Video Shows U.S. Soldiers Killing Unarmed Iraqi Civilians
Bush brings his brand of compassionate conservatism to Iraq.
Another proud day in U.S. military history
Witness to a war crime
I ask readers to please forward this video to mainstream media outlets and to those in government demanding that action be taken to investigate this apparent murder of innocent Iraqi civilians. We can not witness murder and not take action without being complicit in the crime!
hELP US TO UNSURE THAT MORE WAR CRIMES DON'T GO UNPUNISHED
Click here for snipet of html, which will allow you to place this video on your website
2 Minute Video - Click to play - Uploaded 03/23/07
Sunday, March 25, 2007
We
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.
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Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use to first, shrink wrap people's brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.
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To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.
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The battle...has to begin here. In America. The only institution more powerful than the U.S. government is American civil society. The rest of us are subjects of slave nations. We are by no means powerless, but you have the power of proximity. You have access to the Imperial Palace and the Emperor's chambers. Empire's conquests are being carried out in your name.
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Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
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Either way, change will come. It could be bloody, or it could be beautiful. It depends on us.
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It's very, very important to understand that war is the result of a flawed peace, and we must understand the systems that are at work here. You know, we must understand that the resistance movement in Iraq is a resistance movement that all of us have to support, because it's our war, too.
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People are so isolated, and so alone, and so suspicious, and so competitive with each other, and so sure that they are about to be conned by their neighbor, or by their mother, or by their sister, or their grandmother. What's the use of having fifty percent of the world's wealth, or whatever it is that you have, if you're going to live this pathetic, terrified life?
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You have come to a stage where you almost have to work on yourself. You know, on finding some tranquility with which to respond to these things, because I realize that the biggest risk that many of us run is beginning to get inured to the horrors.
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There have been tens of thousands of suicides by farmers in the country, and the government wants to dispute what a suicide is, who a farmer is.
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The mullahs of the Islamic world and the mullahs of the Hindu world and the mullahs of the Christian world are all on the same side. And we are against them all.
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Torture has been privatized now, so you have obviously the whole scandal in America about the abuse of prisoners and the fact that, army people might be made to pay a price, but who are the privatized torturers accountable too?
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Why not have your nuclear bombs in your briefcase? All of these policies that America upholds, nuclear weapons, privatization, all of these things are going to mutate and metamorphosis into these dangerous things.
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The fact is that America's weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.
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Saturday, March 3, 2007
The Only Dream Worth Dreaming!
The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you are alive, and die only when you are dead. To love, to be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of the life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."
Arundhati Roy
Arundhati Roy
Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving
Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism relies for its success on a network of agents - corrupt local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then-Maharashtra government signed a power purchase agreement that gave Enron profits that amounted to 60 percent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!
Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.
The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO - so who can accuse those organizations of being antiturkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?
As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New Genocide in this new era of economic interdependence can be facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.
In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity. Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the world's cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?
Unlike in the old days, the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diarrhea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.
The best allegory for New Racism is the tradition of "turkey pardoning" in the United States. Every year since 1947, the National Turkey Federation has presented the US President with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the President spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press. (Soon they'll even speak English!)
That's how New Racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys - the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) - are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park. The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically they're for the pot. But the Fortunate Fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the WTO - so who can accuse those organizations of being antiturkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee - so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalization? There's a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?
As part of the project of New Racism we also have New Genocide. New Genocide in this new era of economic interdependence can be facilitated by economic sanctions. New Genocide means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Denis Halliday, who was the UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between 1997 and 1998 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.
In the new era, apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalize inequity. Why else would it be that the US taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer twenty times more than a garment made in Britain? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa beans, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try to turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 percent of the world's cocoa beans produce only 5 percent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidized electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonizing regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes and repay them some $382 billion a year?
Friday, March 2, 2007
A Great Video About The Future Of The World
Someone posted this on MSR (It's not partisan or anything). Just watch it, you'll be both glad you did... and horrified at the same time!
Shift Happens (Now you know)
Shift Happens (Now you know)
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
Oh George! That Texas Education Must Have "f*****" You Up When You Were Very Small?!
Whats wrong with Bush?
Bush 10 Years Ago And Now
TOP 10 G W B Moments!!(Enjoy)
And Last. Hillarious Bush Impersonation!This is the BEST!!
Bush 10 Years Ago And Now
TOP 10 G W B Moments!!(Enjoy)
And Last. Hillarious Bush Impersonation!This is the BEST!!
'In Less than Three Years’ : The cliché of US sponsored “democracy” to justify invasion and mass murder
This is a bit old, but its a very good article!!
'In Less than Three Years’ : The cliché of US sponsored “democracy” to justify invasion and mass murder
by Ghali Hassan
Global Research, February 4, 2006
In less than three years, the nation has gone from dictatorship to liberation, to sovereignty, to a constitution, to national elections. At the same time, our coalition has been relentless in shutting off terrorist infiltration, clearing out insurgent strongholds, and turning over territory to Iraqi security forces. George W. Bush, State of the Union, 01 February 2006.
As the pretexts to justify the illegal war of aggression against Iraq started to collapse one after the other, the Bush Administration, its vassals and the mass media adopted the cliché of “democracy” to justify the invasion and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. However, from the outset of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. objective was conspicuous; to destroy Iraq, install a puppet government and pillage the nation’s resources.
In less than three years, the nation has gone from a safe and functioning nation to brutally occupied and chaotic nation. The health care services have collapsed. Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of six months and 5 years has increased from 4% before the invasion to 7.7%. In other words, despite the 13-years long genocidal sanctions, Iraqi children were living much better (by 3.7%) under the regime of Saddam Hussein than under the tyranny of George W. Bush. Lack of clean water and adequate supply of electricity have exacerbated the problem and encouraged various infectious diseases, particularly among children, infants and the pregnant women.
In less than three years, one of the best education systems in the region has deteriorated. Schools have been taken over and transformed into military bases to accommodate the occupying forces. School’s attendance, particularly among girls is at its lowest level. Women’s rights have all disappeared. Unemployment has jumped from an acceptable level to around 60-70 per cent and most Iraqi remain economically inactive. The living conditions of once prosperous people have worsened significantly and the nation is descending into extreme poverty.
Iraq is one of the most diverse and well-integrated societies in the Middle East. There is over a million Kurds in Baghdad. There are millions of Turkmen and Assyrian and other minorities all over the country. Not long before the invasion the New York Times op-ed that Iraq’s ethnic and religious diversity must be used “to our advantages”.
In less than three years, peace between Iraq’s diverse communities has disappeared and replaced by violence and mistrust. Small minorities, such as the Christian minority have fled the country. To speed up the breakage of the Iraqi society, the U.S. Administration put in power a collection of Iraqi expatriate criminals and fanatics and identified them according to their religion and ethnicity. Together with their U.S. minders, they introduced a culture of corruption, fear and violence unheard of in the history of Iraq. Assassination for vengeance and the liquidation of any thing looks like an opposition are committed in Gestapo-like methods.
In less than three years, a vibrant community of scientists, academics and prominent Iraqi politicians and intellectuals has been liquidated in cold blood by criminal elements of the Occupation, including the Israeli Mossad. The objective is to cement sectarian divisions and remove Iraq’s nationalism to service U.S.-Israel imperialist agenda.
Knowing the full consequences of it action, the U.S. Administration deliberately dissolved the Iraqi army and security forces and replaced them with sectarian-based militia groups. The Iranian-trained Badr brigade, the Israeli-trained Kurdish Peshmerga, and other U.S.-trained and armed militias constitute the new Iraqi army and police. Their lack of loyalty to the Iraqi nation, rivalries and hostilities are exploited by U.S. forces and used against each others. They are deployed to fight their Iraqi brothers in different ethnic areas, and in the process foment civil strife. It is a U.S. policy of creating sectarian violence which eventually will lead to “civil war”.
Of course, the ongoing Occupation is justified not only “to spread democracy”, but also as necessary to prevent “civil war”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evidence shows that the U.S. and its collaborators are behind every step leading to violence and “civil war”. “[W]e have widespread evidence that the outside forces are attempting to instigate a civil war here and Iraqis are conscious of that and have made determined effort not to respond to it”, said Dr. Saad Jawad, a political scientist at Baghdad University.
In less than three years, the nation has more prisons and prisoners than at any time in its history. Daily mass arrest, sadistic torture, abuse and humiliation of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children by U.S. soldiers and their vassals have become parts of Western moral values. One only has to look into the Nazi archive to find something similar to these criminal violations of human rights.
What George W. Bush brought to Iraq is daily terror against the Iraqi civilian populations. Entire towns and villages are taken hostages by U.S. forces and bombed indiscriminately. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, have been needlessly murdered. And many more have been wounded and permanently handicapped. In October 2004, the reputed and peer-reviewed British medical journal, the Lancet published a conservative estimate of 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children, killed by U.S. forces between March 2003 and October 2004.
This normalised Western terrorism, including a widespread Nazis-like anti-Muslim and anti-Arabs hatred in West Europe, is creating legitimate Resistance around the world, not “terrorism”. The victims of Western terrorism have been transformed from victims into perpetrators of terrorism. This flawed propaganda is promoted by Western media and Western “progressives” to justify the ongoing Occupation of Iraq. It is true that Iraq is “a heaven for terrorists”, but Iraqis and most Muslims, see the terrorists as Western terrorists.
There are more than 200,000 armed foreigners in Iraq killing Iraqi women and children with impunity, and deliberately instilling fear among the Iraqi population. Iraqis did not ask George Bush and his vassals for protection from “terrorism”. The majority of Iraqis are vehemently against the Occupation and support Resistance attacks against these so-called “Multinational Forces”, and their collaborators.
In November 2005, indiscriminate U.S. bombings of civilian centres killed 18 innocent Iraqi children in Ramadi, 97 civilians in Husaybah, and 40 civilians in Qaim. Westerners need to take a hard look in the mirror to see who the real terrorists are. Not surprisingly, these crimes of Western terrorism against the Iraqi people have become daily routine in a country ruled by foreign occupying forces and without the slightest barking from (supposed to be sovereign) a puppet government.
