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New Delhi watches warily as Doha-based Islamist scholar-activist Yusuf al-Qaradawi emerges as peace broker

Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a Doha-based Islamist scholar who once called on his followers to back jihadist groups in Jammu and Kashmir, has emerged as a key mediator in secret talks between the U.S. and the Taliban, government sources have told The Hindu.

In 2009, Mr. al-Qaradawi had issued a fatwa, or religious edict, asserting that “the Kashmiris were properly fighting jihad against the Indian army.” The jihad was legitimate, he argued, since mujahideen groups sought to create an Islamic state. Therefore, the edict concluded, it was incumbent on all Muslims to help Kashmiris gain their “freedom from Indian aggression.”

New Delhi, Indian diplomatic sources said, has been warily watching Mr. al-Qaradawi’s emergence as peace broker — fearful that his growing influence could help regional jihadist groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad find new sanctuaries in a rapidly changing West Asia or a future Afghan regime which includes the Taliban.

Earlier this month, the sources said, Mr. al-Qaradawi helped draw a road map for a deal between the Taliban and the United States, aimed at giving the superpower a face-saving political settlement ahead of its planned withdrawal from Afghanistan which is due to begin in 2014.

In return for the release of prisoners still held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay, the lifting of United Nations sanctions on its leadership and its recognition as a legitimate political group, the Taliban was expected to agree to sever its links to transnational organisations like al-Qaeda, end violence and eventually share power with the Afghan government.

Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s President, recalled his country’s envoy to Qatar after The Hindu broke news that negotiations to open a Taliban office had reached an advanced stage — angered, reports said, at the prospect of a deal that would have given Taliban legitimacy at a time when hardliners in its ranks are carrying out a lethal campaign targeting regime supporters. However, Kabul on Tuesday announced it would accept a Taliban liaison office in Doha — as long as the talks were “Afghan-led.”

Evidence that hardliners have increasing influence over Taliban decision-making, intelligence sources say, has been mounting. Earlier this year, for example, Sheikh Muhammad Aminullah — who was placed on a United Nations watchlist in 2009 for aiding acts of terrorism — was given command of its Peshawar shura, or command council. Born in 1973, Mr. Aminullah represents a new generation of Taliban commanders ideologically committed to al-Qaeda’s vision.

His predecessor, Maulvi Abdul Kabir, had only a peripheral military role, and was considered a key player in secret peace talks with the Afghan government and the United States.

Islamists vs. jihadists

Egyptian-born Mr. al-Qaradawi is seen by both the United States and the Taliban traditionalists as an ally in the battle against the growing influence of this new generation of commanders. Expelled from his homeland for his Islamist views, he has emerged over the last year as ideological pole star of the Muslim Brotherhood — now West Asia’s most influential political movement.

In 1993, Mr. al-Qaradawi issued a landmark edict endorsing democratic pluralism; the Muslim Brotherhood later cast its embrace of electoral politics in Egypt and elsewhere as a form of da’wa, or proselytising missionary work. Even though Mr. al-Qaradawi said he remained committed to “the spread of Islam until it conquers the entire world,” he argued this could be achieved peacefully.

He condemned 9/11 and, in September, 2005, described the Iraqi jihadist Abu Musa’ab al-Zarqawi as a “criminal.” In a 2009 book, he defended armed jihad under specific conditions — Kashmir, Iraq and, later, Libya were among those cases he endorsed — but lashed out at al-Qaeda for a “mad declaration of war on the whole world.”

Mr. al-Qaradawi explained his logic thus to Der Spiegel: “The [Muslim Brotherhood] have tried [jihad], but [jihad] has not been helpful, and we have not gained anything out of [jihad] other than detention, suffering, and victimisation.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s decision to embrace electoral politics incensed al-Qaeda. In 2008, al-Qaeda’s now-chief Ayman al-Zawahiri lashed out at the Muslim Brotherhood for accepting the Egyptian constitution, rather than God’s word, as a source of law — a fundamental betrayal, he claimed, of the precepts of Islam. In many countries, Brotherhood cadre clashed with salafi-jihadist groups sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

The west’s embrace of Mr. al-Qaradawi for its Afghan negotiations marks the restoration of an old, but little-known, relationship. Key Brotherhood leaders like Said Ramadan, the historian Ian Johnson has shown, were cultivated by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency for anti-communist operations —along with several central and west Asian Islamists who fought with German fascist forces against the Soviet Union in 1941-1945.

Expelled by Egypt’s socialist rulers for his neo-fundamentalist views, Dr. Ramadan received a warm reception — and a radio programme — when he landed in Pakistan in 1948.

The Pakistani-Canadian scholar Tarek Fatah said Dr. Ramadan’s work “was instrumental in turning a secular Muslim country into a hotbed of Islamic extremism.” Dr. Ramadan also visited the White House in 1953, where he met with President Dwight Eisenhower.

By Praveen Swami

29 December 2011

@ The Hindu

“Haha, Ortega doesn’t know what he’s talking about, neither does Evo, they don’t know anything about crime, there are reports out there that know more,” said a journalist from Bloomberg to his colleague. The journalist was sitting next to me in the press tent set up outside the CELAC plenary sessions in the Patio de Honor of the Bolivarian Militia University of Venezuela. He was watching Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega on one of the various large screens broadcasting the summit live, working at one of 60 laptops provided by the Venezuelan government.

And right there were two things already that made the CELAC different to other regional blocs; inclusiveness- that alternative journalists like us from Venezuealanslysis.com, as well as many others, who normally would have been outside the meeting protesting, were instead involved in it and sitting next to naive and bigoted mainstream journalists such as the man from Bloomberg, and the fact that the whole summit was broadcast live- not just to journalists, but around Venezuela and on the internet. Many Venezuelans at home followed the meeting closely, because unlike the OAS or APEC, they felt that the CELAC summit had to do with them, and that it was important.

Nothing like the OAS

“And the president of the United States is more the president of my country / than the president of my country,” wrote Roque Dalton in a poem about the OAS.

Initiated eight months after the coup in Honduras, the absence of the US and Canada, the only countries in the Americas not in the CELAC, is nothing but deliberate. The CELAC is a conscious and collective effort to combat US economic, political, military, and cultural domination in the region.

As Cuban president Raul Castro said on the first day of the summit, “It would be a serious mistake to not recognise that Latin America and the Caribbean have changed, that we can’t be treated as we were in the past. We have had to work hard to confront the burden of colonialism and neo-colonialism, and one can expect a firm regional determination to defend the independence we have reached.”

“The OAS is a …reflection of the 50s and 60s, when it was an instrument to promote the colonialist policy of Washington…that’s why no one talks about the OAS as something Latin American. It represents the past rather that the future,” wrote James Petras.

During the summit, many heads of state echoed similar sentiments, including the prime minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerrit, “CELAC can’t follow in the footsteps of blocs like the OAS and the UN,” he said, and Ortega agreed, “It’s a different Latin America today.”

Many of the heads of state talked about south-south cooperation and regional integration as something necessary, that hadn’t existed in the past. They also talked about solidarity, something that isn’t in the scope of organisations like the OAS.

While following the summit from the press tent, I interviewed Llafrancis Colina, director of Caracas based alternative television station Avila, and Augusto Melero, also with Avila. Molero explained, “The initiative taken by Venezuela for Latin American integration comes at a time when the vision of the world is changing, where there are occupations of Wall Street because the US and Europe haven’t been able to beat their economic crisis. In the CELAC we believe that cooperation will strengthen economic democracy.”

The CELAC’s formally stated objective is to deepen integration and political, social, economic, and cultural unity and to promote sustainable development. That is, rather than a fiesta of free trade deals and luxurious feasts for businessmen or women as is standard fare for regional blocs, CELAC, with the influence of a range of left wing presidents such as Chavez, Morales, and Correa, is about cooperation, social justice, and benefiting the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.

“This summit has been more humane, there’s a position of respect for people’s self determination,” said Melero.

“In the summit itself, there’s a feeling of camaraderie between the different countries, it goes beyond diplomacy. There’s the feeling that, despite having different political perspectives, the presidents can sit down and arrive at agreements, there’s a real intention to solve problems, to work together. The interests of CELAC go beyond the individual interests of each country. For example, the European Union, it’s just about politics and economy, but here with CELAC there’s a cultural aspect, a social one, it’s not just economic,” Melero explained.

One example of that was the proposal by Rafael Correa at the summit for an inter-American system to defend human rights, without the contradictions, hypocrisy, and imperialist arrogance of human rights “reports” that come out of U.S backed organisations about the rest of the world’s human rights situation.

“For the rights of the weak to have weight in the world, we have to unite, that is the fight, this isn’t a struggle for a utopia, it’s a struggle to be,” said Uruguay’s Jose ‘Pepe’ Mujica.

Venezuela has prioritised the CELAC and Latin American integration

The US government with its arrogant and deathly invasions and its paid coup puppeteers offers much less to the cause of Latin American integration than Venezuela does with its social policies and its numerous concrete efforts for Latin American collaboration such as Telesur, the Simon Bolivar satellite, the Radio del Sur, cross continental tourism, petroleum agreements, free eye surgery performed by its doctors in other countries in the region, and so on.

It’s therefore not surprising that it was Venezuela and Chavez who became the president pro tempore of CALC, the predecessor to CELAC, that Venezuela hosted the founding summit on the weekend, and has lead the push to make CELAC real and legitimate.

“For 12 years since Chavez came into government, we’ve been fighting for Latin American integration,” Colina from Avila told me, as she sipped Venezuelan coffee.

“The president [Hugo Chavez] has had a political policy of strengthening Venezuela’s relations with other countries, through bilateral agreements, talks, and ALBA and UNASUR,” Melero added.

“It’s an honour for Venezuela [to host the summit]… many talk about the dream of Bolivar [for a united Latin America] but few talk about it as a project, about actually putting it into practice. Today we’re laying down the first stone, a fundamental one for the unity of Latin America and for our real independence,” Chavez said.

The seriousness the Venezuelan government is giving CELAC was evident in the ongoing coverage and debate by its radio, television, and written media, the decoration of Caracas streets and parks with CELAC posters and photos of Latin America, and the high level of organisation of both the summit and for the media.

Media war comes subtly to CELAC

In the past, spoilt private media journalists have complained of the mediocre reception and non subservient type facilities in Venezuela. One freelance journalist once commented to me that it was a global standard that any restaurant, hotel, or company treat journalists well (ie free food, stay etc) in order to get a good write up, and that Venezuela was doing itself a disservice by not doing the same, and with its chaotic streets and transport. While I beg to differ on the ethics of that, it was important to the Venezuelan government last weekend that the CELAC was accessible to all media- private, public , and alternative, and it wanted that media to be able to easily cover the summit and thereby help the new organisation gain legitimacy and world wide recognition.

At VA we got a 22 page media guide about five days before the summit, then on the day, made our way in the train to La Rinconada station. In a parking lot nearby a tent was set up where journalists registered, and were taken to the summit. After going through security, we made our way to the press tent, with its free lunch and dinner, coffee, laptops and internet, phones, printers, 16 television monitors, and antennas.

