War Two that the White House and Downing Street have extended congratulations & invitations to any foreign leaders ideologically affiliated with Nazism (it is the equivalent of rolling out the red carpet for a senior member of Golden Dawn if he had risen to power in Greece). However, it is presently unclear if Western governments have simultaneously stipulated “good behaviour” conditions for any amicable diplomatic and business relations with Modi’s regime, particularly if the former are actually pursuing a policy of “containment”. It is also presently unclear if the American and British administrations are aware of the full nature of the regime’s ideological background, especially considering the lobbying & whitewashing activities of the various groups discussed in #16.

18. DIRECT LINKS BETWEEN NARENDRA MODI & RSS AND US “TEA PARTY”:

VICE magazine has made a series of astonishing claims about extensive recent involvement between America’s “Tea Party” Republican politicians (including Newt Gingrich) and Narendra Modi. The article includes video footage. It also claims that RSS leader Mohan Bhagwat has been involved in these meetings. Extensive details here.

19. DIRECT LINKS BETWEEN NARENDRA MODI AND SILICON VALLEY:

Apparently Narendra Modi has also been heavily involved with senior figures & organisations in Silicon Valley, including attempts by the latter to rig India’s recent election. Meetings between Modi and major Wall Street banks to discuss investment in India were also arranged. Extensive details here.

20. BJP “STRATEGIC ACTION COMMITTEE” CHAIRMAN SUBRAMANIAN SWAMY: “UNITE THE HINDUS UNDER ONE FLAG AND DIVIDE THE MUSLIMS”:

Subramanian Swamy has most recently been the head of the BJP’s Strategic Action Committee for the 2014 elections; he was appointed by Rajnath Singh, now India’s Home Minister. Swamy is on record as stating that the BJP’s overall election campaign strategy should be “Unite the Hindus under one flag and divide the Muslims”.

Swamy used to give lectures on economics at Harvard University, but he was effectively fired in 2011 after he wrote a virulently anti-Muslim and anti-Christian article for an Indian news website. Swami made a series of strawman claims about the alleged “goals” of what he collectively describes as “Islamic terrorism” along with the alleged behaviour of Indian Muslims, and proposed a series of “solutions” targeting Indian non-Hindus en masse (especially Muslims and Christians) along with neighbouring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Regular readers will notice that many of Swamy’s statements are identical to the RSS’ core ideology, particularly the propaganda writings of the Hitler-supporting RSS co-founder M.S. Golwalkar. Swamy’s article is available online in full here. Key extracts:

Muslims, though a minority in India, still have fanatics who dare to lead violent attacks against Hindus. Other Muslims of India just lump it, sulk or rejoice….[…]…. Muslims cannot be divided into ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ because the former just capitulate when confronted.

…..Therefore we need today a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. In this response, Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindu. That they do, I will not believe, unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors are Hindus…..But still, if any Muslim does so acknowledge his or her Hindu legacy, then we Hindus can accept him or her as a part of the Brihad Hindu Samaj, which is Hindustan. India that is Bharat that is Hindustan is a nation of Hindus and others whose ancestors are Hindus. Even Parsis and Jews in India have Hindu ancestors. Others, who refuse to so acknowledge or those foreigners who become Indian citizens by registration can remain in India, but should not have voting rights (which means they cannot be elected representatives).

[…..]

Goal 1: Overawe India on Kashmir.

Strategy: Remove Article 370, and re-settle ex-servicemen in the Valley. Create Panun Kashmir for Hindu Pandit community. Look or create opportunity to take over PoK [Pakistan-occupied Kashmir]. If Pakistan continues to back terrorists, assist the Baluchis and Sindhis to struggle for independence.

Goal 2: Blast our temples and kill Hindu devotees.

Strategy: Remove the [Mughal-era mosque] masjid in Kashi Vishwanath temple complex [in Varanasi], and 300 others in other sites as a tit-for-tat.

Goal 3: Make India into Darul Islam.

Strategy: Implement Uniform Civil Code, make Sanskrit learning compulsory and singing of Vande Mataram mandatory, and declare India as Hindu Rashtra [Hindu State] in which only those non-Hindus can vote if they proudly acknowledge that their ancestors are Hindus. Re-name India as Hindustan as a nation of Hindus and those whose ancestors are Hindus.