In less than three years, the Iraqi people have lost their sovereignty and national constitution. They were replaced with fake sovereignty and a U.S.-crafted constitution that strips Iraqi women of all of their human rights and divides Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines. In addition, Iraqis have lost their freedom, including freedom of movement, and their rights to organise and protest. They are replaced by insecurity, curfews, and martial laws.
In less than three years, the U.S. orchestrated three illegitimate and fraudulent elections in order to manipulate public opinions, Americans in particular, and legitimise the Occupation. The elections were unfair, undemocratic, and based on sectarianism rather than politics. Indeed, all the so-called “parties” are divided on sectarian lines and do not subscribe to any political ideology. As mentioned earlier, the U.S. aim was to produce a puppet government devoid of nationalism and totally dependent on U.S. forces, and bent on carrying out U.S. colonial agenda. It is traditional pattern of Western colonialism. Colonisers have always used the clichés of “democracy” and “human rights” to manipulate their citizens into believing that their governments are morally responsible and have no evil intention.
Of course, every one knows that the U.S. is not interested in participatory democracy or human rights, particularly in the Middle East. The U.S. is more interested in submissive and violent colonial dictatorships in service of U.S. and Israel interests. This strategy allows for the suppression of any support for the Palestinian people provided by popular democracy. We all know that the U.S. form of democracy (even at home) is flawed and corrupt. For example, Kuwait – occupied by U.S. troops since 1991 – is still a brutal dictatorship, not democracy. We all know that the fraudulent and undemocratic elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia were praised in all Western capitals. Meanwhile the landslide victory of the Resistance movement, Hamas in the January 25 free and faire Palestinian legislative elections were condemned by the U.S. and its European vassals because Hamas is not beholden to Israeli and Western interests. Indeed, Palestinians under Israeli’ brutal Occupation may have to endure further punishment as a result of electing the “wrong” candidates.
In less than three years, without the participation of the Iraqi people, the Bush and Blair governments, and the puppet government are in the process of transferring Iraq's entire economy into a “free market” economy to serve U.S. corporate interests. The long-awaited covert plan to transfer Iraq's oil resources to U.S. and British Oil Corporations is on the table. According to the so-called production sharing agreements (PSAs) – proposed by the U.S. State Department before the 2003 invasion and put aside to be implemented after the December 15 2005 illegitimate elections – Iraqis are set to lose control of their own economic and political fate. (See my Endless Looting of Iraq).
In less than three years, Iraq has gone from a major oil exporter to an importer of oil and petroleum products. Iraqi oil prices have increased dramatically, and for the first time Iraqis are queuing to buy petrol. Many Iraqis believe that it is cheaper to buy a barrel of oil in Kuwait and bring by limousine to Iraq than buy it in Iraq.
The increase in oil prices was forced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). History shows that wherever the IMF went, poverty went up and standards of livings went down. Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Russia are just few examples of IMF initiated destruction. Consistent with its policy of destroying the livelihoods of ordinary peoples around the world, the IMF argued the Iraqi puppet government on 23 December 2005 to start “controlling the wage and pensions bill reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products” in favour of U.S. corporations.
In less than three years, an entire nation has been destroyed beyond recognition. The birthplace of human civilisation has been deliberately looted and raped of its cultural heritage. Vibrant towns and cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarra, Hilla, Najef and Qaim that had taken many years and generations to build have been completely destroyed. More than 500,000 Iraqis have been displaced and ethnically cleansed from their towns and cities. “Clean words can mask dirty deeds”, is how the destruction of Iraq is propagated as “reconstruction”.
In less than three years, every stone has been turned over and every lie has been exposed. Westerners, Americans in particular need to pull themselves out of ignorance and stop pretending that “things will get better” while their fellow human beings in Iraq continue to be slaughtered en mass. It is time to demand an end to violence and racism, and hold the war criminals accountable.
'In Less than Three Years’ : The cliché of US sponsored “democracy” to justify invasion and mass murder
by Ghali Hassan
Global Research, February 4, 2006
In less than three years, the nation has gone from dictatorship to liberation, to sovereignty, to a constitution, to national elections. At the same time, our coalition has been relentless in shutting off terrorist infiltration, clearing out insurgent strongholds, and turning over territory to Iraqi security forces. George W. Bush, State of the Union, 01 February 2006.
As the pretexts to justify the illegal war of aggression against Iraq started to collapse one after the other, the Bush Administration, its vassals and the mass media adopted the cliché of “democracy” to justify the invasion and the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children. However, from the outset of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. objective was conspicuous; to destroy Iraq, install a puppet government and pillage the nation’s resources.
In less than three years, the nation has gone from a safe and functioning nation to brutally occupied and chaotic nation. The health care services have collapsed. Acute malnutrition among Iraqi children between the ages of six months and 5 years has increased from 4% before the invasion to 7.7%. In other words, despite the 13-years long genocidal sanctions, Iraqi children were living much better (by 3.7%) under the regime of Saddam Hussein than under the tyranny of George W. Bush. Lack of clean water and adequate supply of electricity have exacerbated the problem and encouraged various infectious diseases, particularly among children, infants and the pregnant women.
In less than three years, one of the best education systems in the region has deteriorated. Schools have been taken over and transformed into military bases to accommodate the occupying forces. School’s attendance, particularly among girls is at its lowest level. Women’s rights have all disappeared. Unemployment has jumped from an acceptable level to around 60-70 per cent and most Iraqi remain economically inactive. The living conditions of once prosperous people have worsened significantly and the nation is descending into extreme poverty.
Iraq is one of the most diverse and well-integrated societies in the Middle East. There is over a million Kurds in Baghdad. There are millions of Turkmen and Assyrian and other minorities all over the country. Not long before the invasion the New York Times op-ed that Iraq’s ethnic and religious diversity must be used “to our advantages”.
In less than three years, peace between Iraq’s diverse communities has disappeared and replaced by violence and mistrust. Small minorities, such as the Christian minority have fled the country. To speed up the breakage of the Iraqi society, the U.S. Administration put in power a collection of Iraqi expatriate criminals and fanatics and identified them according to their religion and ethnicity. Together with their U.S. minders, they introduced a culture of corruption, fear and violence unheard of in the history of Iraq. Assassination for vengeance and the liquidation of any thing looks like an opposition are committed in Gestapo-like methods.
In less than three years, a vibrant community of scientists, academics and prominent Iraqi politicians and intellectuals has been liquidated in cold blood by criminal elements of the Occupation, including the Israeli Mossad. The objective is to cement sectarian divisions and remove Iraq’s nationalism to service U.S.-Israel imperialist agenda.
Knowing the full consequences of it action, the U.S. Administration deliberately dissolved the Iraqi army and security forces and replaced them with sectarian-based militia groups. The Iranian-trained Badr brigade, the Israeli-trained Kurdish Peshmerga, and other U.S.-trained and armed militias constitute the new Iraqi army and police. Their lack of loyalty to the Iraqi nation, rivalries and hostilities are exploited by U.S. forces and used against each others. They are deployed to fight their Iraqi brothers in different ethnic areas, and in the process foment civil strife. It is a U.S. policy of creating sectarian violence which eventually will lead to “civil war”.
Of course, the ongoing Occupation is justified not only “to spread democracy”, but also as necessary to prevent “civil war”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Evidence shows that the U.S. and its collaborators are behind every step leading to violence and “civil war”. “[W]e have widespread evidence that the outside forces are attempting to instigate a civil war here and Iraqis are conscious of that and have made determined effort not to respond to it”, said Dr. Saad Jawad, a political scientist at Baghdad University.
In less than three years, the nation has more prisons and prisoners than at any time in its history. Daily mass arrest, sadistic torture, abuse and humiliation of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children by U.S. soldiers and their vassals have become parts of Western moral values. One only has to look into the Nazi archive to find something similar to these criminal violations of human rights.
What George W. Bush brought to Iraq is daily terror against the Iraqi civilian populations. Entire towns and villages are taken hostages by U.S. forces and bombed indiscriminately. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi men, women and children, have been needlessly murdered. And many more have been wounded and permanently handicapped. In October 2004, the reputed and peer-reviewed British medical journal, the Lancet published a conservative estimate of 100,000 Iraqis, mostly women and children, killed by U.S. forces between March 2003 and October 2004.
This normalised Western terrorism, including a widespread Nazis-like anti-Muslim and anti-Arabs hatred in West Europe, is creating legitimate Resistance around the world, not “terrorism”. The victims of Western terrorism have been transformed from victims into perpetrators of terrorism. This flawed propaganda is promoted by Western media and Western “progressives” to justify the ongoing Occupation of Iraq. It is true that Iraq is “a heaven for terrorists”, but Iraqis and most Muslims, see the terrorists as Western terrorists.
There are more than 200,000 armed foreigners in Iraq killing Iraqi women and children with impunity, and deliberately instilling fear among the Iraqi population. Iraqis did not ask George Bush and his vassals for protection from “terrorism”. The majority of Iraqis are vehemently against the Occupation and support Resistance attacks against these so-called “Multinational Forces”, and their collaborators.
In November 2005, indiscriminate U.S. bombings of civilian centres killed 18 innocent Iraqi children in Ramadi, 97 civilians in Husaybah, and 40 civilians in Qaim. Westerners need to take a hard look in the mirror to see who the real terrorists are. Not surprisingly, these crimes of Western terrorism against the Iraqi people have become daily routine in a country ruled by foreign occupying forces and without the slightest barking from (supposed to be sovereign) a puppet government.
In less than three years, the Iraqi people have lost their sovereignty and national constitution. They were replaced with fake sovereignty and a U.S.-crafted constitution that strips Iraqi women of all of their human rights and divides Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines. In addition, Iraqis have lost their freedom, including freedom of movement, and their rights to organise and protest. They are replaced by insecurity, curfews, and martial laws.
In less than three years, the U.S. orchestrated three illegitimate and fraudulent elections in order to manipulate public opinions, Americans in particular, and legitimise the Occupation. The elections were unfair, undemocratic, and based on sectarianism rather than politics. Indeed, all the so-called “parties” are divided on sectarian lines and do not subscribe to any political ideology. As mentioned earlier, the U.S. aim was to produce a puppet government devoid of nationalism and totally dependent on U.S. forces, and bent on carrying out U.S. colonial agenda. It is traditional pattern of Western colonialism. Colonisers have always used the clichés of “democracy” and “human rights” to manipulate their citizens into believing that their governments are morally responsible and have no evil intention.