The cooperation between progressive media, and the assistance and information provided by Venezuela’s ministry of communications was special. As Melero told me, “This summit has been premised on inclusion, for example, our media, Avila, an alternative youth station, hasn’t been excluded, we have the same opportunities [access to technology, permission to take photos etc] as other media, we sit next to CNN and talk to them.”

Nevertheless, the mainstream media, in a choir of scepticism, and despite the good hosting by Venezuela, predictably has either boycotted covering the CELAC (Christmas and sports are more important) or has focused on irrelevant angles of it, and purposefully missed the point.

Reuters dismissed CELAC, saying it was just another bunch of “initials” and criticising it for having “no budget nor a permanent secretary”, writing that “analysts” (who the article doesn’t bother to name) are “sceptical” about the bloc and suggesting that historical differences and different national agendas have always got in the way. Another Reuters article, this one in English, reduced the importance of CELAC to a “test” of Chavez’s health and wrote (lied) “The CELAC summit will give the theatrical but authoritarian 57-year-old a much-loved opportunity to grandstand at a big event, and bash the United States at the same time.”

Americas Society also used unnamed “detractors” who “question the usefulness of a potentially redundant forum in a region already plagued by a history of hobbled attempts at integration” and the Wall Street Journal followed what seems to be a private media trend, quoting more unnamed “analysts” that while the US should note the “latest indication of growing Latin American autonomy”, different strains of government could hamper the Community’s effectiveness.

“The media [when writing about Venezuela] always looks for the negative things, the errors and failures, in this case of the summit,” Colina said.

“The mainstream media has tried to minimise the impact of CELAC. They aren’t interested in a united block that goes against the interests of US imperialism, they did the same when they invented things that didn’t happen in the Green Square in Libya to justify the killing of Gaddafi, but in this case they are trivialising the CELAC or making it invisible,” Melero added.

CELAC not just for the suits

Apart from many people here following CELAC live or in the press and debating its outcomes, there were also other activities in Caracas related to the summit, such as art and museum exhibitions, cinema forums, a food festival including dishes from 16 of the CELAC countries, theatre, poetry, sculpture, and book stalls.

Colina expressed it well, “CELAC is not just about sitting at tables and talking, it’s not just for the government, but for all of us, for Latin America”.

The CELAC didn’t end in a million dollar feast in a five star hotel with 30,000 police outside the hotel arresting and repressing protesters, as is common with other regional blocs. No, it ended in a huge concert in the rain, and the sounds of Venezuela’s youth orchestra united with Calle 13’s hip hop,

Their words:

I’m Latin America / A people without legs that walks …

You can’t buy my life / My land isn’t for sale

Long live Latin America!

Introduction

After suffering major military and political defeats in bloody ground wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, failing to buttress long-standing clients in Yemen, Egypt and Tunisia and witnessing the disintegration of puppet regimes in Somalia and South Sudan, the Obama regime has learned nothing: Instead he has turned toward greater military confrontation with global powers, namely Russia and China. Obama has adopted a provocative offensive military strategy right on the frontiers of both China and Russia.

After going from defeat to defeat on the periphery of world power and not satisfied with running treasury-busting deficits in pursuit of empire building against economically weak countries, Obama has embraced a policy of encirclement and provocations against China, the world’s second largest economy and the US’s most important creditor, and Russia, the European Union’s principle oil and gas provider and the world’s second most powerful nuclear weapons power.

This paper addresses the Obama regime’s highly irrational and world-threatening escalation of imperial militarism. We examine the global military, economic and domestic political context that gives rise to these policies. We then examine the multiple points of conflict and intervention in which Washington is engaged, from Pakistan, Iran, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba and beyond. We will then analyze the rationale for military escalation against Russia and China as part of a new offensive moving beyond the Arab world (Syria, Libya) and in the face of the declining economic position of the EU and the US in the global economy. We will then outline the strategies of a declining empire, nurtured on perpetual wars, facing global economic decline, domestic discredit and a working population reeling from the long-term, large-scale dismantling of its basic social programs.

The Turn from Militarism in the Periphery to Global Military Confrontation

November 2011 is a moment of great historical import: Obama declared two major policy positions, both having tremendous strategic consequences affecting competing world powers.

Obama pronounced a policy of military encirclement of China based on stationing a maritime and aerial armada facing the Chinese coast – an overt policy designed to weaken and disrupt China’s access to raw materials and commercial and financial ties in Asia. Obama’s declaration that Asia is the priority region for US military expansion, base-building and economic alliances was directed against China, challenging Beijing in its own backyard. Obama’s iron fist policy statement, addressed to the Australian Parliament, was crystal clear in defining US imperial goals.

“Our enduring interests in the region [Asia Pacific] demands our enduring presence in this region … The United States is a Pacific power and we are here to stay … As we end today’s wars [i.e. the defeats and retreats from Iraq and Afghanistan]… I have directed my national security team to make our presence and missions in the Asia Pacific a top priority … As a result, reduction in US defense spending will not … come at the expense of the Asia Pacific” (CNN.com, Nov. 16, 2011).

The precise nature of what Obama called our “presence and mission” was underlined by the new military agreement with Australia to dispatch warships, warplanes and 2500 marines to the northern most city of Australia (Darwin) directed at China. Secretary of State Clinton has spent the better part of 2011 making highly provocative overtures to Asian countries that have maritime border conflicts with China. Clinton has forcibly injected the US into these disputes, encouraging and exacerbating the demands of Vietnam, Philippines, and Brunei in the South China Sea. Even more seriously, Washington is bolstering its military ties and sales with Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea, as well as increasing the presence of battleships, nuclear submarines and over flights of war planes along China’s coastal waters. In line with the policy of military encirclement and provocation, the Obama-Clinton regime is promoting Asian multi-lateral trade agreements that exclude China and privilege US multi-national corporations, bankers and exporters, dubbed the “Trans-Pacific Partnership”. It currently includes mostly smaller countries, but Obama has hopes of enticing Japan and Canada to join …

Obama’s presence at the APEC meeting of East Asian leader and his visit to Indonesia in November 2011 all revolve around efforts to secure US hegemony. Obama-Clinton hope to counter the relative decline of US economic links in the face of the geometrical growth of trade and investment ties between East Asia and China.

A most recent example of Obama-Clinton’s delusional, but destructive, efforts to deliberately disrupt China’s economic ties in Asia, is taking place in Myanmar (Burma). Clinton’s December 2011 visit to Myanmar was preceded by a decision by the Thein Sein regime to suspend a China Power Investment-funded dam project in the north of the country. According to official confidential documents released by WilkiLeaks the “Burmese NGO’s, which organized and led the campaign against the dam, were heavily funded by the US government”(Financial Times, Dec. 2, 2011, p. 2). This and other provocative activity and Clinton’s speeches condemning Chinese “tied aid” pale in comparison with the long-term, large-scale interests which link Myanmar with China. China is Myanmar’s biggest trading partner and investor, including six other dam projects. Chinese companies are building new highways and rail lines across the country, opening southwestern China up for Burmese products and China is constructing oil pipelines and ports. There is a powerful dynamic of mutual economic interests that will not be disturbed by one dispute (FT, December 2, 2011, p.2). Clinton’s critique of China’s billion-dollar investments in Myanmar’s infrastructure is one of the most bizarre in world history, coming in the aftermath of Washington’s brutal eight-year military presence in Iraq which destroyed $500 billion dollars of Iraqi infrastructure, according to Baghdad official estimates. Only a delusional administration could imagine that rhetorical flourishes, a three day visit and the bankrolling of an NGO is an adequate counter-weight to deep economic ties linking Myanmar to China. The same delusional posture underlies the entire repertoire of policies informing the Obama regime’s efforts to displace China’s predominant role in Asia.

While any one policy adopted by the Obama regime does not, in itself, present an immediate threat to peace, the cumulative impact of all these policy pronouncements and the projections of military power add up to an all out comprehensive effort to isolate, intimidate and degrade China’s rise as a regional and global power. Military encirclement and alliances, exclusion of China in proposed regional economic associations, partisan intervention in regional maritime disputes and positioning technologically advanced warplanes, are all aimed to undermine China’s competitiveness and to compensate for US economic inferiority via closed political and economic networks.

Clearly White House military and economic moves and US Congressional anti-China demagogy are aimed at weakening China’s trading position and forcing its business-minded leaders into privileging US banking and business interests over and above their own enterprises. Pushed to its limits, Obama’s prioritizing a big military push could lead to a catastrophic rupture in US-Chinese economic relations. This would result in dire consequences, especially but not exclusively, on the US economy and particularly its financial system. China holds over $1.5 trillion dollars in US debt, mainly Treasury Notes, and each year purchases from $200 to $300 billion in new issues, a vital source in financing the US deficit. If Obama provokes a serious threat to China’s security interests and Beijing is forced to respond, it will not be military but economic retaliation: the sell-off of a few hundred billion dollars in T-notes and the curtailment of new purchases of US debt. The US deficit will skyrocket, its credit ratings will descend to ‘junk’, and the financial system will ‘tremble onto collapse’. Interest rates to attract new buyers of US debt will approach double digits. Chinese exports to the US will suffer and losses will incur due to the devaluation of the T-notes in Chinese hands. China has been diversifying its markets around the world and its huge domestic market could probably absorb most of what China loses abroad in the course of a pull-back from the US market.

While Obama strays across the Pacific to announce his military threats to China and strives to economically isolate China from the rest of Asia, the US economic presence is fast fading in what used to be its “backyard”: Quoting one Financial Times journalist, “China is the only show [in town] for Latin America” (Financial Times, Nov. 23, 2011, p.6). China has displaced the US and the EU as Latin America’s principle trading partner; Beijing has poured billions in new investments and provides low interest loans.

China’s trade with India, Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan and Vietnam is increasing at a far faster rate than that of the US. The US effort to build an imperial-centered security alliance in Asia is based on fragile economic foundations. Even Australia, the anchor and linchpin of the US military thrust in Asia, is heavily dependent on mineral exports to China. Any military interruption would send the Australian economy into a tailspin.

The US economy is in no condition to replace China as a market for Asian or Australian commodity and manufacturing exports. The Asian countries must be acutely aware that there is no future advantage in tying themselves to a declining, highly militarized, empire. Obama and Clinton deceive themselves if they think they can entice Asia into a long-term alliance. The Asian’s are simply using the Obama regime’s friendly overtures as a ‘tactical device’, a negotiating ploy, to leverage better terms in securing maritime and territorial boundaries with China.