Goal 4: Change India’s demography by illegal immigration, conversion, and refusal to adopt family planning.

Strategy: Enact a national law prohibiting conversion from Hindu religion to any other religion. Re-conversion will not be banned. Declare caste is not birth-based but code of discipline based. Welcome non-Hindus to re-convert to the caste of their choice provided they adhere to the code of discipline. Annex land from Bangladesh in proportion to the illegal migrants from that country staying in India. At present, northern one-third from Sylhet to Khulna can be annexed to re-settle the illegal migrants.

Goal 5: Denigrate Hinduism through vulgar writings and preaching in mosques, madrassas, and churches to create loss of self-respect amongst Hindus and make them fit for capitulation.

Strategy: Propagate the development of a Hindu mindset (see my new book Hindutva and National Renaissance, Haranand, 2010).

CNN-IBN journalist Karan Thapar subsequently interviewed Subramanian Swamy and meticulously challenged him about the statements in his article; video footage and an English transcript of the full interview is available via CNN-IBN here. It is worth reading in full, not least because of Swamy’s own behaviour and ridiculous “arguments” during the interview. Also note that Swamy made the following claims: (a) he was “proud” of his views, (b) his overall agenda explicitly targets Christians as well as Muslims, and (c) he has “already won over the RSS heart long ago”.

Incidentally, many readers will notice that Modi’s regime has already started the process of implementing a number of the “strategies” mentioned above.

Subramanian Swamy’s personal Twitter account is full of similar nonsense. Furthermore, Swamy is also now on record as claiming that “being gay is a mental disorder” and subsequently addressing homophobic insults to people who objected to his statements.

Despite the abhorrent nature of Swamy’s views, the Wall Street Journal has recently continued to give him a platform, albeit about economic issues, without publicly disclosing any of the information above.

21. NARENDRA MODI AND SHIV SENA’S BAL THACKERAY:

The BJP’s oldest ally is the Far-Right Maharashtrian organisation “Shiv Sena” (“Army of Shiva” or “Army of God”), which is now also a political party; approximately 80% of Shiv Sena politicians currently have criminal charges against them, the largest percentage of any Indian political party. The Shiv Sena has repeatedly been involved in fomenting sectarian conflict and violence, first targeting Gujaratis and South Indians, and subsequently Muslims (most notoriously during the 1992-1993 Bombay riots).

According to a formal judicial investigation in India, “the immediate causes of the Bombay Riots were: (a) the demolition of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya [the Shiv Sena was one of the Hindu Nationalist groups responsible for its destruction], (b) the aggravation of Muslim sentiments by the Hindus with their celebration rallies and (c) the insensitive and harsh approach of the police while handling the protesting mobs which initially were not violent.” The investigation also confirmed that writings in the Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna (“Confrontation”) played a major role in inciting sectarian conflict and anti-Muslim violence during the riots; Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray himself had repeatedly written inflammatory polemics in Saamna, describing “what should be done to the Muslims”.

The Shiv Sena has repeatedly been responsible for threats and violence targeting Sikhs too; furthermore, the organisation has also recently been agitating against migrants from the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

During the recent election campaign, minutes before Narendra Modi arrived at a rally, a Shiv Sena leader told the large assembled crowd that “Narendra Modi will destroy Pakistan within 6 months if he comes to power”, although the organisation subsequently distanced itself from his statements.

It turns out that Narendra Modi himself was directly involved with the Shiv Sena’s late leader, the Hitler-idolising Bal Thackeray (1926-2012); one of the photos in the image at the top of this article shows Modi bowing to Thackeray, and the two men even jointly addressed large rallies where Thackeray made virulently anti-Muslim statements to the audience.

Examples of Thackeray’s statements are available as follows:

(a) Via the Indian Express: In 2007, Thackeray jointly addressed a rally alongside Narendra Modi. During Thackeray’s 20-minute speech, he said that his dream was to create “a Hindustan of the Hindus” so that “we can bring Islam in this country down to its knees”.