Of course, every one knows that the U.S. is not interested in participatory democracy or human rights, particularly in the Middle East. The U.S. is more interested in submissive and violent colonial dictatorships in service of U.S. and Israel interests. This strategy allows for the suppression of any support for the Palestinian people provided by popular democracy. We all know that the U.S. form of democracy (even at home) is flawed and corrupt. For example, Kuwait – occupied by U.S. troops since 1991 – is still a brutal dictatorship, not democracy. We all know that the fraudulent and undemocratic elections in Egypt and Saudi Arabia were praised in all Western capitals. Meanwhile the landslide victory of the Resistance movement, Hamas in the January 25 free and faire Palestinian legislative elections were condemned by the U.S. and its European vassals because Hamas is not beholden to Israeli and Western interests. Indeed, Palestinians under Israeli’ brutal Occupation may have to endure further punishment as a result of electing the “wrong” candidates.
In less than three years, without the participation of the Iraqi people, the Bush and Blair governments, and the puppet government are in the process of transferring Iraq's entire economy into a “free market” economy to serve U.S. corporate interests. The long-awaited covert plan to transfer Iraq's oil resources to U.S. and British Oil Corporations is on the table. According to the so-called production sharing agreements (PSAs) – proposed by the U.S. State Department before the 2003 invasion and put aside to be implemented after the December 15 2005 illegitimate elections – Iraqis are set to lose control of their own economic and political fate. (See my Endless Looting of Iraq).
In less than three years, Iraq has gone from a major oil exporter to an importer of oil and petroleum products. Iraqi oil prices have increased dramatically, and for the first time Iraqis are queuing to buy petrol. Many Iraqis believe that it is cheaper to buy a barrel of oil in Kuwait and bring by limousine to Iraq than buy it in Iraq.
The increase in oil prices was forced by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). History shows that wherever the IMF went, poverty went up and standards of livings went down. Argentina, Bolivia, Chile and Russia are just few examples of IMF initiated destruction. Consistent with its policy of destroying the livelihoods of ordinary peoples around the world, the IMF argued the Iraqi puppet government on 23 December 2005 to start “controlling the wage and pensions bill reducing subsidies on petroleum products, and expanding the participation of the private sector in the domestic market for petroleum products” in favour of U.S. corporations.
In less than three years, an entire nation has been destroyed beyond recognition. The birthplace of human civilisation has been deliberately looted and raped of its cultural heritage. Vibrant towns and cities like Fallujah, Ramadi, Samarra, Hilla, Najef and Qaim that had taken many years and generations to build have been completely destroyed. More than 500,000 Iraqis have been displaced and ethnically cleansed from their towns and cities. “Clean words can mask dirty deeds”, is how the destruction of Iraq is propagated as “reconstruction”.
In less than three years, every stone has been turned over and every lie has been exposed. Westerners, Americans in particular need to pull themselves out of ignorance and stop pretending that “things will get better” while their fellow human beings in Iraq continue to be slaughtered en mass. It is time to demand an end to violence and racism, and hold the war criminals accountable.
Saddam Hussein’s Last Words: "To the Hell that is Iraq!?"
What the Media has Deliberately Concealed
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, January 31, 2007
"On the Holy day of Eid, the world watched in horror at the barbaric lynching of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, allegedly for crimes against humanity. This public murder was sanctioned by the War Criminals, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.
The entire trial process was a mockery of justice, no less a Kangaroo Court. Defence counsels were brutally murdered, witnesses threatened and judges removed for being impartial and replaced by puppet judges. Yet, we are told that Iraq was invaded to promote democracy, freedom and justice."
(Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, 30 December 2006)
The barbaric lynching of Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, was a choreographed event, a carefully staged U.S. sponsored PSYOP, with a view to triggering social divisions and fomenting sectarian violence within Iraq and the broader Middle East.
In its coverage of the execution, the international media, in a highly convoluted fashion, combined the transcript of Saddam Hussein’s execution with “recollections” of so-called witness statements.
Moreover, the transcripts were often presented to readers without context or explanation. More generally, the translations from the Arabic were the object of manipulation and media distortion.
The execution of the Iraqi leader was carefully timed to occur during a sensitive time for Muslims. The execution fell during Eid ul-Adha, a holy day for Muslims. The date of the execution is perhaps one of the most compromising signals that the execution was indeed a psychological operation (PSYOP) launched by the United States.
The execution date was deliberately chosen during a sacred period for Muslims to exploit a divide between Shiites and Sunni. This sacred day was marked on Saturday, December 30, 2007 by Sunni Muslims in Iraq and was observed a day later on Sunday, December 31, 2007 by Iraq’s Shiites.
This is a strategic difference in dates that the executing of Saddam Hussein sought to expose and exploit to create sedition and division between Iraqis and Muslims. The day of the execution was deliberately chosen by its U.S. sponsors to occur on Saturday, December 30, 2006, the day that Sunni Muslims observed Eid ul-Adha.
The execution took place on December 30, with a view to enraging Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims. Concurrently, both the media and official U.S. statements pointed to the Shiites (and the "Shiite government") as being responsible for the execution.
Aside form the religious context, the execution was also illegal under the Iraqi legal code and constitution. This has been articulated by Rizgar Mohammad Amin, an Iraqi Kurd and one of the former judges in the questionable trial of Saddam Hussein.
The execution was carried out, as a psychological weapon, to usher in sectarian violence and division throughout the Middle East. The timing also coincided with several announcements and news reports of war plans by the United States and Israel in regards to Syria and Iran.
It is no coincidence that shortly after the execution the U.S. President identified Syria and Iran as the enemies of Iraq and raided an Iranian Consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The media disinformation campaign pertaining to the execution was coordinated with the instruments of war propaganda emanating from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence.
In the immediate wake of the execution, the global networks of the corporate media went into full gear to propagate the misinformation that the Pentagon wanted to convey to the general public.
The translated transcripts of Saddam Hussein’s last words, which had been scrupulously manipulated and distorted, were fed into the global news chain.
Presented below is the Global Research translation from the Arabic original audio-video believed to have been recorded on a cell phone. Also presented for purposes of comparison are several other "translations" from the same Arabic original.
Transcript: Our translation from the Arabic original
Background voices, which are very hard to hear, are having a conversation in the background and someone calls someone else in the execution chamber by "Ali" or is looking for "Ali."
Saddam Hussein: "I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God."
Saddam Hussein: "Oh God." [saying this in preparation, as is Middle Eastern custom, as the noose is put around his neck]
One voice leads customary Muslim prayer (called a salvat): "May God's blessings be upon Mohammed and his companions/household [family]."
All Voices, including Saddam Hussein, repeat the customary prayer: "May God's blessings be upon Mohammed and his companions/household [family]."
A group of voices: "Moqtada...Moqtada ...Moqtada." [Meaning the young Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr] …
Saddam with amusement: "Moqtada...Moqtada! Do you consider this bravery?" [This can also be translated as meaning "Is this your manhood?"]
Several individuals say several times: "To Hell [hell-fire]!" [This can be translated as "Go to Hell!"]
Saddam Hussein mockingly replies/asks: "To the hell that is Iraq!?"
Others voices: "Long live Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr."
Single Voice: "Please do not [stop]. The man is being executed. Please no, please stop."
Saddam Hussein starts recitation of final Muslim prayers: "I bear witness that there is no god but God and I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God. I bear witness that there is no god but God and I testify that Mohammed..." [Saddam Hussein is suddenly interrupted without finishing his prayer with the opening of the trap door.]
Several Voices: "The tyrant [dictator] has collapsed!"
Other voices: "May God’s blessings upon Mohammed and his household (family)."
Single Voice: "Let him hang for eight minutes."
Many conversations continue in the background about Saddam Hussein.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note on the Original Video
The Global Research translation is based on an Arabic video. The release of this video was in all likelihood part of the U.S. sponsored intelligence operation. The video was allegedly taken from a cell phone camera belonging to one of the executioners. Viewer discretion is advised; the video is gruesome and upsetting in nature and does not resemble a state-run execution. To view click here
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Corporate Media Translations
Below are several transcripts of translations. Some of these transcripts demonstrate a major deviation from the original (Arabic) word by word dialogue. A look at the CNN or BBC versions of the video clearly reveals a deliberate attempt to distort Saddam Hussein’s statements and portray the Shiite Muslims of Iraq as those behind the Iraqi leaders hanging in Baghdad.
The corporate media’s translations add or interject what was reportedly said by Saddam Hussein to what was recorded
Fox News
The Fox News’ transcript fails to even give a glimpse of Saddam Hussein’s last words. It only gives an ominously detailed translation of the start of the video. One should ask is there a reason why the full transcript was not given and why this partial transcript was portrayed as the transcript of the execution in its entirety.
Fox News Transcript
A new videotape surfaced Monday on the Web appearing to show the body of former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein after he was hanged on Dec. 30, 2006. This is the translation of the audio conversation on that 27-second video among individuals with access to the body and someone apparently using a cell phone camera:
(Inaudible)— Abu Ali
Hurry up! Hurry up!
— Hurry up!
(Inaudible)
— Let’s go my friend…Come on man!
I’ll fix it up for you.
— I am coming. I am coming.
— Just a moment, one moment
— I am coming. I am coming.
— Abu Ali, Abu Ali… You take care of this.
— Ok let’s go, let’s go
— Come on my friend! Come on my friend!
Ok, I am coming. I am coming.
BBC Transcript
The BBC’s transcript fails also to give a glimpse of Saddam Hussein’s last words, besides painting the executioners as savage Shiites. Nor does the BBC report acknowledge Washington role in ordering this execution.