Washington is delusional if it believes that it can convince Asia to break long-term large-scale lucrative economic ties to China in order to join an exclusive economic association with such dubious prospects. Any ‘reorientation’ of Asia, from China to the US, would require more than the presence of an American naval and airborne armada pointed at China. It would require the total restructuring of the Asian countries’ economies, class structure and political and military elite. The most powerful economic entrepreneurial groups in Asia have deep and growing ties with China/Hong Kong, especially among the dynamic transnational Chinese business elites in the region. A turn toward Washington entails a massive counter-revolution, which substitutes colonial ‘traders’ (compradors) for established entrepreneurs. A turn to the US would require a dictatorial elite willing to cut strategic trading and investment linkages, displacing millions of workers and professionals. As much as some US-trained Asian military officers , economists and former Wall Street financiers and billionaires might seek to ‘balance’ a US military presence with Chinese economic power, they must realize that ultimately advantage resides in working out an Asian solution.

The age of Asian “comprador capitalists”, willing to sell out national industry and sovereignty in exchange for privileged access to US markets, is ancient history. Whatever the boundless enthusiasm for conspicuous consumerism and Western lifestyles, which Asia and China’s new rich mindlessly celebrate, whatever the embrace of inequalities and savage capitalist exploitation of labor, there is recognition that the past history of US and European dominance precluded the growth and enrichment of an indigenous bourgeoisie and middle class. The speeches and pronouncements of Obama and Clinton reek of nostalgia for a past of neo-colonial overseers and comprador collaborators – a mindless delusion. Their attempts at political realism, in finally recognizing Asia as the economic pivot of the present world order, takes a bizarre turn in imagining that military posturing and projections of armed force will reduce China to a marginal player in the region.

Obama’s Escalation of Confrontation with Russia

The Obama regime has launched a major frontal military thrust on Russia’s borders. The US has moved forward missile sites and Air Force bases in Poland, Rumania, Turkey, Spain, Czech Republic and Bulgaria: Patriot PAC-3 anti-aircraft missile complexes in Poland; advanced radar AN/TPY-2 in Turkey; and several missile (SM-3 IA) loaded warships in Spain are among the prominent weapons encircling Russia, most only minutes away from it strategic heartland. Secondly, the Obama regime has mounted an all-out effort to secure and expand US military bases in Central Asia among former Soviet republics. Thirdly, Washington, via NATO, has launched major economic and military operations against Russia’s major trading partners in North Africa and the Middle East. The NATO war against Libya, which ousted the Gadhafi regime, has paralyzed or nullified multi-billion dollar Russian oil and gas investments, arms sales and substituted a NATO puppet for the former Russia-friendly regime.

The UN-NATO economic sanctions and US-Israeli clandestine terrorist activity aimed at Iran has undermined Russia’s lucrative billion-dollar nuclear trade and joint oil ventures. NATO, including Turkey, backed by the Gulf monarchical dictatorships, has implemented harsh sanctions and funded terrorist assaults on Syria, Russia’s last remaining ally in the region and where it has a sole naval facility (Tartus) on the Mediterranean Sea. Russia’s previous collaboration with NATO in weakening its own economic and security position is a product of the monumental misreading of NATO and especially Obama’s imperial policies. Russian President Medvedev and his Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov mistakenly assumed (like Gorbachev and Yeltsin before them) that backing US-NATO policies against Russia’s trading partners would result in some sort of “reciprocity”: US dismantling its offensive “missile shield” on its frontiers and support for Russia’s admission into the World Trade Organization. Medvedev, following his liberal pro-western illusions, fell into line and backed US-Israeli sanctions against Iran, believing the tales of a “nuclear weapons programs”. Then Lavrov fell for the NATO line of “no fly zones to protect Libyan civilian lives” and voted in favor, only to feebly “protest”, much too late, that NATO was “exceeding its mandate” by bombing Libya into the Middle Ages and installing a pro-NATO puppet regime of rogues and fundamentalists. Finally when the US aimed a cleaver at Russia’s heartland by pushing ahead with an all-out effort to install missile launch sites 5 minutes by air from Moscow while organizing mass and armed assaults on Syria, did the Medvedev-Lavrov duet awake from its stupor and oppose UN sanctions. Medvedev threatened to abandon the nuclear missile reduction treaty (START) and to place medium-range missiles with 5 minute launch-time from Berlin, Paris and London.

Medvedev-Lavrov’s policy of consolidation and co-operation based on Obama’s rhetoric of “resetting relations” invited aggressive empire building: Each capitulation led to a further aggression. As a result, Russia is surrounded by missiles on its western frontier; it has suffered losses among its major trading partners in the Middle East and faces US bases in southwest and Central Asia.

Belatedly Russian officials have moved to replace the delusional Medvedev for the realist Putin, as next President. This shift to a political realist has predictably evoked a wave of hostility toward Putin in all the Western media. Obama’s aggressive policy to isolate Russia by undermining independent regimes has, however, not affected Russia’s status as a nuclear weapons power. It has only heightened tensions in Europe and perhaps ended any future chance of peaceful nuclear weapons reduction or efforts to secure a UN Security Council consensus on issues of peaceful conflict resolution. Washington, under Obama-Clinton, has turned Russia from a pliant client to a major adversary.

Putin looks to deepening and expanding ties with the East, namely China, in the face of threats from the West. The combination of Russian advanced weapons technology and energy resources and Chinese dynamic manufacturing and industrial growth are more than a match for crisis-ridden EU-USA economies wallowing in stagnation.

Obama’s military confrontation toward Russia will greatly prejudice access to Russian raw materials and definitively foreclose any long-term strategic security agreement, which would be useful in lowering the deficit and reviving the US economy.

Between Realism and Delusion: Obama’s Strategic Realignment

Obama’s recognition that the present and future center of political and economic power is moving inexorably to Asia, was a flash of political realism. After a lost decade of pouring hundreds of billions of dollars in military adventures on the margins and periphery of world politics, Washington has finally discovered that is not where the fate of nations, especially Great Powers, will be decided, except in a negative sense – of bleeding resources over lost causes. Obama’s new realism and priorities apparently are now focused on Southeast and Northeast Asia, where dynamic economies flourish, markets are growing at a double digit rate, investors are ploughing tens of billions in productive activity and trade is expanding at three times the rate of the US and the EU.

But Obama’s ‘New Realism’ is blighted by entirely delusional assumptions, which undermine any serious effort to realign US policy.

In the first place Obama’s effort to ‘enter’ into Asia is via a military build-up and not through a sharpening and upgrading of US economic competitiveness. What does the US produce for the Asian countries that will enhance its market share? Apart from arms, airplanes and agriculture, the US has few competitive industries. The US would have to comprehensively re-orient its economy, upgrade skilled labor, and transfer billions from “security” and militarism to applied innovations. But Obama works within the current military-Zionist-financial complex: He knows no other and is incapable of breaking with it.

Secondly, Obama-Clinton operate under the delusion that the US can exclude China or minimize its role in Asia, a policy that is undercut by the huge and growing investment and presence of all the major US multi-national corporations in China , who use it as an export platform to Asia and the rest of the world.

The US military build-up and policy of intimidation will only force China to downgrade its role as creditor financing the US debt, a policy China can pursue because the US market, while still important, is declining, as China expands its presence in its domestic, Asian, Latin American and European markets.

What once appeared to be New Realism is now revealed to be the recycling of Old Delusions: The notion that the US can return to being the supreme Pacific Power it was after World War Two. The US attempts to return to Pacific dominance under Obama-Clinton with a crippled economy, with the overhang of an over-militarized economy, and with major strategic handicaps: Over the past decade the United States foreign policy has been at the beck and call of Israel’s fifth column (the Israel “lobby”). The entire US political class is devoid of common, practical sense and national purpose. They are immersed in troglodyte debates over “indefinite detentions” and “mass immigrant expulsions”. Worse, all are on the payrolls of private corporations who sell in the US and invest in China.

Why would Obama abjure costly wars in the unprofitable periphery and then promote the same military metaphysics at the dynamic center of the world economic universe? Does Barack Obama and his advisers believe he is the Second Coming of Admiral Commodore Perry, whose 19th century warships and blockades forced Asia open to Western trade? Does he believe that military alliances will be the first stage to a subsequent period of privileged economic entry?

Does Obama believe that his regime can blockade China, as Washington did to Japan in the lead up to World War Two? It’s too late. China is much more central to the world economy, too vital even to the financing of the US debt, too bonded up with the Forbes Five Hundred multi-national corporations. To provoke China, to even fantasize about economic “exclusion” to bring down China, is to pursue policies that will totally disrupt the world economy, first and foremost the US economy!

Conclusion

Obama’s ‘crackpot realism’, his shift from wars in the Muslim world to military confrontation in Asia, has no intrinsic worth and poses extraordinary extrinsic costs. The military methods and economic goals are totally incompatible and beyond the capacity of the US, as it is currently constituted. Washington’s policies will not ‘weaken’ Russia or China, even less intimidate them. Instead it will encourage both to adopt more adversarial positions, making it less likely that they lend a hand to Obama’s sequential wars on behalf of Israel. Already Russia has sent warships to its Syrian port, refused to support an arms embargo against Syria and Iran and (in retrospect) criticized the NATO war against Libya. China and Russia have far too many strategic ties with the world economy to suffer any great losses from a series of US military outposts and “exclusive” alliances. Russia can aim just as many deadly nuclear missiles at the West as the US can mount from its bases in Eastern Europe.

In other words, Obama’s military escalation will not change the nuclear balance of power, but will bring Russia and China into a closer and deeper alliance. Gone are the days of Kissinger-Nixon’s “divide and conquer” strategy pitting US-Chinese trade agreements against Russian arms. Washington has a totally exaggerated significance of the current maritime spats between China and its neighbors. What unites them in economic terms is far more important in the medium and long-run. China’s Asian economic ties will erode any tenuous military links to the US.

Obama’s “crackpot realism”, views the world market through military lenses. Military arrogance toward Asia has led to a rupture with Pakistan, its most compliant client regime in South Asia. NATO deliberately slaughtered 24 Pakistani soldiers and thumbed their nose at the Pakistani generals, while China and Russia condemned the attack and gained influence.

In the end, the military and exclusionary posture to China will fail. Washington will overplay its hand and frighten its business-oriented erstwhile Asian partners, who only want to play-off a US military presence to gain tactical economic advantage. They certainly do not want a new US instigated ‘Cold War’ dividing and weakening the dynamic intra-Asian trade and investment. Obama and his minions will quickly learn that Asia’s current leaders do not have permanent allies – only permanent interests. In the final analysis, China figures prominently in configuring a new Asia-centric world economy. Washington may claim to have a ‘permanent Pacific presence’ but until it demonstrates it can take care of its “basic business at home”, like arranging its own finances and balancing its current account deficits, the US Naval command may end up renting its naval facilities to Asian exporters and shippers, transporting goods for them, and protecting them by pursuing pirates, contrabandists and narco-traffickers. Come to think about it, Obama might reduce the US trade deficit with Asia by renting out the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Straits, instead of wasting US taxpayer money bullying successful Asian economic powers.

By James Petras

8 December 2011

Countercurrents.org

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, TempsModerne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. His publishers have included Random House, John Wiley, Westview, Routledge, Macmillan, Verso, Zed Books and Pluto Books. He is winner of the Career of Distinguished Service Award from the American Sociological Association’s Marxist Sociology Section, the Robert Kenny Award for Best Book, 2002, and the Best Dissertation, Western Political Science Association in 1968. His most recent titles include Unmasking Globalization: Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century (2001); co-author The Dynamics of Social Change in Latin America (2000), System in Crisis (2003), co-author Social Movements and State Power (2003), co-author Empire With Imperialism (2005), co-author)Multinationals on Trial (2006).