(b) Via India Today: In 1984, Thackeray gave an interview in which he stated:

”[Muslims] are spreading like a cancer and should be operated on like a cancer. The…country should be saved from the Muslims and the police should support them [Hindu Maha Sangh] in their struggle just like the police in Punjab were sympathetic to the Khalistanis.”

(c) Via The Daily Beast and the Times of India: In 1992, just weeks before the Bombay riots erupted, Thackeray stated:

“If you take [Hitler’s autobiography] Mein Kampf and if you remove the word Jew and put in the word Muslim, that is what I believe in.”

In 1993, Thackeray gave an interview to TIME magazine in which he stated:

“There is nothing wrong if [Indian] Muslims are treated as Jews were in Nazi Germany”.

(d) Via CNN-IBN: In 2008, Thackeray promoted “Hindu terrorism” involving Hindu “suicide bomb squads to protect India and Hindus”.

(e) Via NDTV: Accused of being dictatorial and a demagogue, Thackeray stated:

“I am a great admirer of Hitler, and I am not ashamed to say so ! I do not say that I agree with all the methods he employed, but he was a wonderful organiser and orator, and I feel that he and I have several things in common.….What India really needs is a dictator who will rule benevolently, but with an iron hand.”

(f) Via the New India Press: Thackeray is on record as making the following statements:

“Yes, I am a dictator. It is a Hitler that is needed in India today.’’

[After Thackeray was asked in a television programme whether he wanted to be the Hitler of Bombay] ”Do not underestimate me, I am [the Hitler] of the whole of Maharashtra and want to be of whole of India.’’

(g) Via the New York Times: The article quotes Thackeray describing himself as the “Hitler of Bombay”. The article also includes multiple extracts from previous NYT articles describing Thackeray and the Shiv Sena’s role in sectarian conflict and particularly anti-Muslim carnage.

(h) Via Outlook India: Includes a 1996 video interview of Thackeray describing himself as “the Hitler of Maharashtra”, denigrating democracy and praising dictatorship.

(i) Via Outlook India: English transcript of Thackeray’s 1996 interview when he repeatedly denigrated democracy.

(j) Via TIME magazine: In 1993, Thackeray stated: “If a holy war is to begin because of me, so be it”.

22. NARENDRA MODI AND SAVARKAR, FOUNDER OF “HINDU NATIONALISM”:

Self-described “Hindu Nationalist” Narendra Modi has repeatedly praised V.D. Savarkar (1883-1966), most recently tweeting: “We remember and salute his tireless efforts towards the regeneration of our motherland” and adding “Veer Savarkar is remembered as a prolific writer, thinker, poet and a social reformer. Leaving for parliament to pay tributes to Veer Savarkar.” Around the same time last year (the anniversary of Savarkar’s birth), Modi described Savarkar as a “heroic man”, a “worshipper of weapons” and a “worshipper of sacred texts”. An article on Modi’s own website also includes audio footage of a speech of Modi “going back almost two decades, where he talks about the phenomenon Veer Savarkar was”.

Savarkar coined the term “Hinduvta”, ie. Hindu Nationalism. He wrote numerous propaganda texts promoting this ideology and has been one of its most influential figures. Savarkar was an atheist, which possibly explains why “Hindu Nationalism” is stripped of Hinduism’s admirable pluralistic religious ideals and ethical principles.

Savarkar is on record as repeatedly endorsing Hitler, the Nazis and their treatment of religious minorities. Quoting directly from Savarkar’s own propaganda writings and speeches, numerous examples of his statements were comprehensively documented in the previous article in this series. In summary:

(a) Savarkar praised Hitler, Nazism and Fascism;
(b) Savarkar praised expansionist Nazi Germany and multiple aspects of Nazi ideology;
(c) Savarkar made statements duplicating the Nazi concept of a “Fatherland”;
(d) Savarkar explicitly compared Indian Hindus and Muslims to Germans and Jews;
(e) Savarkar explicitly stated that Indian Muslims should be treated the way Nazis treated German Jews;
(f) Savarkar explicitly advocated the “Two Nation Theory” and reiterated the parallels with Germany and Jews;
(g) Savarkar denigrated historical Hindu warrior codes of chivalry towards women and explicitly stated that Hindu men should rape Muslim women;
(h) Savarkar continued denigrating historical Hindu chivalry towards Muslim women and explicitly stated that Muslim women should be forcibly converted to Hinduism;
(i) Savarkar denigrated Buddhism’s principle of universal brotherhood;
(j) Savarkar promoted collaboration with the British colonial authorities and refused to support the mainstream Indian independence movement;
(k) Savarkar was one of the main ringleaders of the cabal that murdered Mahatma Gandhi, as confirmed by a formal judicial investigation in India during the 1960s.