Moreover, Saddam Hussein’s last words about Iraq being turned into a living Hell are conveniently omitted. The BBC transcript also uses phrases that portray the executioners as Shiites. This is done by the chosen reference in the phrase referring to Prophet Mohammed’s family and the statement "And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies," which is a reference to Imam Mahdi, a Muslim figure, that Shiite Muslims’ place special emphasis on in regards to Sunni Muslims.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Transcript
Translation of Arabic subtitles accompanying the latest execution footage as broadcast on al-Jazeera TV station:
[Saddam] Oh God.
[Voices] May God's blessings be upon Muhammad and his household.
[Voices] And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies.
[Voices] Moqtada [Al-Sadr]...Moqtada...Moqtada.
[Saddam] Do you consider this bravery?
[Voice] Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.
[Voice] To hell.
[Voice] Please do not. The man is being executed. Please no, I beg you to stop.
[Saddam] There is no God but Allah and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah and I testify that Muhammad...
At this point the video stops and the sound of the trapdoors opening is heard in the background.
The Independent (U.K.)
The Independent, a British daily, that gives a fairly progressive view on international events seems to have also carried a version of the translation of the transcript of the execution of Saddam Hussein that has omitted Saddam Hussein’s last words indicating that Iraq has been turned into a “Hell on earth.”
The Independent (U.K.) Transcript: Dictator's last words
Saddam: "Oh God."
Voices: "May God's blessings be upon Mohamed and his household. And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies."
Voices: "Moqtada [al-Sadr] ... Moqtada ... Moqtada."
Saddam: "Do you consider this bravery?"
Voice: "Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr."
Voice: "To hell."
Voice: "Please do not. The man is being executed. Please no, I beg you to stop."
Saddam: "There is no God but Allah and I testify that Mohamed is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah and I testify that Mohamed..."
Analysis and Implications
Internationally and especially in the Arab World and the Middle East, the barbaric lynching was casually presented as a Shiite Muslim initiative, when in fact the Anglo-American occupation forces were in control of every phase of this gruesome venture.
Ironically, the individuals and leaders who played a major role in ordering the lynching of Saddam Hussein are now saying quite emphatically that they were opposed to his execution. Prime Minister Tony Blair is reported to have stated that "the manner in which former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was executed was ‘completely wrong.’"
Meanwhile, the dictators and autocratic leaders of the Arab World have also jumped aboard in expressing their opposition to Saddam Hussein’s lynching.
Criticism expressed by the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, the Hashemite family in Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt, amongst others, constitutes an empty form of posturing geared towards raising their popularity amongst their own citizens.
The Role of the Iraqi Puppet Government
In these various reports, there has been a deliberate and calculated attempt to place the responsibility for the execution of Saddam Hussein squarely on the shoulders of the so-called "Iraqi government," without acknowledging that this government cannot act without the consent of the United States. The Iraqi government, which is best described as a U.S.-controlled puppet regime, is invariably portrayed in press reports as a "Shiite Muslim government" or a "Shiite Muslim-dominated government". This is also an integral part of the U.S. PSYOP designed to break down solidarity between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims against the Anglo-American invaders and occupiers.
The present Iraqi "government" is an appendix of the U.S. Occupation administration and gets it orders from Washington and London. It is neither Shiite Muslim in character nor is it a real government. With regards to its powerless composition, it is almost evenly divided between Iraqi Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni (Sunnite) Arabs.
To expose the manufactured portrayal of power in Iraq, one should look back at the composition of Iraqi government institutions during the era of Saddam Hussein. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Shiite Arabs had a greater representation than Sunni Arabs within the civilian bureaucracy as well as within the security and military apparatus, largely because of the demographic realities of Iraq.
But this fact has long been forgotten. Nothing has changed in regards to the composition of the bureaucracy, administrative bodies, security forces, and military apparatus of Iraq. Prior to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, about 60% of the Iraqi military were Shiite Arabs. This 60% fought against neighbouring Iran which is a predominantly Shiite Muslim nation.
In reality, the real divisions in the Middle East are not based on on around religious, sectarian, and ethnic considerations, but on those nations and forces, which either oppose or support the Anglo-American agenda in the Middle East.
The media focus on sectarian divisions is intended to divert the attention of public opinion from the fact that the U.S. and its Coalition partners are the root cause of anarchy and violence, resulting in countless deaths and atrocities in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein’s Last Moments
In his last moments, the words of Saddam Hussein were very compelling. When he was told to "go to Hell" by his executioners, the Iraqi leader replied, "[You mean] to the hell that is Iraq!?"
Who turned Iraq into a living Hell? Who is to be blamed? These words were so powerful that several major media outlets conveniently omitted them from their translations, including the BBC and CNN. Any meaningful revelation or coverage of the correct final statements of Saddam Hussein could have severe and negative implications for the Anglo-American military roadmap in the Middle East. "To the hell that is Iraq!?" could become a powerful political slogan, serving to rally public opinion throughout the Muslim World against America's imperial ambitions.
The Iraqi leader’s final words carry great weight because they describe the situation created in Iraq under military occupation. This final statement could also have political ramifications in the U.S. and Britain, as public opinion becomes increasingly aware that these last words, "the living Hell," describes what Iraq has been turned into, under U.S. and British military occupation.
The late Saddam Hussein’s words could have strong implications for rallying resistance in the Arab world against the US-UK occupation of Iraq. In this regard, the Arab mainstream media has played a calculated role in furthering the Anglo-American military agenda by shifting the blame for Saddam Hussein’s execution onto the Shiite Iraqis.
Outside the Arab World, if allowed to be heard freely and unadulterated, Saddam Hussein’s last words ("To the hell that is Iraq!?"), which describe the realities of an occupied country, could potentially backlash on the legitimacy of the US administration and its indefectible British ally.
The mainstream sources, which reported his statement conveyed the impression, through a highly distorted and convoluted analysis, that Saddam Hussein was blaming the Shiite Arabs and the "Shiite dominated Iraqi government" for destroying Iraq. But nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence amply confirms that since the early days of the occupation of Iraq the United States and Britain have not only created a situation of insecurity, but have also been involved in covert acts of violence, including random massacres and suicide attacks directed against civilians.
This deliberate media portrayal of an emerging “Shiite ascension” in Iraq and the Middle East is part of a multifaceted strategy geared towards creating tensions within the predominately Muslim populations of the Middle East. It is a typical “divide and conquer” strategy, which is supported by the long tentacles of the intelligence apparatus of the United States. The hidden agenda is to trigger "civil war" and the redraw the map of the Middle East. The ultimate objective is the domination of the Middle East by the United States, Britain and their coalition partners, including Israel and proxy Arab leaders. The active collaboration of the frontline Arab governments, which have military cooperation agreements with NATO and the U.S., are also tied into this agenda.
Divisions and animosity within their respective populations is what has allowed these pro-U.S. Arab authoritarian figureheads, which increasingly act as proxies, to remain in power.
Since the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon, the coalition building phase of the military roadmap has been launch. The United States has been constructing the “Coalition of the Moderate,” which includes Israel, Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud Abbas, the Lebanese government, Egypt, the U.A.E., Turkey, and Jordan. While this has been going on there is a continuous attempt to build public consensus in support of dividing Iraq and military strikes against Syria and Iran. The media in North America, Europe, and the Arab World have played an important role in demonizing the Syrians and the Iranians.
As the United States gears up for the next stage of the Middle East war, the drive to divide the populations of the region now encompasses a broad area extending from Lebanon and Palestine to the Persian Gulf.
The life of Saddam Hussein was used by the United States as firewood to further fuel discord and division in Iraq and the Middle East before the next phase of its military roadmap, which is directed against Iran and Syria.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG).
What the Media has Deliberately Concealed
by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya
Global Research, January 31, 2007
"On the Holy day of Eid, the world watched in horror at the barbaric lynching of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, allegedly for crimes against humanity. This public murder was sanctioned by the War Criminals, President Bush and Prime Minister Blair.
The entire trial process was a mockery of justice, no less a Kangaroo Court. Defence counsels were brutally murdered, witnesses threatened and judges removed for being impartial and replaced by puppet judges. Yet, we are told that Iraq was invaded to promote democracy, freedom and justice."
(Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, former Prime Minister of Malaysia, 30 December 2006)
The barbaric lynching of Saddam Hussein, the former president of Iraq, was a choreographed event, a carefully staged U.S. sponsored PSYOP, with a view to triggering social divisions and fomenting sectarian violence within Iraq and the broader Middle East.
In its coverage of the execution, the international media, in a highly convoluted fashion, combined the transcript of Saddam Hussein’s execution with “recollections” of so-called witness statements.
Moreover, the transcripts were often presented to readers without context or explanation. More generally, the translations from the Arabic were the object of manipulation and media distortion.
The execution of the Iraqi leader was carefully timed to occur during a sensitive time for Muslims. The execution fell during Eid ul-Adha, a holy day for Muslims. The date of the execution is perhaps one of the most compromising signals that the execution was indeed a psychological operation (PSYOP) launched by the United States.
The execution date was deliberately chosen during a sacred period for Muslims to exploit a divide between Shiites and Sunni. This sacred day was marked on Saturday, December 30, 2007 by Sunni Muslims in Iraq and was observed a day later on Sunday, December 31, 2007 by Iraq’s Shiites.
This is a strategic difference in dates that the executing of Saddam Hussein sought to expose and exploit to create sedition and division between Iraqis and Muslims. The day of the execution was deliberately chosen by its U.S. sponsors to occur on Saturday, December 30, 2006, the day that Sunni Muslims observed Eid ul-Adha.
The execution took place on December 30, with a view to enraging Sunni Muslims against Shiite Muslims. Concurrently, both the media and official U.S. statements pointed to the Shiites (and the "Shiite government") as being responsible for the execution.
Aside form the religious context, the execution was also illegal under the Iraqi legal code and constitution. This has been articulated by Rizgar Mohammad Amin, an Iraqi Kurd and one of the former judges in the questionable trial of Saddam Hussein.
The execution was carried out, as a psychological weapon, to usher in sectarian violence and division throughout the Middle East. The timing also coincided with several announcements and news reports of war plans by the United States and Israel in regards to Syria and Iran.
It is no coincidence that shortly after the execution the U.S. President identified Syria and Iran as the enemies of Iraq and raided an Iranian Consulate in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The media disinformation campaign pertaining to the execution was coordinated with the instruments of war propaganda emanating from the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence.