In his book Kairos for Palestine, Rifat Odeh Kassis [4] deals with a topic that is as fresh as the destruction of a Palestinian home by Israeli-driven, US-built bulldozers, and as ancient as the use of the term kairos, derived from an ancient Greek word which refers to a specific moment in time.

Why does this wanton destruction of private Palestinian homes continue unabated? The answer is simple: Israel controls the narrative that justifies its conduct by reporting the demolition of a Palestinian home as a “necessary step” for the “security” and well-being of Israel. The Israeli narrative keeps the Western world locked into a permanent state of ignorance, following the pattern of previous Western colonial invaders and occupiers.

The Israeli narrative, carefully honed by Israel well before Israel’s 1947-48 war of conquest, has skillfully made the case that Israel is a state whose inhabitants deserve their own state as victims of oppression and genocide. They chose the ancient biblical lands of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) on the grounds that the land was “given to them” by Yahweh (the Hebrew word for God).

That narrative — mixing ancient biblical beliefs with modern political strategy — has so totally dominated the perspective of the Western world outside the Middle East, that it has emerged as the only view of reality known to the West. It is in this narrative that Israel is the “victim” and the Palestinian people are an enemy that seeks to drive Israelis “into the sea.”

It has been Israel’s goal since it gained UN recognition as a state in 1949 to control this narrative and prevent any contrary narrative from obtaining a hearing. The occupation of the Palestinian people is sold to the West as a necessity. Palestinians in this narrative are perceived as a threat to the well being and security of all Israelis.

The large majority of Americans have accepted this narrative as the only available reality. They permit their government to function as a financial backer of Israel, and to politically support Israel in world forums. American politicians function within a bipartisan political operation which accepts and promotes the “Israel is a permanent victim” narrative. This narrative obscures the political reality that Israel serves as an important part of the American empire, which seeks to control the people of the Middle East through military power and political deceit.

The invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the current role the US plays in Libya and in the agitation for war against Iran, are the most recent examples of this power and deceit.

 The Palestinian narrative traces its history through Arab history, from which Palestinians emerged as an important part of the Ottoman Empire. Following Arab support for the Western allies in their war in 1917-18 against Germany and Turkey, Palestinians were assured they would retain their homeland in their corner of the Ottoman Empire. The Palestinian narrative in the modern era emphasizes the Nakba [5] (catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing that led to Israel’s establishment. That narrative has been denied a part in American discussions of the Middle East.

Israeli propaganda saturates American society

It is the Israeli narrative that enables Israel to be an important American ally in the Middle East. That narrative saturates American society through the media, the economy, political structures, nongovernmental institutions involved in education and religious groups.

The Zionists were amongst the last of the western colonial invaders to arrive in the Middle East to conquer a land and exploit its population. This invasion was built on military power and deceit, the twin sins that continue to shape the US/Israel alliance in the Middle East.

Kairos for Palestine traces the history of what led to the Palestine Kairos Document that emerged from the situation created by that alliance. It tells the story of the Christian churches’ effort to communicate the suffering imposed by Israel on Palestinians and it does so from a Christian perspective.

The document originated within the Christian churches working inside Israel, the occupied West Bank and Gaza. It is a community-created document written out of the experience of the Palestinians. It calls upon Christians everywhere to wake up to the conditions under which all of the people of Palestine — Christian, Muslim and non-religious — and respond appropriately to gross injustice created by the US/Israel alliance of empire-building through oppression.

The political strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions [6] (BDS) is a separate project from the Kairos Document. The two run parallel, however, as different ways in which Palestinians address the outside world.

BDS is a strategy of nonviolence that advocates economic pressure on Israel to halt its oppressive military occupation. It calls attention to the manner in which outside corporations endorse that occupation and profit from it.

BDS originated as a political movement in July 2005 as a “call from Palestinian civil society.” It was signed and sent out from a large number of civil society groups within the West Bank and Gaza. It is important to note that, unlike the Kairos Document, BDS is a strategy which the civil society of Palestinians has developed.

Kairos Palestine, which is the primary focus of Kassis’ book, originated in Bethlehem as a statement from Palestinian Christian leaders. The document was released in December 2009. It is a theological document of faith, not a proposal of strategy. Circumstances since the original document was written in 2009 have grown even worse as Kassis explains (9):

Jerusalem is being forcibly de-Arabized and systematically Judaized with unprecedented speed and aggression: Life for Palestinians there becomes less and less bearable as house demolitions, evictions, arbitrary arrests and interrogations, residency revocations, and the imprisonment and house arrests of children all increase. The siege on the Gaza Strip remains and intensifies unabated.

The Israeli government is forgoing its longstanding public relations campaign — its ongoing propaganda as the only ‘democracy’ in the Middle East — and reverting instead to openly racist laws like the one that seeks to criminalize individuals and organizations that call for boycott.

BDS, with its secular origins, is not promoted by the Kairos Document, but BDS has been adopted by some Christian groups as a practical strategy which Palestinians propose the West adopt as a means toward putting economic pressure on Israel to give up its oppressive control of the Palestinian people.

Resistance of Americans to BDS illustrates how effectively the Israeli (“we are the victims under outside threat”) narrative works to prevent Americans from hearing the call of either the Kairos Document, or the economic strategy of BDS.

Confronting apartheid

The modern use of a Kairos statement by an oppressed population dates back to the first edition of a statement from South African Christians in 1985, a document intended, Kassis reports, “to provide an alternative discourse to the dominant theological thinking” of the day. This South African document confronted the apartheid structures maintained by the minority white population of that society.

Subsequent Kairos documents have emerged in Kenya, Zimbabwe, India and Latin America, each in ways appropriate to the historical moment addressed, all insisting that the Christian faith calls for the oppressors to acknowledge the sinfulness of their oppressive conduct. The various Kairos documents all pursued the same goal, a prophetic call to those in power to acknowledge that the New Testament commands them to halt their oppressive conduct and identify with the oppressed.

Kassis writes (83) that these Kairos documents all emerged from similar contexts: oppression, injustice and the denial of equality and human rights.

They are also “united by their timing, by the kind of moment at which they came into being. They aren’t written at any time; rather they are created when there are no options than true participation in a process of collective change.” To use a theological term, kairos “speaks to the qualitative, not sequential, form of time; for example, the New Testament defines it as “the appointed time in the purpose of God.”

Kassis adds that this moment is one in which God acts. It is a moment, as well, in political terms, that implies “a crucial time, an appointed time, in which the message of the text is delivered” (83).

Adopting a more modern form of expression, Kassis concludes that “the message of the Kairos is both the SOS signal of a sinking ship and a call for hope in the face of despair.”

The Palestine Kairos Document, Kassis explains, arose from a dialogue within Palestinian Christian communities, in short, not from outsiders, but from those who suffer under occupation, which is to say, oppression and captivity.

The Kairos Document emerged from a Palestinian dialogue among a group of 15 interdenominational Palestinian Christian leaders.

After two years of work, prayer, many meetings and discussions, along with debates and draft, the leaders produced a final draft of the document, which they called “A Moment of Truth: A Word of Faith, Hope and Love from the Heart of Palestinian Suffering.”

The final document was released to the public at an event in Bethlehem on 11 December 2009. Kassis was deeply involved in preparing the final document. With its release, Kassis was selected to serve as the General Coordinator of the Kairos Palestine Group.

He began his career as an activist and religious leader in 1988 when he served as director of the YMCA rehabilitation programs in the West Bank, the first of many assignments he has handled since.

In 2005 he became the international manager of the World Council of Churches (WCC) Ecumenical Accompaniment Program in Palestine and Israel.

From September 2007 until March 2009, Kassis was the WCC’s general secretary’s special advisor on the Middle East. His current task is to write about and explain the significance of the Palestine Kairos Document.

Demand to pay attention

The kairos moment places a demand not only on Christians, but on people of other religions or no religions, to pay attention to the message that Israeli occupation is “oppression” in the same way South African apartheid and Latin American economic oppression of the poor were oppressive.

The challenge to readers of this book is for its readers to bridge the gap between the Christian theological language of a “right and opportune moment” and the universal cry for justice for those who suffer and are oppressed.

However the reader understands the term kairos, the impossible-to-refute “facts on the ground” in Israel and Palestine, are clear; this is the “right moment” for the world to recognize and acknowledge that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is unjust, immoral, illegal and destructive. Read this book, learn from it, and use it for small group discussions, and as an instrument with which to fight the wall of ignorance that endorses Palestinian suffering. It is a book that demands that attention must be paid to the conduct of the governments in Israel and in the United States, the two military powers who have the power to maintain or end this suffering.

25 December 2011

By James M. Wall

@The Electronic Intifada

James M. Wall is a contributing editor of The Christian Century magazine, based in Chicago, Illinois. From 1972 through 1999, he was editor and publisher. He writes a personal blog, Wallwritings.me [8], which he began in April 2008.

As protests raged again across the Middle East, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, offered his assessment of the Arab Spring last week. It was, he said, an “Islamic, anti-western, anti-liberal, anti-Israeli, undemocratic wave”, adding that Israel’s Arab neighbours were “moving not forwards, but backwards”.

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s rightwing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

The bill effectively divides non-governmental organisations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel. The favoured ones, such as ambulance services and universities, will continue to be lavishly funded from foreign sources, chiefly wealthy private Jewish donors from the United States and Europe.

The “political” ones – meaning those that criticise government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax.

The grounds for being defined as a “political” NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.

One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organisations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.

At the same time Netanyahu wants the Israeli media emasculated. Last week his government threw its weight behind a new defamation law that will leave few but milionaires in a position to criticise politicians and officials. Mr Netanyahu observed: “It may be called the Defamation Law, but I call it the ‘publication of truth law’.” The media and human rights groups fear the worst.

This monkey must speak no evil.

Another bill, backed by the justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, is designed to skew the make-up of a panel selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with apppointees who share its ideological worldview and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favoured candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organisations.

Senior legislators from Mr Netanyahu’s party are pushing another bill that would make it nigh impossible for human rights organisations to petition the supreme court against government actions.

The judicial monkey should see no evil.

At one level, these and a host of other measures – including increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and the recently passed boycott law, which exposes critics of the settlements to expensive court actions for damages – are designed to strengthen the occupation by disarming its critics inside Israel.

But there is another, even more valued goal: making sure that in future the plentiful horror stories from the Palestinian territories – monitored by human rights organisations, reported by the media and heard in the courts – never reach the ears of the international community.

The third monkey is supposed to hear no evil.

The crackdown is justified in the Israeli right’s view on the grounds that criticism of the occupation represents not domestic concerns but unwelcome foreign interference in Israel’s affairs. The promotion of human rights – whether in Israel, the occupied territories or the Arab world – is considered by Netanyahu and his allies as inherently un-Israeli and anti-Israeli.