23. NARENDRA MODI’S ELECTION MANIFESTO AND INDIAN NON-HINDUS:

The BJP’s 2014 election manifesto discussed Indian civilisation from ancient times to the modern period, explicitly referring to various examples in glowing terms, but it completely avoided mentioning anything from the 12th century to the 18th century (as the historian William Dalrymple also recently noted in the New Statesman). The entire era was eradicated from the manifesto’s sweeping historical summary, as though Muslims didn’t even exist, let alone contribute anything positive to Indian culture and civilisation during that extensive period.

Furthermore, the manifesto explicitly stated that persecuted Hindus overseas would be welcome to seek refuge in India, but no mention was made of similar privileges for persecuted Indians overseas from other religious backgrounds — a fact that Narendra Modi increasingly tied himself up into knots to “explain” when Indian professional journalist Arnab Goswami questioned him about the matter prior to the election. Full English transcript of the interview via Outlook India here.

24. MAYA KODNANI: SENIOR MINISTER IN NARENDRA MODI’S GUJARAT STATE GOVERNMENT, MURDEROUS RINGLEADER DURING 2002 RIOTS:

Maya Kodnani, a qualified medical doctor with a further diploma in Gynaecology and Obstetrics, was a senior minister in Narendra Modi’s Gujarat state government until 2009 (the perverse irony of Kodnani’s specific medical qualifications will become clear to readers shortly). In 2012, Kodnani was convicted of orchestrating one of the main massacres during the Gujarat 2002 riots. Along with 31 other perpetrators, Kodnani was found guilty of “murder, attempt to murder, conspiracy, spreading enmity and communal [sectarian] hatred and unlawful assembly”. Survivors and witnesses had repeatedly identified Kodnani as one of the ringleaders; she had even driven around and exhorted rioters to kill as many people as possible, and was seen handing out swords to Hindus, again exhorting them to kill Muslims. It is worth noting that Gujarat’s state police, under the primary jurisdiction of Modi’s right-hand-man Amit Shah, had initially refused to prosecute Kodnani, citing “lack of evidence”.

As documented in the English transcript via Outlook India here, Arnab Goswami, the Indian professional journalist mentioned in #23, also recently questioned Modi about the issue of Maya Kodnani. Modi worked closely with her, appointing Kodnani as “Minister for Women and Child Development” in 2007 (bear in mind that Kodnani was one of the ringleaders of a riot that had included mass rapes). There are only two plausible explanations: Either Kodnani managed to successfully trick Modi for years, or Modi approved of her actions during the 2002 riots (possibly including being complicit himself). Modi became noticeably aggressive and evasive when the journalist attempted to question him about Kodnani, including excusing his own promotion of Kodnani to the state Cabinet by repeatedly insisting that “she was not facing any charges at the time”, and even accusing the journalist of having “so much filth on [his] mind”.

As Firstpost observes, not only did Modi make Kodnani a senior minister in 2007 despite the fact that it was already well-known that she had been one of the ringleaders of the mass-murdering, mass-raping riot in February 2002, but Modi had even given Kodnani the ticket to run for election in that very same riot-ravaged constituency in December 2002.

25. “TEN MORE YEARS”:

Narendra Modi is now on record as claiming that it will take “10 years” for him to “transform India”. As detailed in #7 above, the RSS is planning to consolidate and expand its position in India for the next 50 years at the very least.

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FURTHER INFORMATION:

1. I will repeat my statements from the previous two articles in this series: The information in this article should not be exploited by anyone to denigrate India & Indians in general, Hindus en masse or the religion of Hinduism as a whole; both as a Sikh and as an individual, I have a zero-tolerance policy towards racial & religious bigotry, regardless of the source and regardless of the target.