In the immediate wake of the execution, the global networks of the corporate media went into full gear to propagate the misinformation that the Pentagon wanted to convey to the general public.
The translated transcripts of Saddam Hussein’s last words, which had been scrupulously manipulated and distorted, were fed into the global news chain.
Presented below is the Global Research translation from the Arabic original audio-video believed to have been recorded on a cell phone. Also presented for purposes of comparison are several other "translations" from the same Arabic original.
Transcript: Our translation from the Arabic original
Background voices, which are very hard to hear, are having a conversation in the background and someone calls someone else in the execution chamber by "Ali" or is looking for "Ali."
Saddam Hussein: "I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God."
Saddam Hussein: "Oh God." [saying this in preparation, as is Middle Eastern custom, as the noose is put around his neck]
One voice leads customary Muslim prayer (called a salvat): "May God's blessings be upon Mohammed and his companions/household [family]."
All Voices, including Saddam Hussein, repeat the customary prayer: "May God's blessings be upon Mohammed and his companions/household [family]."
A group of voices: "Moqtada...Moqtada ...Moqtada." [Meaning the young Shiite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr] …
Saddam with amusement: "Moqtada...Moqtada! Do you consider this bravery?" [This can also be translated as meaning "Is this your manhood?"]
Several individuals say several times: "To Hell [hell-fire]!" [This can be translated as "Go to Hell!"]
Saddam Hussein mockingly replies/asks: "To the hell that is Iraq!?"
Others voices: "Long live Mohammed Baqir Al-Sadr."
Single Voice: "Please do not [stop]. The man is being executed. Please no, please stop."
Saddam Hussein starts recitation of final Muslim prayers: "I bear witness that there is no god but God and I testify that Mohammed is the Messenger of God. I bear witness that there is no god but God and I testify that Mohammed..." [Saddam Hussein is suddenly interrupted without finishing his prayer with the opening of the trap door.]
Several Voices: "The tyrant [dictator] has collapsed!"
Other voices: "May God’s blessings upon Mohammed and his household (family)."
Single Voice: "Let him hang for eight minutes."
Many conversations continue in the background about Saddam Hussein.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Note on the Original Video
The Global Research translation is based on an Arabic video. The release of this video was in all likelihood part of the U.S. sponsored intelligence operation. The video was allegedly taken from a cell phone camera belonging to one of the executioners. Viewer discretion is advised; the video is gruesome and upsetting in nature and does not resemble a state-run execution. To view click here
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Corporate Media Translations
Below are several transcripts of translations. Some of these transcripts demonstrate a major deviation from the original (Arabic) word by word dialogue. A look at the CNN or BBC versions of the video clearly reveals a deliberate attempt to distort Saddam Hussein’s statements and portray the Shiite Muslims of Iraq as those behind the Iraqi leaders hanging in Baghdad.
The corporate media’s translations add or interject what was reportedly said by Saddam Hussein to what was recorded
Fox News
The Fox News’ transcript fails to even give a glimpse of Saddam Hussein’s last words. It only gives an ominously detailed translation of the start of the video. One should ask is there a reason why the full transcript was not given and why this partial transcript was portrayed as the transcript of the execution in its entirety.
Fox News Transcript
A new videotape surfaced Monday on the Web appearing to show the body of former Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein after he was hanged on Dec. 30, 2006. This is the translation of the audio conversation on that 27-second video among individuals with access to the body and someone apparently using a cell phone camera:
(Inaudible)— Abu Ali
Hurry up! Hurry up!
— Hurry up!
(Inaudible)
— Let’s go my friend…Come on man!
I’ll fix it up for you.
— I am coming. I am coming.
— Just a moment, one moment
— I am coming. I am coming.
— Abu Ali, Abu Ali… You take care of this.
— Ok let’s go, let’s go
— Come on my friend! Come on my friend!
Ok, I am coming. I am coming.
BBC Transcript
The BBC’s transcript fails also to give a glimpse of Saddam Hussein’s last words, besides painting the executioners as savage Shiites. Nor does the BBC report acknowledge Washington role in ordering this execution.
Moreover, Saddam Hussein’s last words about Iraq being turned into a living Hell are conveniently omitted. The BBC transcript also uses phrases that portray the executioners as Shiites. This is done by the chosen reference in the phrase referring to Prophet Mohammed’s family and the statement "And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies," which is a reference to Imam Mahdi, a Muslim figure, that Shiite Muslims’ place special emphasis on in regards to Sunni Muslims.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Transcript
Translation of Arabic subtitles accompanying the latest execution footage as broadcast on al-Jazeera TV station:
[Saddam] Oh God.
[Voices] May God's blessings be upon Muhammad and his household.
[Voices] And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies.
[Voices] Moqtada [Al-Sadr]...Moqtada...Moqtada.
[Saddam] Do you consider this bravery?
[Voice] Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr.
[Voice] To hell.
[Voice] Please do not. The man is being executed. Please no, I beg you to stop.
[Saddam] There is no God but Allah and I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah and I testify that Muhammad...
At this point the video stops and the sound of the trapdoors opening is heard in the background.
The Independent (U.K.)
The Independent, a British daily, that gives a fairly progressive view on international events seems to have also carried a version of the translation of the transcript of the execution of Saddam Hussein that has omitted Saddam Hussein’s last words indicating that Iraq has been turned into a “Hell on earth.”
The Independent (U.K.) Transcript: Dictator's last words
Saddam: "Oh God."
Voices: "May God's blessings be upon Mohamed and his household. And may God hasten their appearance and curse their enemies."
Voices: "Moqtada [al-Sadr] ... Moqtada ... Moqtada."
Saddam: "Do you consider this bravery?"
Voice: "Long live Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr."
Voice: "To hell."
Voice: "Please do not. The man is being executed. Please no, I beg you to stop."
Saddam: "There is no God but Allah and I testify that Mohamed is the messenger of God. There is no God but Allah and I testify that Mohamed..."
Analysis and Implications
Internationally and especially in the Arab World and the Middle East, the barbaric lynching was casually presented as a Shiite Muslim initiative, when in fact the Anglo-American occupation forces were in control of every phase of this gruesome venture.
Ironically, the individuals and leaders who played a major role in ordering the lynching of Saddam Hussein are now saying quite emphatically that they were opposed to his execution. Prime Minister Tony Blair is reported to have stated that "the manner in which former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was executed was ‘completely wrong.’"
Meanwhile, the dictators and autocratic leaders of the Arab World have also jumped aboard in expressing their opposition to Saddam Hussein’s lynching.
Criticism expressed by the House of Saud in Saudi Arabia, the Hashemite family in Jordan and President Mubarak of Egypt, amongst others, constitutes an empty form of posturing geared towards raising their popularity amongst their own citizens.
The Role of the Iraqi Puppet Government
In these various reports, there has been a deliberate and calculated attempt to place the responsibility for the execution of Saddam Hussein squarely on the shoulders of the so-called "Iraqi government," without acknowledging that this government cannot act without the consent of the United States. The Iraqi government, which is best described as a U.S.-controlled puppet regime, is invariably portrayed in press reports as a "Shiite Muslim government" or a "Shiite Muslim-dominated government". This is also an integral part of the U.S. PSYOP designed to break down solidarity between Shiite Muslims and Sunni Muslims against the Anglo-American invaders and occupiers.
The present Iraqi "government" is an appendix of the U.S. Occupation administration and gets it orders from Washington and London. It is neither Shiite Muslim in character nor is it a real government. With regards to its powerless composition, it is almost evenly divided between Iraqi Kurds, Shiite Arabs, and Sunni (Sunnite) Arabs.
To expose the manufactured portrayal of power in Iraq, one should look back at the composition of Iraqi government institutions during the era of Saddam Hussein. Prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Shiite Arabs had a greater representation than Sunni Arabs within the civilian bureaucracy as well as within the security and military apparatus, largely because of the demographic realities of Iraq.
But this fact has long been forgotten. Nothing has changed in regards to the composition of the bureaucracy, administrative bodies, security forces, and military apparatus of Iraq. Prior to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, about 60% of the Iraqi military were Shiite Arabs. This 60% fought against neighbouring Iran which is a predominantly Shiite Muslim nation.
In reality, the real divisions in the Middle East are not based on on around religious, sectarian, and ethnic considerations, but on those nations and forces, which either oppose or support the Anglo-American agenda in the Middle East.
The media focus on sectarian divisions is intended to divert the attention of public opinion from the fact that the U.S. and its Coalition partners are the root cause of anarchy and violence, resulting in countless deaths and atrocities in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein’s Last Moments
In his last moments, the words of Saddam Hussein were very compelling. When he was told to "go to Hell" by his executioners, the Iraqi leader replied, "[You mean] to the hell that is Iraq!?"
Who turned Iraq into a living Hell? Who is to be blamed? These words were so powerful that several major media outlets conveniently omitted them from their translations, including the BBC and CNN. Any meaningful revelation or coverage of the correct final statements of Saddam Hussein could have severe and negative implications for the Anglo-American military roadmap in the Middle East. "To the hell that is Iraq!?" could become a powerful political slogan, serving to rally public opinion throughout the Muslim World against America's imperial ambitions.
The Iraqi leader’s final words carry great weight because they describe the situation created in Iraq under military occupation. This final statement could also have political ramifications in the U.S. and Britain, as public opinion becomes increasingly aware that these last words, "the living Hell," describes what Iraq has been turned into, under U.S. and British military occupation.
The late Saddam Hussein’s words could have strong implications for rallying resistance in the Arab world against the US-UK occupation of Iraq. In this regard, the Arab mainstream media has played a calculated role in furthering the Anglo-American military agenda by shifting the blame for Saddam Hussein’s execution onto the Shiite Iraqis.
Outside the Arab World, if allowed to be heard freely and unadulterated, Saddam Hussein’s last words ("To the hell that is Iraq!?"), which describe the realities of an occupied country, could potentially backlash on the legitimacy of the US administration and its indefectible British ally.