The hypocrisy is hard to stomach. Israel has long claimed special dispensation to interfere in the affairs of both the EU and the United States. Jewish Agency staff proselytise among European and American Jews to persuade them to emigrate to Israel. Uniquely, Israel’s security agencies are given free rein at airports around the world to harass and invade the privacy of non-Jews flying to Tel Aviv. And Israel’s political proxies abroad – sophisticated lobby groups like AIPAC in the US – act as foreign agents while not registering as such.

Of course, Israel’s qualms against foreign meddling are selective. No restrictions are planned for rightwing Jews from abroad, such as US casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, who have pumped enormous sums into propping up illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land.

There is a faulty logic too to Israel’s argument. As human rights activists point out, the areas where they do most of their work are located not in Israel but in the Palestinian territories, which Israel is occupying in violation of international law.

Privately, European embassies have been trying to drive home this point. The EU gives Israel preferential trading status, worth billions of dollars annually to the Israeli economy, on condition that it respects human rights in the occupied territories. Europe argues it is, therefore, entitled to fund the monitoring of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. More’s the pity that Europe fails to act on the information it receives.

Given the right’s strengthening hand, it can be expected to devise ever more creative ways to silence the human rights community and Israeli media and emasculate the courts as way to end the bad press.

Israelis are obssessed with their country’s image abroad and what they regard as a “delegitimisation” campaign that threatens not only the occupation’s continuation but also Israel’s long-term survival as an ethnic state. The leadership has been incensed by regular surveys of global opinion showing Israel ranked among the most unpopular countries in the world.

The Palestinians’ recent decision to turn to the international community for recognition of statehood has only amplified such grievances.

Israel has no intention of altering its policies, or of pursuing peace. Rather, Netanyahu’s government has been oscillating between a desperate desire to pass yet more anti-democratic legislation to stifle criticism and a modicum of restraint motivated by fear of the international backlash.

A cabinet debate last month on legislation against human rights groups focused barely at all on the proposal’s merits. Instead the head of the National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror, was called before ministers to explain whether Israel stood to lose more from passing such bills or from allowing human rights groups to carry on monitoring the occupation.

Deluded as it may seem, Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to turn the clock back 40 years, to a “golden age” when foreign correspondents and western governments could refer, without blushing, to the occupation of the Palestinians as “benign”.

Donald Neff, Jerusalem correspondent for Time magazine in the 1970s, admitted years later that his and his colleagues’ performance was so feeble at the time in large part because there was little critical information available on the occupation. When he witnessed first-hand what was taking place, his editors in the US refused to believe him and he was eventually moved on.

Now, however, the genie is out the bottle. The international community understands full well – thanks to human rights activists – both that the occupation is brutal and that Israel has been peace-making in bad faith.

If Israel continues on its current course, another myth long accepted by western countries – that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” – may finally be shattered.

By Jonathan Cook

1 December 2011

Countercurrents.org

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net

A version of this story was first published in the National, Abu Dhabi

The Obama administration’s claims last week that US military occupation had bequeathed democracy to Iraq were disintegrating even before the last American troops left on Sunday.

Just four days after the official withdrawal, the always tense relations between the Shiite- and Sunni-based factions within the country’s government have led to an open split along sectarian and geographical lines, raising the prospect of a civil war that could draw in neighbouring states or be exploited to justify the return of US forces.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, the head of the coalition of Shiite parties that dominates the parliament, is being accused by the Iraqiya alliance of Sunni-based parties of attempting to establish a dictatorship. Last Friday, Iraqiya MPs began a boycott after the Shiite majority put a no-confidence motion against Sunni vice prime minister Saleh Mutlaq for labelling Maliki a “dictator.” On Sunday, intelligence agencies under Maliki’s command boarded an aircraft carrying Sunni vice president Tariq al-Hashemi and dragged off seven of his bodyguards on charges of terrorism.

An arrest warrant was issued on Monday against Hashemi himself, claiming that he was behind a series of bombings, including an alleged attempt to assassinate Maliki. Three of his arrested bodyguards were presented on live television, apparently confessing to carrying out terrorist acts on Hashemi’s orders. Hashemi has taken refuge in the autonomous Kurdish region in Iraq’s three northern provinces, where authorities have refused to obey court orders that he be arrested and returned to Baghdad.

The result has been the effective collapse of the so-called national unity government formed under US pressure in December 2010, nine months after national elections. Maliki retained the prime ministership, but the three major Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish blocs were each given government ministries in the name of power-sharing. After the charges were laid against Hashemi, Iraqiya announced that Sunni ministers would no longer perform their duties.

The move against Hashemi follows the arrest over the past several months of hundreds of predominantly Sunni former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and ex-army officers on charges of plotting to overthrow the government. Maliki alleges to have information from pro-US former Libyan interim leader Mahmoud Jibril that the Gaddafi regime was financing and encouraging a Sunni uprising once US forces had left.

In an interview with Reuters on Tuesday, Iraqiya leader Iyad Allawi denounced the wave of arrests, labelled the televised confessions as “fabricated,” compared Maliki with Hussein, and implicitly appealed for outside intervention to prevent civil war.

“We fear the return of dictatorship by this authoritarian way of governing,” Allawi said. “Maliki has crossed all red lines and Iraq is now facing a very, very serious and very difficult situation… My fear is that the Iraqi people will lose faith in the political process and sectarianism will prevail. Unless the international community and the region get involved and unless sense prevails, Iraq is heading towards a very big conflict.”

Kurdish leader Massud Barzani declared the situation was a “deep crisis.” Attempting to straddle the Shiite and Sunni camps, he stated that “we must not underestimate or tolerate terrorism; at the same time, however, security forces should not be used for political objectives.”

Through the fog of alleged conspiracies and intrigues, more fundamental issues are involved in the rising tensions.

Every faction of the venal Iraqi elite collaborated with the US occupation and bears the responsibility for the resulting social catastrophe. They each fear an eruption of popular opposition, similar to the movements that have emerged across the Middle East this year. The uprising against the Assad regime in Syria, on Iraq’s western border, is provoking the greatest concerns. Millions of desperately impoverished and oppressed Iraqi workers and urban poor, including the one million Iraqi refugees in Syria, are being politicised by events.

Sectarianism is being exploited by the ruling elites to divert social discontent in reactionary directions. In the predominantly Sunni provinces of Anbar, Nineveh, Salahaddin and Diyala, local organisations are raising demands for the same autonomy from the central government as the Kurdish region, which controls its own security forces, budget and foreign affairs. Last week, the provincial government in Diyala unilaterally declared itself autonomous on the grounds that the Shiite-dominated Baghdad government was starving it of funds for services and reconstruction.

During the armed resistance to the US occupation, autonomy was opposed by the insurgent organisations, many of whom were based in Sunni areas. A de-facto partition of the country is now viewed by the Sunni elite as a means of maintaining control over the population, pressuring Baghdad to grant them a greater share of national oil income and forging their own relations with neighbouring states. Sunni extremists denounce Maliki’s government as a puppet of the Shiite-based regime in Iran and call for closer ties with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and other Arab countries.

For their part, Maliki and the Shiite parties are seeking to channel unrest within the majority Shiite population into fears that the departure of American forces is being accompanied by a Sunni plot to re-establish an anti-Shiite dictatorship similar to Hussein’s. The calls for autonomy in Sunni areas are taking place in the context of a US-driven campaign against Iran and its regional allies such as the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad.

Maliki has pointedly refused to support regional condemnations of Assad’s repression of anti-government protests. If Assad’s government falls, it will most likely be replaced by a fiercely anti-Iranian regime, backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and based on sectarian Sunni movements that are developing close ties with Sunni parties and tribes in western Iraq.

A December 20 article in the British Guardian cited Ali Hatem Suleiman, a leader of the large Dulaimi tribe in Anbar province, which borders Syria. He warned that “the people are preparing for war” against the Maliki government and admitted that Iraqi Sunni fighters would potentially cross into Syria to aid the anti-Assad uprising. Suleiman bluntly said: “If Assad is gone, at least our back will be secured, especially in Anbar… It is Arab versus Persian [Iran].”

The danger of sectarian warfare is considerable. In Diyala, Shiite militiamen loyal to cleric Moqtada al-Sadr have blockaded roads in protest against the declaration of autonomy. In Baghdad, Shiite troops of the Iraqi Army have been deployed outside the homes of leading politicians in largely Sunni-populated suburbs.

The civilian population of all backgrounds are living with the increasing fear of a new round of bloodshed. Sectarian violence, deliberately stoked by the US occupation, claimed tens of thousands of lives, particularly between 2006 and 2008, and displaced an estimated 4.7 million Iraqis from their homes.

Developments in Iraq are being followed intensely in Washington. US Vice President Joe Biden reportedly rang Maliki and the speaker of the Iraqi parliament on Tuesday to press for all factional leaders “to meet and work through their differences together.” If a sectarian civil war erupts, tens of thousands of US troops, stationed in Kuwait, Bahrain and other Gulf states, could be sent back into Iraq to protect American strategic and economic interests.

By James Cogan

22 December 2011

WSWS.org

The first question in last Saturday night’s Republican debate on foreign policy dealt with Iran, and a newly published report by the International Atomic Energy Agency. The report, which raised renewed concern about the “possible existence of undeclared nuclear facilities and material in Iran,” struck a darker tone than previous assessments. But it was carefully hedged. On the debate platform, however, any ambiguity was lost. One of the moderators said that the I.A.E.A. report had provided “additional credible evidence that Iran is pursuing a nuclear weapon” and asked what various candidates, upon winning the Presidency, would do to stop Iran. Herman Cain said he would assist those who are trying to overthrow the government. Newt Gingrich said he would coördinate with the Israeli government and maximize covert operations to block the Iranian weapons program. Mitt Romney called the state of Iran’s nuclear program Obama’s “greatest failing, from a foreign-policy standpoint” and added, “Look, one thing you can know … and that is if we reëlect Barack Obama Iran will have a nuclear weapon.” The Iranian bomb was a sure thing Saturday night.

I’ve been reporting on Iran and the bomb for The New Yorker for the past decade, with a focus on the repeated inability of the best and the brightest of the Joint Special Operations Command to find definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons production program in Iran. The goal of the high-risk American covert operations was to find something physical—a “smoking calutron,” as a knowledgeable official once told me—to show the world that Iran was working on warheads at an undisclosed site, to make the evidence public, and then to attack and destroy the site.

The Times reported, in its lead story the day after the report came out, that I.A.E.A. investigators “have amassed a trove of new evidence that, they say, makes a ‘credible’ case” that Iran may be carrying out nuclear-weapons activities. The newspaper quoted a Western diplomat as declaring that “the level of detail is unbelievable…. The report describes virtually all the steps to make a nuclear warhead and the progress Iran has achieved in each of those steps. It reads likes a menu.” The Times set the tone for much of the coverage. (A second Times story that day on the I.A.E.A. report noted, more cautiously, that “it is true that the basic allegations in the report are not substantially new, and have been discussed by experts for years.”)