2. Senior academics such as Princeton University’s Dr Christophe Jaffrelot (who has written extensively about “Hindutva”/”Hindu Nationalism” and the RSS) have stated that Narendra Modi will switch to the extremist Hindu Nationalism agenda as “Plan B” if his alleged “development” plans ultimately fail.

Hypothetically, it is also possible that Modi and the RSS will not necessarily wait that long if they think they can get away with it domestically and internationally — particularly if (a) they decide to engineer some kind of “incident” in order to justify their subsequent actions [see #13 in the main article above, regarding the extremely incriminating information recently released by India’s Supreme Court and National Investigations Agency], or (b) there is a genuine Islamist terrorist attack and/or sectarian violence in India and/or a deterioration in relations with Pakistan which they can exploit.

Hopefully none of these events will occur.

Realpolitik may force Modi to moderate his stance and restrain his actions now that he is actually Prime Minister (especially due to foreign trade/diplomatic ties and international scrutiny). Nevertheless, legitimate concerns will remain if Modi does not resign from the RSS, denounce the organisation and condemn its ideology; the feasibility of this is of course complicated by the fact that the BJP openly describes the RSS as its “ideological fountainhead”.

3. The RSS, Bal Thackeray and Hindu Nationalists’ admiration for Hitler and Nazism is particularly ironic (not to mention extremely stupid) considering what the racist white supremacist Hitler actually thought of Indians, including the British colonial rule of India.

Furthermore, Narendra Modi’s Gujarat state government was exposed as enthusiastically promoting Hitler in school textbooks, including the glorification of Nazism.

Indian readers who are unaware of the full historical facts or (for whatever reason) misguidedly admire Hitler are very strongly advised to read Cambridge Professor Sir Richard J. Evans’ acclaimed Third Reich trilogy: The Coming of the Third Reich, The Third Reich in Power, and The Third Reich at War. Professor Evans is one of the world’s leading experts on the period; his historical trilogy is widely (and justifiably) regarded as the best, most comprehensive overview of Hitler, Nazism, the Third Reich and the Holocaust ever written. The books’ focus on the dangers of dictatorship & extreme nationalism should prove extremely educational, especially the focus on the consequences of large-scale cultural and institutional bigotry towards (and ultimately persecution of) religious minorities; the moral implications for members of majority populations who are either indifferent or actively complicit should also prove enlightening.

4. For interested readers and for future reference, contact details for the International Criminal Court at The Hague are available here. Details on atrocities which the ICC defines as crimes against humanity are available here. It is also worth noting that the United Nations Security Council has adopted multiple resolutions during the past decade in which it has reaffirmed its responsibility to protect people from genocide, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity; furthermore, one of these resolutions also states that rape and other forms of sexual violence can constitute crimes against humanity or “a constitutive act with respect to genocide”.

5. The Twitter address of US President Barack Obama is @BarackObama. President Obama also uses the official White House twitter account: @WhiteHouse.

The Twitter address of British Prime Minister David Cameron is @Number10gov.

6. Contact details for the US Department of State are available here. The US Department of State’s Twitter address is @StateDept.

7. Contact details for US Secretary of State John Kerry are available here. John Kerry’s Twitter address is @JohnKerry.

8. Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison and Republican Congressman Joe Pitts have been leading American bipartisan efforts to oppose Narendra Modi. They have jointly introduced a bipartisan Congressional resolution urging the US Government to continue denying a visa to Modi on the grounds of religious freedom violations. They have also jointly introduced a bipartisan Congressional resolution on the protection of religious minorities in India, which includes calls for specific actions to be taken by the US State Department; the complete text of the resolution is available in PDF form online here.

Congressman Keith Ellison’s Twitter address is @keithellison. Congressman Joe Pitts’s Twitter address is @RepJoePitts.

9. Contact details for the British Government’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office are available here. The FCO’s Twitter address is @foreignoffice.

10. The Twitter address of Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, Senior Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Minister for Faith and Communities, is @SayeedaWarsi.

11. Contact details for the British Government’s Home Office are available here. The Home Office’s Twitter address is @ukhomeoffice.

12. The Twitter address of Keith Vaz, Chairman of the British Government’s Home Affairs Select Committee, is @Keith_VazMP.