The mainstream sources, which reported his statement conveyed the impression, through a highly distorted and convoluted analysis, that Saddam Hussein was blaming the Shiite Arabs and the "Shiite dominated Iraqi government" for destroying Iraq. But nothing could be further from the truth. The evidence amply confirms that since the early days of the occupation of Iraq the United States and Britain have not only created a situation of insecurity, but have also been involved in covert acts of violence, including random massacres and suicide attacks directed against civilians.
This deliberate media portrayal of an emerging “Shiite ascension” in Iraq and the Middle East is part of a multifaceted strategy geared towards creating tensions within the predominately Muslim populations of the Middle East. It is a typical “divide and conquer” strategy, which is supported by the long tentacles of the intelligence apparatus of the United States. The hidden agenda is to trigger "civil war" and the redraw the map of the Middle East. The ultimate objective is the domination of the Middle East by the United States, Britain and their coalition partners, including Israel and proxy Arab leaders. The active collaboration of the frontline Arab governments, which have military cooperation agreements with NATO and the U.S., are also tied into this agenda.
Divisions and animosity within their respective populations is what has allowed these pro-U.S. Arab authoritarian figureheads, which increasingly act as proxies, to remain in power.
Since the Anglo-American sponsored Israeli siege of Lebanon, the coalition building phase of the military roadmap has been launch. The United States has been constructing the “Coalition of the Moderate,” which includes Israel, Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud Abbas, the Lebanese government, Egypt, the U.A.E., Turkey, and Jordan. While this has been going on there is a continuous attempt to build public consensus in support of dividing Iraq and military strikes against Syria and Iran. The media in North America, Europe, and the Arab World have played an important role in demonizing the Syrians and the Iranians.
As the United States gears up for the next stage of the Middle East war, the drive to divide the populations of the region now encompasses a broad area extending from Lebanon and Palestine to the Persian Gulf.
The life of Saddam Hussein was used by the United States as firewood to further fuel discord and division in Iraq and the Middle East before the next phase of its military roadmap, which is directed against Iran and Syria.
Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya is an independent writer based in Ottawa specializing in Middle Eastern affairs. He is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG).
On the Trial of Saddam Hussein: Court set up by an Illegal Occupying Power
On the Trial of Saddam Hussein: Court set up by an Illegal Occupying Power
by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
Global Research, November 8, 2006
Statement by Tun Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, Member, International Committee for the Defence of President Saddam Hussein
As a member of the International Committee for the Defence of President Saddam Hussein, to oversee the trial of Saddam Hussein I would like to express my horror and disgust over the trial and sentencing of Saddam Hussein to death by hanging;
Firstly a court set up by his enemies has no right to try Saddam Hussein. Since the inception of the trial, the International Committee and the Panel of Lawyers in the defence of President Saddam Hussein have repeatedly pointed out that the court set up by an illegal occupying power has no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct the said proceedings. If Saddam Hussein is to be tried, it should be by an international court of judges drawn from countries uninvolved in the Iraqi invasion and occupation. The members of the International Committee have demanded that in order for justice to be done and seen to be done, the trial court and the judges must be independent and without bias, and be able to discharge their duties without fear or favour. The Chief Judge that presided in the early part of the proceedings resigned in protest against the blatant interference by the Iraqi regime installed by the occupying power. He was replaced by a judge who had no qualms in disregarding all established principles of fair trial and was willing to hand down a judgment inconsistent with the evidence adduced.
In the course of the proceedings, lawyers representing President Saddam Hussein and his co-accused were threatened and brutally murdered. Witnesses were also intimidated. This fact alone would render any verdict handed down by the court to be manifestly unjust and contrary to all established principles of a fair trial.
There were no evidence that President Saddam Hussein was involved in the killings of Shiites in 1982. Yet the Court found him guilty. The Court was a Kangaroo Court set up for the sole purpose of rendering a guilty verdict. It was a Nuremberg type court, manifestly biased and incapable of being just.
If President Saddam Hussein was guilty as charged, then President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair should be tried for the unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq and the death of over 650,000 Iraqis and the brutal torture of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo Bay.
President Bush Senior, President Clinton and President Bush Jr should also be tried for the sanctions against Iraq which caused the death of more than half-a-million children and the use of illegal weapons such as depleted uranium, cluster bombs, phosphrous bombs etc.
For all these reasons, as a member of the International Committee overseeing the trial of Saddam Hussein, I condemn the death sentence passed on Saddam Hussein. It is a travesty of justice and unworthy of the present stage of human civilisation.
Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
November 7, 2006
by Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
Global Research, November 8, 2006
Statement by Tun Dr Mahathir bin Mohamad, Member, International Committee for the Defence of President Saddam Hussein
As a member of the International Committee for the Defence of President Saddam Hussein, to oversee the trial of Saddam Hussein I would like to express my horror and disgust over the trial and sentencing of Saddam Hussein to death by hanging;
Firstly a court set up by his enemies has no right to try Saddam Hussein. Since the inception of the trial, the International Committee and the Panel of Lawyers in the defence of President Saddam Hussein have repeatedly pointed out that the court set up by an illegal occupying power has no jurisdiction whatsoever to conduct the said proceedings. If Saddam Hussein is to be tried, it should be by an international court of judges drawn from countries uninvolved in the Iraqi invasion and occupation. The members of the International Committee have demanded that in order for justice to be done and seen to be done, the trial court and the judges must be independent and without bias, and be able to discharge their duties without fear or favour. The Chief Judge that presided in the early part of the proceedings resigned in protest against the blatant interference by the Iraqi regime installed by the occupying power. He was replaced by a judge who had no qualms in disregarding all established principles of fair trial and was willing to hand down a judgment inconsistent with the evidence adduced.
In the course of the proceedings, lawyers representing President Saddam Hussein and his co-accused were threatened and brutally murdered. Witnesses were also intimidated. This fact alone would render any verdict handed down by the court to be manifestly unjust and contrary to all established principles of a fair trial.
There were no evidence that President Saddam Hussein was involved in the killings of Shiites in 1982. Yet the Court found him guilty. The Court was a Kangaroo Court set up for the sole purpose of rendering a guilty verdict. It was a Nuremberg type court, manifestly biased and incapable of being just.
If President Saddam Hussein was guilty as charged, then President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair should be tried for the unlawful invasion and occupation of Iraq and the death of over 650,000 Iraqis and the brutal torture of thousands of innocent men, women and children in Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo Bay.
President Bush Senior, President Clinton and President Bush Jr should also be tried for the sanctions against Iraq which caused the death of more than half-a-million children and the use of illegal weapons such as depleted uranium, cluster bombs, phosphrous bombs etc.
For all these reasons, as a member of the International Committee overseeing the trial of Saddam Hussein, I condemn the death sentence passed on Saddam Hussein. It is a travesty of justice and unworthy of the present stage of human civilisation.
Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad
November 7, 2006
Sunday, February 25, 2007
The Criminalization of US Foreign Policy
PERDANA GLOBAL PEACE ORGANISATION
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
EXPOSE WAR CRIMES - CRIMINALISE WAR
5-7 February 2007, Dewan Merdeka, Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur
1. The contemporary context
The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.
There is mounting evidence that the Bush Administration, in liaison with Israel and NATO, is planning the launching of a nuclear war against Iran, ironically, in retaliation for Tehran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program. The US-Israeli military operation is said to be in "an advanced state of readiness".
If such a plan were to be launched, the war would escalate and eventually engulf the entire Middle-East Central Asian region.
The war could extend beyond the region, as some analysts have suggested, ultimately leading us into a World War III scenario.
The US-led naval deployment (involving a massive deployment of military hardware) is taking place in two distinct theaters: the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean is broadly under the jurisdiction of NATO in liaison with Israel. Directed against Syria, it is conducted under the façade of a UN "peace-keeping" mission. In this context, the Israeli led war on Lebanon last Summer, which was conducive to countless atrocities and the destruction of an entire country, must be viewed as a stage of the broader US sponsored military road-map.
2. Naval Buildup in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean
The naval armada in the Persian Gulf is largely under US command, with the participation of Canada.
USS Enterprise Strike Group
USS Eisenhower
The naval buildup is coordinated with the air attacks. The planning of aerial bombings of Iran started in mid-2004, pursuant to the formulation of CONPLAN 8022 in early 2004. In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued.
While its contents remain classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the stockpiling and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.
In recent developments, there are reports that Washington is planning to launch air attacks from military bases in Romania and Bulgaria. "American forces could be using their two USAF bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April [2007]," according to the Bulgarian news agency Novinite.
3. The Ultimate War Crime: Using Nuclear Weapons in a Conventional War theater
Despite Pentagon statements, which describe tactical nuclear weapons as "safe for the surrounding civilian population", the use of nukes in a conventional war theater directed against Iran would trigger the ultimate war crime: a nuclear holocaust. The resulting radioactive contamination, which threatens future generations, would by no means be limited to the Middle East.
B61-11 NEP Thermonuclear Bomb
4. The "War on Terrorism": Pretext to Wage War
In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a contingency plan "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States". Mass casualty producing events, involving the death of civilians are being used to galvanize public opinion in support of a military agenda. The deaths of civilian are used to justify preemptive actions to defend the American homeland against an alleged outside enemy, who are identified as "Islamic terrorists".
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Mass Casualty Producing Events
"A terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event [will occur] somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event." General Tommy Franks,
"We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." (David Rockefeller)
"As America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." (Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Grand Chessboard)
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The presumption was that if such a 9/11 type event involving the deaths of civilians (mass casualty producing event) were to take place, Iran would, according to Cheney, be behind it, thereby providing a pretext for punitive bombings, much in the same way as the US sponsored attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001, allegedly in retribution for the alleged support of the Taliban government to the 9/11 terrorists
More recently, several analysts have focussed on the creation of a "Gulf of Tonkin incident", which would be used by the Bush administration as a pretext to wage war on Iran
5. The Real Objective Of This War Is Oil
The oil lies in Muslim lands. The objective is to take possession of the oil, transform countries into territories and redraw the map of the Middle East
War builds a fake "humanitarian agenda". Throughout history, vilification of the enemy has been applied time and again with a view to ultimately justifying war and war crimes.
Demonization of the enemy serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against "Islamic terrorism" (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth. The term "Islamo-fascism," serves to degrade the policies, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while also upholding the tenets of "Western democracy" and the "free market" as the only alternative for these countries.