But how definitive, or transformative, were the findings? The I.A.E.A. said it had continued in recent years “to receive, collect and evaluate information relevant to possible military dimensions of Iran’s nuclear program” and, as a result, it has been able “to refine its analysis.” The net effect has been to create “more concern.” But Robert Kelley, a retired I.A.E.A. director and nuclear engineer who previously spent more than thirty years with the Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons program, told me that he could find very little new information in the I.A.E.A. report. He noted that hundreds of pages of material appears to come from a single source: a laptop computer, allegedly supplied to the I.A.E.A. by a Western intelligence agency, whose provenance could not be established. Those materials, and others, “were old news,” Kelley said, and known to many journalists. “I wonder why this same stuff is now considered ‘new information’ by the same reporters.”

A nuanced assessment of the I.A.E.A. report was published by the Arms Control Association (A.C.A.), a nonprofit whose mission is to encourage public support for effective arms control. The A.C.A. noted that the I.A.E.A. did “reinforce what the nonproliferation community has recognized for some times: that Iran engaged in various nuclear weapons development activities until 2003, then stopped many of them, but continued others.” (The American intelligence community reached the same conclusion in a still classified 2007 estimate.) The I.A.E.A.’s report “suggests,” the A.C.A. paper said, that Iran “is working to shorten the timeframe to build the bomb once and if it makes that decision. But it remains apparent that a nuclear-armed Iran is still not imminent nor is it inevitable.” Greg Thielmann, a former State Department and Senate Intelligence Committee analyst who was one of the authors of the A.C.A. assessment, told me, “There is troubling evidence suggesting that studies are still going on, but there is nothing that indicates that Iran is really building a bomb.” He added, “Those who want to drum up support for a bombing attack on Iran sort of aggressively misrepresented the report.”

Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Ploughshare Fund, a disarmament group, who serves on Hillary Clinton’s International Security Advisory Board, said, “I was briefed on most of this stuff several years ago at the I.A.E.A. headquarters in Vienna. There’s little new in the report. Most of this information is well known to experts who follow the issue.” Cirincione noted that “post-2003, the report only cites computer modelling and a few other experiments.” (A senior I.A.E.A. official similarly told me, “I was underwhelmed by the information.”)

The report did note that its on-site camera inspection process of Iran’s civilian nuclear enrichment facilities—mandated under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory—“continues to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material.” In other words, all of the low enriched uranium now known to be produced inside Iran is accounted for; if highly enriched uranium is being used for the manufacture of a bomb, it would have to have another, unknown source.

The shift in tone at the I.A.E.A. seems linked to a change at the top. The I.A.E.A.’s report had extra weight because the Agency has had a reputation for years as a reliable arbiter on Iran. Mohammed ElBaradei, who retired as the I.A.E.A.’s Director General two years ago, was viewed internationally, although not always in Washington, as an honest broker—a view that lead to the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. ElBaradei’s replacement is Yukiya Amano of Japan. Late last year, a classified U.S. Embassy cable from Vienna, the site of the I.A.E.A. headquarters, described Amano as being “ready for prime time.” According to the cable, which was obtained by WikiLeaks, in a meeting in September, 2009, with Glyn Davies, the American permanent representative to the I.A.E.A., said, “Amano reminded Ambassador on several occasions that he would need to make concessions to the G-77 [the group of developing countries], which correctly required him to be fair-minded and independent, but that he was solidly in the U.S. court on every strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.” The cable added that Amano’s “willingness to speak candidly with U.S. interlocutors on his strategy … bodes well for our future relationship.”

It is possible, of course, that Iran has simply circumvented the reconnaissance efforts of America and the I.A.E.A., perhaps even building Dick Cheney’s nightmare: a hidden underground nuclear-weapons fabrication facility. Iran’s track record with the I.A.E.A. has been far from good: its leadership began construction of its initial uranium facilities in the nineteen-eighties without informing the Agency, in violation of the nonproliferation treaty. Over the next decade and a half, under prodding from ElBaradei and the West, the Iranians began acknowledging their deceit and opened their enrichment facilities, and their records, to I.A.E.A. inspectors.

The new report, therefore, leaves us where we’ve been since 2002, when George Bush declared Iran to be a member of the Axis of Evil—with lots of belligerent talk but no definitive evidence of a nuclear-weapons program.

By Seymour M. Hersh

18 November 2011

@ The New Yorker

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2011/11/iran-and-the-iaea.html#ixzz1gag68abM

A course for US military officers has been teaching that America’s enemy is Islam in general and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following second world war precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.

The Pentagon suspended the course in late April when a student objected to the material. The FBI also changed some agent training last year after discovering that it, too, was critical of Islam.

The teaching in the military course was counter to repeated assertions by US officials over the past decade that America is at war against Islamic extremists, not the religion itself.

“They hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit,” the instructor, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Dooley, said in a presentation last July for the course at Joint Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. The college, for professional military members, teaches mid-level officers and government civilians on subjects related to planning and executing war.

Dooley also presumed, for the purposes of his theoretical war plan, that the Geneva conventions that set standards of armed conflict, are “no longer relevant”.

He adds: “This would leave open the option once again of taking war to a civilian population wherever necessary (the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki being applicable to the Mecca and Medina destruction decision point).”

His war plan suggests possible outcomes such as “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation … Islam reduced to cult status”.

A copy of the presentation was obtained and posted online by Wired.com’s Danger Room blog. The college did not respond to the Associated Press’ requests for copies of the documents, but a Pentagon spokesman authenticated the documents. Dooley still works for the college, but is no longer teaching, said the joint chiefs of staff chairman, General Martin Dempsey. Dooley has refused to comment.

A military service record summary provided by army human resources at Fort Knox, Kentucky, shows that Dooley was commissioned as a second lieutenant upon graduation from the US military academy at West Point, New York, in May 1994. He has served tours in Germany, Bosnia, Kuwait and Iraq. He has numerous awards including a Bronze Star medal, the fourth-highest US combat award.

In what he termed a model for a campaign to force a transformation of Islam, Dooley called for “a direct ideological and philosophical confrontation with Islam”, with the presumption that Islam is an ideology rather than just a religion.

He further asserted that Islam has already declared war on the west, and the US specifically.

“It is therefore illogical” to continue with the current US strategy, which Dooley said presumes there is a way of finding common ground with Islamic religious leaders, without “waging near total war”.

The course on Islam had been taught since 2004, but was not part of the required core curriculum. It was offered five times a year, with about 20 students each time.

Though Dooley has been teaching at the college since August 2010, it was unclear when he took on that particular class, called Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.

The joint staff suspended the course after it had received a student complaint, and within days Dempsey ordered all service branches to review their training to ensure other courses do not use anti-Islamic material.

On Thursday, Dempsey said the material in the Norfolk course was counter to American “appreciation for religious freedom and cultural awareness”.

“It was just totally objectionable, against our values, and it wasn’t academically sound,” Dempsey said. “This wasn’t about … pushing back on liberal thought; this was objectionable, academically irresponsible.”

In his July 2011 presentation on “counterjihad”, Dooley asserted that the rise of what he called a “military Islam/Islamist resurgence” compels the US to consider extreme measures, “unconstrained by fears of political incorrectness”.

He described his purpose as generating “dynamic discussion and thought”, while noting that his ideas and proposals are not official US government policy and cannot be found in any current official defence department documents.

A Pentagon inquiry is seeking to determine whether someone above the professor’s level is supposed to approve course materials and whether that approval process was followed in this case, said Colonel Dave Lapan, a spokesman for Dempsey.

The problem of negative portrayals of Islam in federal government is not new. A six-month review the FBI launched into agent training material uncovered 876 offensive or inaccurate pages that had been used in 392 presentations, including a PowerPoint slide that said the bureau can sometimes bend or suspend the law in counterterror investigations.

Martin Dempsey

11 May 2012

@guardian.co.uk

Accusations that the Syrian government is either wholly or mainly responsible for breaches of the United Nations’ ceasefire are meant to provide a pretext for military intervention by the imperialist powers and their proxies.

The US and European media, meanwhile, is acting as a barely concealed propaganda instrument tasked with preparing public opinion for the latest criminal adventure in the Middle East—a war for regime change in Syria to follow those waged in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Saturation coverage was given to an explosion in Hama, with “opposition” sources cited to claim that a Scud missile attack had destroyed a building, accompanied by the usual inflated casualty figures. The more believable explanation that the explosion was due to an accident at a building used as a bomb factory was relegated to an aside.

The same holds true of the widespread reporting of “shock footage” of a journalist supposedly being “buried alive” by Syrian troops—a video so obviously staged and badly scripted that even supporters of the opposition have deemed it as a fake.

In contrast, a campaign by the opposition to create the conditions for a military intervention through systematic violations of the cease-fire has been downplayed or portrayed as staged provocations by the regime of Bashir al-Assad.

On Friday, a suicide bomber in Damascus killed 10 people and wounded more than 28 others outside the Zain al-Abideen mosque. Witnesses said a man in military uniform detonated an explosives vest while he was among soldiers that left body parts scattered across the tarmac.

Earlier, a loud blast was heard near a bus station used by pro-Assad militiamen preventing demonstrations in the capital—one of four more minor explosions in Damascus in which four people were wounded.

On Saturday, oppositionists clashed with troops in the coastal town of Burj Islam, close to the presidential summer palace. The intense shooting lasted for 15 to 30 minutes.

On Saturday, oppositionists in dinghies attacked a military unit on the Mediterranean coast, about 30 kilometres from the border with Turkey, leading to the deaths of several members of the Syrian armed forces.

That same day, Lebanon said its navy seized three containers with large quantities of weapons destined for the opposition groups. The Lutfallah II began its voyage from Libya, stopped off in Alexandria in Egypt, and then headed for Tripoli in Lebanon before it was intercepted.

The official statements of the UN, Washington, Paris and Ankara are made as if none of this is taking place.

On Friday, even as reports of the suicide bombing in Damascus were emerging, UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon warned that Syria’s government was “in contravention” of the April 12 cease-fire and that Assad’s crackdown has reached an “intolerable stage.”

Ban said the UN would soon beef up its 15 observers in Syria to 300.

Ban’s statement provided the US with another opportunity to declare that Damascus has failed to honour the UN peace plan. On April 28, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the UN peace plan “as a whole is failing…. It remains our assessment that the bulk of the violations of the cease-fire pledge are coming from the regime side.”

The US has in fact said the same thing from day one, threatening on April 21 that it may not even allow the renewal of the UN monitoring mission in Syria after the first three months is up. “Our patience is exhausted,” Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the UN told the Security Council.

The US has already signalled its intention to move to a military solution. Defence Undersecretary Kathleen Hicks and National Security Council director of strategies Derek Chollet have told the Senate that the UN diplomatic initiative had now reached “the point of collapse”.

The Pentagon has its “plan B” in place, including calling on US troops to set up a security zone along the border between Syria and Turkey. “We are planning various strategies for a vast range of scenarios, including the possibility of helping allies and partners on the frontier zones,” Hicks said April 27.