The US led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region.
Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves, depending on the source and methodology of the estimate.
In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves. Western countries including its major oil producers ( Canada, the US, Norway, the UK, Denmark and Australia) control approximately 4 percent of total oil reserves. (In the alternative estimate of the Oil and Gas Journal which includes Canada's oil sands, this percentage would be of the the order of 16.5%.
The largest share of the World's oil reserves lies in a region extending (North) from the tip of Yemen to the Caspian sea basin and (East) from the Eastern Mediterranean coastline to the Persian Gulf. This broader Middle East- Central Asian region, which is the theater of the US-led "war on terrorism" encompasses according to the estimates of World Oil, more than sixty percent of the World's oil reserves. (See table below).
Iraq has five times more oil than the United States.
Muslim countries possess at least 16 times more oil than the Western countries.
The major non-Muslim oil reserve countries are Venezuela, Russia, Mexico, China and Brazil. (See table)
The victims of war crimes are vilified Demonization is applied to an enemy, which possesses three quarters of the world's oil reserves. "Axis of evil", "rogue States", "failed nations", "Islamic terrorists": demonization and vilification are the ideological pillars of America's "war on terror". They serve as a casus belli for waging the battle for oil.
The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The Middle East Central Asian region is heavily militarized. (See map). The oil fields are encircled: NATO war ships stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean (as part of a UN "peace keeping" operation), US Carrier Strike Groups and Destroyer Squadrons in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian deployed as part of the "war on terrorism".
REDRAWING THE MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
6. Historical Background: From Hiroshima to the Preemptive Warfare Doctrine
What are the historical roots of this military agenda? What is the balance sheet of US sponsored war crimes extending from 1945 to the present?
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WHO ARE THE WAR CRIMINALS: BUSH IS NOT THE ONLY WAR CRIMINAL ON THE BLOC
US war crimes and atrocities should be seen as the direct consequence of a foreign policy and military agenda, which supports US corporate interests, including the oil giants, the Wall Street financial establishment and the big six defense contractors.
The Middle East war is the culmination of a history of US sponsored military interventions.
The bombing of Hiroshima was the initial landmark leading to the formulation of a "preemptive" nuclear doctrine, where nukes are to be used in the conventional war theater.
There is a continuum: the bombing of Hiroshima was presented to public opinion as "safe for civilians" because Hiroshima was identified in President Truman’s August 9, 1945 radio address as "a military base".
"The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.."
(President Harry S. Truman in a radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945, Listen to Excerpt of his speech, By going through Truman’s diary, one has the distinct impression that he firmly believed that Hiroshima was a military target. Was he briefed on the consequences of the atom bomb?(President Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945).
Similarly, the use of nukes against Iran is presented as an act of self-defense, which according to the Pentagon, will minimize the risk of "collateral damage" and protect the lives of civilians.Prior the invasion of Iraq, the use of tactical nuclear weapons had been contemplated as a means to assassinate Saddam Hussein:
"If Saddam was arguably the highest value target in Iraq, then a good case could be made for using a nuclear weapon like the B61-11 to assure killing him and decapitating the regime" (.Defense News, December 8, 2003).
More generally, mini-nukes are considered safe to be used in a conventional war theater:
"What's needed now is something that can threaten a bunker tunneled under 300 meters of granite without killing the surrounding civilian population." (Pentagon Official quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, 2006, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060217&articleId=1988
These statements, which reflect US nuclear doctrine promote according to Federation of American Scientists (FAS) "the illusion that nuclear weapons could be used in ways which minimize their ‘collateral damage’, making them acceptable tools to be used like conventional weapons." (See http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001 / click v54nl, italics added)
7. America’s Wars of the "Post War Era"
What is referred euphemistically as the "post war era" is in fact a period of continuous war and militarization. Since the end of the Second World War, this "long war" seeks to establish US hegemony worldwide.
This period is marked by a succession of US sponsored theater wars (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia), various forms of military interventions including low intensity conflicts, "civil wars" (The Congo, Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan) military coups, US sponsored death squadrons and massacres (Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines), covert wars led by US intelligence , etc.
This entire period (1945- present) has been marked by a succession of US sponsored wars and military-intelligence interventions in all major regions of the World (see map below).
Accounting for these various operations, the United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries in different regions of the developing world, since August 1945, a number of them many times (Eric Waddell, 2003):
"The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect ‘regime change’. The cloaks of "human rights" and of "democracy were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts." (Eric Waddell, 2003)
The foreign policy underpinnings of what is now referred to by Bush officials as the "long war" are to be found in what is known as the "Truman Doctrine", first formulated by foreign policy adviser George F. Kennan in a 1948 in State Department brief.
What this 1948 document conveys is continuity in US foreign policy, from "Containment" to "Pre-emptive" War. It states in polite terms that the US should seek economic and strategic dominance through military means:
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. (…)
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better (George f. Kennan, 1948 State Department Brief)
8. Destroying Internationalism
The planned disintegration of the United Nations system as an independent and influential international body has been on the drawing board of US foreign policy since the inception of the United Nations in 1946. Its planned demise was an integral part of the Truman doctrine as defined in 1948. From the very inception of the UN, Washington has sought on the one hand to control it to its advantage, while also seeking to weakening and ultimately destroy the UN system. The outgoing Secretary General Kofi Annan became a tool of US foreign policy.
In the words of George Kennan:
"Occasionally, it [the United Nations] has served a useful purpose. But by and large it has created more problems than it has solved, and has led to a considerable dispersal of our diplomatic effort. And in our efforts to use the UN majority for major political purposes we are playing with a dangerous weapon which may some day turn against us. This is a situation which warrants most careful study and foresight on our part. (George Kennan, 1948)
In our efforts to use the UN majority for major political purposes we are playing with a dangerous weapon which may some day turn against us. This is a situation which warrants most careful study and foresight on our part. (George Kennan, 1948)
Although officially committed to the "international community", Washington has largely played lip service to the United Nations. In recent years it has sought to undermine it as an institution. Since Gulf War I, the UN has largely acted as a rubber stamp. It has closed its eyes to US war crimes, it has implemented so-called peacekeeping operations on behalf of the Anglo-American invaders, in violation of the UN Charter.
9. From the Truman Doctrine to the Neo-Conservatives
The Neo-conservative agenda under the Bush administration should be viewed as the culmination of a (bipartisan) "Post War" foreign policy framework, which provides the basis for the planning of the contemporary wars and atrocities including the setting up of torture chambers, concentration camps and the extensive use of prohibited weapons directed against civilians.
From Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, to the CIA sponsored military coups in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the objective has been to ensure US military hegemony and global economic domination, as initially formulated under the "Truman Doctrine". Despite significant policy differences, successive Democratic and Republican administrations, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have carried out this global military agenda.
10. US War Crimes and Atrocities
This entire "post war period" is marked by extensive war crimes resulting in the death of more than ten million people. This figure does not include those who perished as a result of poverty, starvation and disease.
What we are dealing with is a criminal US foreign policy agenda. Criminalization does not pertain to one or more heads of State. It pertains to the entire State system, it’s various civilian and military institutions as well as the powerful corporate interests behind the formulation of US foreign policy, the Washington think tanks, the creditor institutions which finance the military machine.
War crimes are the result of the criminalization of the US State and foreign policy apparatus. We are dealing specifically with individual war criminals, but with a process involving decision makers acting at different level, with a mandate to carry out war crimes, following established guidelines and procedures.
What distinguishes the Bush administration in relation to historical record of US sponsored crimes and atrocities, is that the concentration camps, targeted assassinations and torture chambers are now openly considered as legitimate forms of intervention, which sustain "the global war on terrorism" and support the spread of Western democracy.
11. Mechanisms of US Intervention
US sponsored crimes are not limited to the casualties of war and the physical destruction of the nation’s infrastructure.
Countries are destroyed, often transformed into territories, sovereignty is foregone, national institutions collapse, the national economy is destroyed through the imposition of "free market" reforms, unemployment becomes rampant, social services are dismantled, wages collapse, and people are impoverished.
In turn, the nation’s assets and natural resources are transferred into the hands of foreign investors through a privatization programme imposed by the invading forces.
12. The Perdana Initiative: Reversing the Tide of War
The Perdana Initiative to Criminalize War seeks to break the consensus.
Once that consensus is broken, the shaky legitimacy of the "Global War on Terrorism" collapses like a deck of cards. The War criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on.
To reverse the tide of war requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, mosques, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war which contemplates the use of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel.
Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community, particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the political and military actors in high office must be challenged.
There seems to be a reluctance by members of Congress to exercise their powers under the US Constitution, with a view to preventing the unthinkable: the onslaught of a US sponsored nuclear war. The consequences of this inaction could be devastating. Once the decision is taken at the political level, it will be very difficult to turn the clock backwards.
Moreover, the antiwar movement has not addressed the US sponsored nuclear threat on Iran in a consistent way, in part due to divisions within its ranks, in part due to lack of information. Moreover, a significant sector of the antiwar movement considers that the "threat of Islamic terrorism" is real. "We are against the war, but we support the war on terrorism." This ambivalent stance ultimately serves to reinforce the legitimacy of the US national security doctrine which is predicated on waging the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT).
At this juncture, with the popularity of the Bush-Cheney regime at an all time low, a real opportunity exists to initiate an impeachment process, which could contribute to temporarily stalling the military agenda.
The corporate media also bear a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. Until recently these war preparations involving the use of nuclear weapons have been scarcely covered by the corporate media. The latter must also be forcefully challenged for their biased coverage of the Middle East war.
What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.
In response to the Perdana initaitve to criminalize war, it is essential to bring the US-Israeli war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America, Western Europe and Israel. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.