On April 19, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta disclosed that the Pentagon has plans in place for establishing humanitarian corridors in Syria. “Anything that takes out the Assad regime is a step in the right direction,” he said.

The same line is coming from Paris. French president Nicholas Sarkozy was the first Western leader to publicly back humanitarian corridors.

Last week, Foreign Minister Alan Juppé said that it may be necessary for the UN Security Council to consider a resolution authorising the use of force. “We cannot allow the [Damascus] regime to defy us,” he said. If the peace plan fails, “we would have to move to a new stage with a Chapter Seven resolution to stop this tragedy”.

May 5, when former UN secretary general Kofi Annan is set to present his report on the peace process, will be “a moment of truth”, Juppé said. France has been discussing invoking Chapter 7 of the UN Charter, which allows for military action, with other powers, he added.

Secretary of State Hilary Clinton threatened to invoke Chapter 7 at the April 18 “Friends of Syria” meeting in Paris.

On Thursday, Turkish foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu told parliament, “In the face of developments in Syria, we are taking into consideration any kind of possibility in line with our national security and interests.” This includes setting up a buffer zone on the Syrian side of the border that Turkey wants to be policed by NATO.

On April 9, four Syrian refugees and a Turkish policeman and a translator were wounded in the Kilis refugee camp on the 560-mile Turkish-Syrian border. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan responded by threatening to invoke Article 5 of the NATO treaty, stipulating that an attack against a NATO member is considered an attack against all members.

The Arab states are also ready to line up behind a military attack on Damascus. The head of the Arab League, Nabil el-Arabi, said Arab foreign ministers have asked him to convene a meeting of all the Syrian opposition factions on May 16. On Friday, Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud met with Qatar’s crown prince Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in Riyadh to plan a joint intervention at the meeting.

Regime change in Syria ultimately targets its main regional ally, Iran, as well as the oil and military interests of Russia and China in the region. Tensions are worsening daily as a result.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdolahian, has denounced “The parties who back sending weapons to Syria” as “responsible for killing innocent people.”

Russian foreign ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said, “Opposition groups have essentially reverted to waging wide-scale terror in the region.”

On Saturday, during a visit to Moscow, Chinese vice foreign minister Cheng Guoping said that both sides “hold 100 percent coinciding positions on the issues of North Korea and Syria.”

By Chris Marsden

30 April 2012

@ WSWS.org

Last December, a super-secret RQ-170 Sentinel, part of a far-reaching program of CIA drone surveillance over Iran, went down (or was shot down, or computer-jacked and hacked down) and was recovered intact by the Iranian military.  This week, an Iranian general proudly announced that his country’s experts had accessed the plane’s computer — he offered information he claimed proved it — and were now “reverse-engineering” the drone to create one of their own.

Most or all of his claims have been widely doubted, derided, or simply dismissed in our world, and for all I know his was indeed pure bluster and bluff.  But if so, it still managed to catch an urge that lay behind a couple of hundred years of global history: to adapt the most sophisticated aspects of the West to resist the West.  That urge has been essential to the way our planet has developed. After all, much of the last two centuries might well be headlined in technological, economic, and even political terms, “The History of Reverse-Engineering.”

Starting in the eighteenth century, whether you were in the Ottoman Empire or China, wherever, in fact, cannon-mounted European ships appeared to break down doors and conquer countries or subject them to an alien will, the issue of reverse-engineering was always close at hand.  For endless decades, the preeminent question, the crucial thing to debate, was just what could be adapted from the Western arsenal of weapons, politics, technology, and ideas, and how it could be melded with local culture, how it could be given Ottoman, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, or [fill in the blank] “characteristics” and made to check or reverse the course of events.  The rise of Japan in the nineteenth century and the more recent spectacular growth of China are, without any doubt, cases of the history of reverse-engineering.

Whatever the successes and failures of that process, the question today — as the U.S. declines, Europe stagnates, and the explosive BRICS countries head for center stage — is perhaps this: Can reverse-engineering really take us any farther, or will it in the end simply take us down?  Isn’t it time for something new in the engineering universe or perhaps for the coming of reverse-reverse-engineering somewhere on this weather-freaky, overtaxed planet of ours?

Who better to offer us a little rundown on that planet, end to end, top to bottom in its moment of global stress than Asia Times’ and TomDispatch’s own peripatetic author Pepe Escobar?  He’s seen it all.  Now, you will, too. Tom

A History of the World, BRIC by BRIC

Neoliberal Dragons, Eurasian Wet Dreams, and Robocop Fantasies

Goldman Sachs — via economist Jim O’Neill — invented the concept of a rising new bloc on the planet: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). Some cynics couldn’t help calling it the “Bloody Ridiculous Investment Concept.”

Not really. Goldman now expects the BRICS countries to account for almost 40% of global gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050, and to include four of the world’s top five economies.

Soon, in fact, that acronym may have to expand to include Turkey, Indonesia, South Korea and, yes, nuclear Iran: BRIIICTSS?  Despite its well-known problems as a nation under economic siege, Iran is also motoring along as part of the N-11, yet another distilled concept.  (It stands for the next 11 emerging economies.)

The multitrillion-dollar global question remains: Is the emergence of BRICS a signal that we have truly entered a new multipolar world?

Yale’s canny historian Paul Kennedy (of “imperial overstretch” fame) is convinced that we either are about to cross or have already crossed a “historical watershed” taking us far beyond the post-Cold War unipolar world of “the sole superpower.” There are, argues Kennedy, four main reasons for that: the slow erosion of the U.S. dollar (formerly 85% of global reserves, now less than 60%), the “paralysis of the European project,” Asia rising (the end of 500 years of Western hegemony), and the decrepitude of the United Nations.

The Group of Eight (G-8) is already increasingly irrelevant. The G-20, which includes the BRICS, might, however, prove to be the real thing. But there’s much to be done to cross that watershed rather than simply be swept over it willy-nilly: the reform of the U.N. Security Council, and above all, the reform of the Bretton Woods system, especially those two crucial institutions, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

On the other hand, willy-nilly may prove the way of the world.  After all, as emerging superstars, the BRICS have a ton of problems.  True, in only the last seven years Brazil has added 40 million people as middle-class consumers; by 2016, it will have invested another $900 billion — more than a third of its GDP — in energy and infrastructure; and it’s not as exposed as some BRICS members to the imponderables of world trade, since its exports are only 11% of GDP, even less than the U.S.

Still, the key problem remains the same: lack of good management, not to mention a swamp of corruption. Brazil’s brazen new monied class is turning out to be no less corrupt than the old, arrogant, comprador elites that used to run the country.

In India, the choice seems to be between manageable and unmanageable chaos. The corruption of the country’s political elite would make Shiva proud. Abuse of state power, nepotistic control of contracts related to infrastructure, the looting of mineral resources, real estate property scandals — they’ve got it all, even if India is not a Hindu Pakistan. Not yet anyway.

Since 1991, “reform” in India has meant only one thing: unbridled commerce and getting the state out of the economy. Not surprisingly then, nothing is being done to reform public institutions, which are a scandal in themselves. Efficient public administration? Don’t even think about it. In a nutshell, India is a chaotic economic dynamo and yet, in some sense, not even an emerging power, not to speak of a superpower.

Russia, too, is still trying to find the magic mix, including a competent state policy to exploit the country’s bounteous natural resources, extraordinary space, and impressive social talent.  It must modernize fast as, apart from Moscow and St. Petersburg, relative social backwardness prevails. Its leaders remain uneasy about neighboring China (aware that any Sino-Russian alliance would leave Russia as a distinctly junior partner).  They are distrustful of Washington, anxious over the depopulation of their eastern territories, and worried about the cultural and religious alienation of their Muslim population.

Then again the Putinator is back as president with his magic formula for modernization: a strategic German-Russian partnership that will benefit the power elite/business oligarchy, but not necessarily the majority of Russians.

Dead in the Woods

The post-World War II Bretton Woods system is now officially dead, totally illegitimate, but what are the BRICS planning to do about it?

At their summit in New Delhi in late March, they pushed for the creation of a BRICS development bank that could invest in infrastructure and provide them with back-up credit for whatever financial crises lie down the road. The BRICS know perfectly well that Washington and the European Union (EU) will never relinquish control of the IMF and the World Bank. Nonetheless, trade among these countries will reach an impressive $500 billion by 2015, mostly in their own currencies.

However, BRICS cohesion, to the extent it exists, centers mostly around shared frustration with the Masters of the Universe-style financial speculation that nearly sent the global economy off a cliff in 2008. True, the BRICS crew also has a notable convergence of policy and opinion when it comes to embattled Iran, an Arab Sprung Middle East, and Northern Africa. Still, for the moment the key problem they face is this: they don’t have an ideological or institutional alternative to neo-liberalism and the lordship of global finance.

As Vijay Prashad has noted, the Global North has done everything to prevent any serious discussion of how to reform the global financial casino. No wonder the head of the G-77 group of developing nations (now G-132, in fact), Thai ambassador Pisnau Chanvitan, has warned of “behavior that seems to indicate a desire for the dawn of a new neocolonialism.”

Meanwhile, things happen anyway, helter-skelter.  China, for instance, continues to informally advance the yuan as a globalizing, if not global, currency. It’s already trading in yuan with Russia and Australia, not to mention across Latin America and in the Middle East. Increasingly, the BRICS are betting on the yuan as their monetary alternative to a devalued U.S. dollar.

Japan is using both yen and yuan in its bilateral trade with its huge Asian neighbor. The fact is that there’s already an unacknowledged Asian free-trade zone in the making, with China, Japan, and South Korea on board.

What’s ahead, even if it includes a BRICS-bright future, will undoubtedly be very messy.  Just about anything is possible (verging on likely), from another Great Recession in the U.S. to European stagnation or even the collapse of the eurozone, to a BRICS-wide slowdown, a tempest in the currency markets, the collapse of financial institutions, and a global crash.

And talk about messy, who could forget what Dick Cheney said, while still Halliburton’s CEO, at the Institute of Petroleum in London in 1999: “The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.” No wonder when, as vice president, he came to power in 2001, his first order of business was to “liberate” Iraq’s oil. Of course, who doesn’t remember how that ended?

Now (different administration but same line of work), it’s an oil-embargo-cum-economic-war on Iran. The leadership in Beijing sees Washington’s whole Iran psychodrama as a regime-change plot, pure and simple, having nothing to do with nuclear weapons. Then again, the winner so far in the Iran imbroglio is China. With Iran’s banking system in crisis, and the U.S. embargo playing havoc with that country’s economy, Beijing can essentially dictate its terms for buying Iranian oil.

The Chinese are expanding Iran’s fleet of oil tankers, a deal worth more than $1 billion, and that other BRICS giant, India, is now purchasing even more Iranian oil than China. Yet Washington won’t apply its sanctions to BRICS members because these days, economically speaking, the U.S. needs them more than they need the U.S.

The World Through Chinese Eyes

Which brings us to the dragon in the room: China.

What’s the ultimate Chinese obsession? Stability, stability, stability.

The usual self-description of the system there as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is, of course, as mythical as a gorgon. In reality, think hardcore neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics led by men who have every intention of saving global capitalism.

At the moment, China is smack in the middle of a tectonic, structural shift from an export/investment model to a services/consumer-led model. In terms of its explosive economic growth, the last decades have been almost unimaginable to most Chinese (and the rest of the world), but according to the Financial Times, they have also left the country’s richest 1% controlling 40%-60% of total household wealth. How to find a way to overcome such staggering collateral damage? How to make a system with tremendous inbuilt problems function for 1.3 billion people?

Enter “stability-mania.” Back in 2007, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was warning that the Chinese economy could become “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.” These were the famous “Four Uns.”

Today, the collective leadership, including the next Prime Minister, Li Leqiang, has gone a nervous step further, purging “unstable” from the Party’s lexicon.  For all practical purposes, the next phase in the country’s development is already upon us.

It will be quite something to watch in the years to come.

How will the nominally “communist” princelings — the sons and daughters of top revolutionary Party leaders, all immensely wealthy, thanks, in part, to their cozy arrangements with Western corporations, plus the bribes, the alliances with gangsters, all those “concessions” to the highest bidder, and the whole Western-linked crony-capitalist oligarchy — lead China beyond the “Four Modernizations”? Especially with all that fabulous wealth to loot.

The Obama administration, expressing its own anxiety, has responded to the clear emergence of China as a power to be reckoned with via a “strategic pivot” — from its disastrous wars in the Greater Middle East to Asia.  The Pentagon likes to call this “rebalancing” (though things are anything but rebalanced or over for the U.S. in the Middle East).

Before 9/11, the Bush administration had been focused on China as its future global enemy number one.  Then 9/11 redirected it to what the Pentagon called “the arc of instability,” the oil heartlands of the planet extending from the Middle East through Central Asia.  Given Washington’s distraction, Beijing calculated that it might enjoy a window of roughly two decades in which the pressure would be largely off.  In those years, it could focus on a breakneck version of internal development, while the U.S. was squandering mountains of money on its nonsensical “Global War on Terror.”

Twelve years later, that window is being slammed shut as from India, Australia, and the Philippines to South Korea and Japan, the U.S. declares itself back in the hegemony business in Asia. Doubts that this was the new American path were dispelled by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s November 2011 manifesto in Foreign Policy magazine, none too subtly labeled “America’s Pacific Century.” (And she was talking about this century, not the last one!)

The American mantra is always the same: “American security,” whose definition is: whatever happens on the planet.  Whether in the oil-rich Persian Gulf where Washington “helps” allies Israel and Saudi Arabia because they feel threatened by Iran, or Asia where similar help is offered to a growing corps of countries that are said to feel threatened by China, it’s always in the name of U.S. security. In either case, in just about any case, that’s what trumps all else.

As a result, if there is a 33-year Wall of Mistrust between the U.S. and Iran, there is a new, growing Great Wall of Mistrust between the U.S. and China.  Recently, Wang Jisi, Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and a top Chinese strategic analyst, offered the Beijing leadership’s perspective on that “Pacific Century” in an influential paper he coauthored.

China, he and his coauthor write, now expects to be treated as a first-class power.  After all, it “successfully weathered… the 1997-98 global financial crisis,” caused, in Beijing’s eyes, by “deep deficiencies in the U.S. economy and politics. China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy and seems to be the number two in world politics, as well… Chinese leaders do not credit these successes to the United States or to the U.S.-led world order.”

The U.S., Wang adds, “is seen in China generally as a declining power over the long run… It is now a question of how many years, rather than how many decades, before China replaces the United States as the largest economy in the world… part of an emerging new structure.”  (Think: BRICS.)

In sum, as Wang and his coauthor portray it, influential Chinese see their country’s development model providing “an alternative to Western democracy and experiences for other developing countries to learn from, while many developing countries that have introduced Western values and political systems are experiencing disorder and chaos.”

Put it all in a nutshell and you have a Chinese vision of the world in which a fading U.S. still yearns for global hegemony and remains powerful enough to block emerging powers — China and the other BRICS — from their twenty-first century destiny.

Dr. Zbig’s Eurasian Wet Dream

Now, how does the U.S. political elite see that same world? Virtually no one is better qualified to handle that subject than former national security adviser, BTC pipeline facilitator, and briefly Obama ghost adviser, Dr. Zbigniew (“Zbig”) Brzezinski.  And he doesn’t hesitate to do so in his latest book, Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.

If the Chinese have their strategic eyes on those other BRICS nations, Dr. Zbig remains stuck on the Old World, newly configured.  He is now arguing that, for the U.S. to maintain some form of global hegemony, it must bet on an “expanded West.”  That would mean strengthening the Europeans (especially in energy terms), while embracing Turkey, which he imagines as a template for new Arab democracies, and engaging Russia, politically and economically, in a “strategically sober and prudent fashion.”

Turkey, by the way, is no such template because, despite the Arab Spring, for the foreseeable future, there are no new Arab democracies. Still, Zbig believes that Turkey can help Europe, and so the U.S., in far more practical ways to solve certain global energy problems by facilitating its “unimpeded access across the Caspian Sea to Central Asia’s oil and gas.”

Under the present circumstances, however, this, too, remains something of a fantasy.  After all, Turkey can only become a key transit country in the great energy game on the Eurasian chessboard I’ve long labeled Pipelineistan if the Europeans get their act together.  They would have to convince the energy-rich, autocratic “republic” of Turkmenistan to ignore its powerful Russian neighbor and sell them all the natural gas they need.  And then there’s that other energy matter that looks unlikely at the moment: Washington and Brussels would have to ditch counterproductive sanctions and embargos against Iran (and the war games that go with them) and start doing serious business with that country.

Dr. Zbig nonetheless proposes the notion of a two-speed Europe as the key to future American power on the planet.  Think of it as an upbeat version of a scenario in which the present Eurozone semi-collapses.  He would maintain the leading role of the inept bureaucratic fat cats in Brussels now running the EU, and support another “Europe” (mostly the southern “Club Med” countries) outside the euro, with nominally free movement of people and goods between the two. His bet — and in this he reflects a key strand of Washington thinking — is that a two-speed Europe, a Eurasian Big Mac, still joined at the hip to America, could be a globally critical player for the rest of the twenty-first century.

And then, of course, Dr. Zbig displays all his Cold Warrior colors, extolling an American future “stability in the Far East” inspired by “the role Britain played in the nineteenth century as a stabilizer and balancer of Europe.”  We’re talking, in other words, about this century’s number one gunboat diplomat.  He graciously concedes that a “comprehensive American-Chinese global partnership” would still be possible, but only if Washington retains a significant geopolitical presence in what he still calls the “Far East” — “whether China approves or not.”

The answer will be “not.”

In a way, all of this is familiar stuff, as is much of actual Washington policy today.  In his case, it’s really a remix of his 1997 magnum opus The Grand Chessboard  in which, he once again certifies that “the huge Trans-Eurasian continent is the central arena of world affairs.” Only now reality has taught him that Eurasia can’t be conquered and America’s best shot is to try to bring Turkey and Russia into the fold.

Robocop Rules

Yet Brzezinski looks positively benign when you compare his ideas to Hillary Clinton’s recent pronouncements, including her address to the tongue-twistingly named World Affairs Council 2012 NATO Conference.  There, as the Obama administration regularly does, she highlighted “NATO’s enduring relationship with Afghanistan” and praised negotiations between the U.S. and Kabul over “a long-term strategic partnership between our two nations.”

Translation; despite being outmaneuvered by a minority Pashtun insurgency for years, neither the Pentagon nor NATO have any intention of rebalancing out of their holdings in the Greater Middle East.  Already negotiating with President Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul for staying rights through 2024, the U.S. has every intention of holding onto three major strategic Afghan bases: Bagram, Shindand (near the Iranian border), and Kandahar (near the Pakistani border). Only the terminally naïve would believe the Pentagon capable of voluntarily abandoning such sterling outposts for the monitoring of Central Asia and strategic competitors Russia and China.

NATO, Clinton added ominously, will “expand its defense capabilities for the twenty-first century,” including the missile defense system the alliance approved at its last meeting in Lisbon in 2010.

It will be fascinating to see what the possible election of socialist François Hollande as French president might mean.  Interested in a deeper strategic partnership with the BRICS, he is committed to the end of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency.  The question is: Would his victory throw a monkey wrench into NATO’s works, after these years under the Great Liberator of Libya, that neo-Napoleonic image-maker Nicolas Sarkozy (for whom France was just mustard in Washington’s steak tartar).

No matter what either Dr. Zbig or Hillary might think, most European countries, fed up with their black-hole adventures in Afghanistan and Libya, and with the way NATO now serves U.S. global interests, support Hollande on this. But it will still be an uphill battle. The destruction and overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan regime was the highpoint of the recent NATO agenda of regime change in MENA (the Middle East-Northern Africa). And NATO remains Washington’s plan B for the future, if the usual network of think tanks, endowments, funds, foundations, NGOs, and even the U.N. fail to provoke what could be described as YouTube regime change.

In a nutshell: after going to war on three continents (in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya), turning the Mediterranean into a virtual NATO lake, and patrolling the Arabian Sea non-stop, NATO will be, according to Hillary, riding on “a bet on America’s leadership and strength, just as we did in the twentieth century, for this century and beyond.” So 21 years after the end of the Soviet Union — NATO’s original raison d’etre — this could be the way the world ends; not with a bang, but with NATO, in whimpering mode, still fulfilling the role of perpetual global Robocop.

We’re back once again with Dr. Zbig and the idea of America as the “promoter and guarantor of unity” in the West, and as “balance and conciliator” in the East (for which it needs bases from the Persian Gulf to Japan, including those Afghan ones). And don’t forget that the Pentagon has never given up the idea of attaining Full Spectrum Dominance.

For all that military strength, however, it’s worth keeping in mind that this is distinctly a New World (and not in North America either).  Against the guns and the gunboats, the missiles and the drones, there is economic power.  Currency wars are now raging. BRICS members China and Russia have cordilleras of cash. South America is uniting fast. The Putinator has offered South Korea an oil pipeline. Iran is planning to sell all its oil and gas in a basket of currencies, none dollars. China is paying to expand its blue-water Navy and its anti-ship missile weaponry. One day, Tokyo may finally realize that, as long as it is occupied by Wall Street and the Pentagon, it will live in eternal recession. Even Australia may eventually refuse to be forced into a counterproductive trade war with China.

So this twenty-first century world of ours is shaping up right now largely as a confrontation between the U.S./NATO and the BRICS, warts and all on every side. The danger: that somewhere down the line it turns into a Full Spectrum Confrontation. Because make no mistake, unlike Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi, the BRICS will actually be able to shoot back.

By Pepe Escobar

26 April 2012

@ TomDispatch

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times, a TomDispatch regular, and a political analyst for al-Jazeera and RT. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009).