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ANNEX
A1 Categorization, Nature of US Intervention (44 countries)
CASUALTIES ARE NOT LIMITED TO KILLINGS IN THE WAR THEATER OR OTHER MILITARY-TYPE OPERATIONS,
WE MUST ALSO ASSESS THE BROAD ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND INSTITUIONAL MECHANISMS AS WELL AS THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF WAR AND ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
With regard to military and covert intelligence or other command type operations, we may distinguish between:
TW Theater War
MC US Instigated Military Coup
CW US Sponsored Civil War
MP Military policing
CO, Covert Intelligence operation, proxy armies, death squadrons,
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Countries
Afghanistan TW CW MC CO, Angola CW CO, Argentina MC CO, Bangladesh MC, Bolivia MC, Bosnia TW CW, Brazil MC CO, Cambodia TW CW CO, Chile MC CO, Colombia CW CO, Congo TW CW, Dominican Republic MC MP CO, El Salvador CW, MC CO, Eritrea CW, Ethiopia CW , Guatemala MC CO, Grenada MP, Haiti MC MP CO, Honduras MC MP CO, Indonesia MC CO, Iran MC, Iraq MC TW CO, Japan TW , Laos TW CW, Lebanon TW CW CO MP, Liberia, CW, Macedonia MP, CW CO, Mozambique CW CO, Nicaragua CW CO, Nigeria CW CO,North Korea TW CW, Pakistan MC CO, Palestine CW CO, Panama MC MP, Philippines MC MP CO, Rwanda CW CO, Serbia CW CO, Somalia CW MP CO, Sierra Leone CW, South Korea CW TW CO, Sudan CW MP CO, Thailand MC CO, Uruguay MC CO, Venezuela MC, Vietnam TW MC CW, Zimbabwe CW
Historical examples of US sponsored war crimes
SELECTED COUNTRY CASES
Korea (1950-1953)
North Korea lost nearly a third its population of 8 - 9 million people during the 37-month long "hot" war, 1950 - 1953, an unprecedented percentage of suffered by any nation as a result of an armed conflict. General Lemay in charge of US operations in Korea candidly acknowledges that the US killed up to 20 percent of North Korea's population over that three period of intensive bombings’
Vietnam (1954-1975)
According to Vietnamese sources, civilian casualties resulting from the Vietnam War were of the order of 4 million. Out of a population of 38 million during the period 1954-1975, Vietnamese casualties represent a 12-13% of the entire population
Indonesia
While Indonesia was not invaded by US forces, it experienced according to a CIA report, "one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century." Ironically it was the CIA which instigated this plan.
"The 300-page CIA text fails to acknowledge the direct role of the US in the massacres It essentially "blames the victims of the killings -- the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) -- for their own deaths… The hundreds of thousands of people shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or starved to death were labeled perpetrators, or would-be perpetrators of atrocities, just as culpable for the murder of the army generals as the handful of people who were truly guilty."
The Congo (1998-2000)
The Congo (1998-2000) and The Sudan were US sponsored "civil wars". Two years of war in the Congo (1998-2000) caused the deaths of an estimated 3.8 million people, mostly from starvation and disease.
Sudan
Two million deaths resulted from Sudan's 18-year "civil war", which is tied into securing control over oil reserves.
Nigeria-Biafra
One million people also died during the US sponsored Nigeria-Biafra conflict of the late 1960s, which was also linked to oil interests.
Rwanda (1994-1995)
Between 500,000 and a million people died as a result of the Rwandan "civil war" and genocide. Recent reports confirm that the US and Britain played a key role in triggering the ethnic massacres.
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20070201&articleId=4659
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
EXPOSE WAR CRIMES - CRIMINALISE WAR
5-7 February 2007, Dewan Merdeka, Putra World Trade Centre, Kuala Lumpur
1. The contemporary context
The World is at the crossroads of the most serious crisis in modern history. The US has embarked on a military adventure, "a long war", which threatens the future of humanity.
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable, a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread, in terms of radioactive fallout, over a large part of the Middle East.
There is mounting evidence that the Bush Administration, in liaison with Israel and NATO, is planning the launching of a nuclear war against Iran, ironically, in retaliation for Tehran's nonexistent nuclear weapons program. The US-Israeli military operation is said to be in "an advanced state of readiness".
If such a plan were to be launched, the war would escalate and eventually engulf the entire Middle-East Central Asian region.
The war could extend beyond the region, as some analysts have suggested, ultimately leading us into a World War III scenario.
The US-led naval deployment (involving a massive deployment of military hardware) is taking place in two distinct theaters: the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The militarization of the Eastern Mediterranean is broadly under the jurisdiction of NATO in liaison with Israel. Directed against Syria, it is conducted under the façade of a UN "peace-keeping" mission. In this context, the Israeli led war on Lebanon last Summer, which was conducive to countless atrocities and the destruction of an entire country, must be viewed as a stage of the broader US sponsored military road-map.
2. Naval Buildup in the Persian Gulf and the Eastern Mediterranean
The naval armada in the Persian Gulf is largely under US command, with the participation of Canada.
USS Enterprise Strike Group
USS Eisenhower
The naval buildup is coordinated with the air attacks. The planning of aerial bombings of Iran started in mid-2004, pursuant to the formulation of CONPLAN 8022 in early 2004. In May 2004, National Security Presidential Directive NSPD 35 entitled Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization was issued.
While its contents remain classified, the presumption is that NSPD 35 pertains to the stockpiling and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East war theater in compliance with CONPLAN 8022.
In recent developments, there are reports that Washington is planning to launch air attacks from military bases in Romania and Bulgaria. "American forces could be using their two USAF bases in Bulgaria and one at Romania's Black Sea coast to launch an attack on Iran in April [2007]," according to the Bulgarian news agency Novinite.
3. The Ultimate War Crime: Using Nuclear Weapons in a Conventional War theater
Despite Pentagon statements, which describe tactical nuclear weapons as "safe for the surrounding civilian population", the use of nukes in a conventional war theater directed against Iran would trigger the ultimate war crime: a nuclear holocaust. The resulting radioactive contamination, which threatens future generations, would by no means be limited to the Middle East.
B61-11 NEP Thermonuclear Bomb
4. The "War on Terrorism": Pretext to Wage War
In 2005, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a contingency plan "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States". Mass casualty producing events, involving the death of civilians are being used to galvanize public opinion in support of a military agenda. The deaths of civilian are used to justify preemptive actions to defend the American homeland against an alleged outside enemy, who are identified as "Islamic terrorists".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mass Casualty Producing Events
"A terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event [will occur] somewhere in the Western world – it may be in the United States of America – that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event." General Tommy Franks,
"We are on the verge of global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order." (David Rockefeller)
"As America becomes an increasingly multicultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstances of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat." (Zbigniew Brzezinski in the Grand Chessboard)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The presumption was that if such a 9/11 type event involving the deaths of civilians (mass casualty producing event) were to take place, Iran would, according to Cheney, be behind it, thereby providing a pretext for punitive bombings, much in the same way as the US sponsored attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001, allegedly in retribution for the alleged support of the Taliban government to the 9/11 terrorists
More recently, several analysts have focussed on the creation of a "Gulf of Tonkin incident", which would be used by the Bush administration as a pretext to wage war on Iran
5. The Real Objective Of This War Is Oil
The oil lies in Muslim lands. The objective is to take possession of the oil, transform countries into territories and redraw the map of the Middle East
War builds a fake "humanitarian agenda". Throughout history, vilification of the enemy has been applied time and again with a view to ultimately justifying war and war crimes.
Demonization of the enemy serves geopolitical and economic objectives. Likewise, the campaign against "Islamic terrorism" (which is supported covertly by US intelligence) supports the conquest of oil wealth. The term "Islamo-fascism," serves to degrade the policies, institutions, values and social fabric of Muslim countries, while also upholding the tenets of "Western democracy" and the "free market" as the only alternative for these countries.
The US led war in the broader Middle East Central Asian region consists in gaining control over more than sixty percent of the world's reserves of oil and natural gas. The Anglo-American oil giants also seek to gain control over oil and gas pipeline routes out of the region.
Muslim countries including Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei, possess between 66.2 and 75.9 percent of total oil reserves, depending on the source and methodology of the estimate.
In contrast, the United States of America has barely 2 percent of total oil reserves. Western countries including its major oil producers ( Canada, the US, Norway, the UK, Denmark and Australia) control approximately 4 percent of total oil reserves. (In the alternative estimate of the Oil and Gas Journal which includes Canada's oil sands, this percentage would be of the the order of 16.5%.
The largest share of the World's oil reserves lies in a region extending (North) from the tip of Yemen to the Caspian sea basin and (East) from the Eastern Mediterranean coastline to the Persian Gulf. This broader Middle East- Central Asian region, which is the theater of the US-led "war on terrorism" encompasses according to the estimates of World Oil, more than sixty percent of the World's oil reserves. (See table below).
Iraq has five times more oil than the United States.
Muslim countries possess at least 16 times more oil than the Western countries.
The major non-Muslim oil reserve countries are Venezuela, Russia, Mexico, China and Brazil. (See table)
The victims of war crimes are vilified Demonization is applied to an enemy, which possesses three quarters of the world's oil reserves. "Axis of evil", "rogue States", "failed nations", "Islamic terrorists": demonization and vilification are the ideological pillars of America's "war on terror". They serve as a casus belli for waging the battle for oil.
The Battle for Oil requires the demonization of those who possess the oil. The enemy is characterized as evil, with a view to justifying military action including the mass killing of civilians. The Middle East Central Asian region is heavily militarized. (See map). The oil fields are encircled: NATO war ships stationed in the Eastern Mediterranean (as part of a UN "peace keeping" operation), US Carrier Strike Groups and Destroyer Squadrons in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian deployed as part of the "war on terrorism".
REDRAWING THE MAP OF THE NEW MIDDLE EAST
6. Historical Background: From Hiroshima to the Preemptive Warfare Doctrine
What are the historical roots of this military agenda? What is the balance sheet of US sponsored war crimes extending from 1945 to the present?
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WHO ARE THE WAR CRIMINALS: BUSH IS NOT THE ONLY WAR CRIMINAL ON THE BLOC
US war crimes and atrocities should be seen as the direct consequence of a foreign policy and military agenda, which supports US corporate interests, including the oil giants, the Wall Street financial establishment and the big six defense contractors.
The Middle East war is the culmination of a history of US sponsored military interventions.
The bombing of Hiroshima was the initial landmark leading to the formulation of a "preemptive" nuclear doctrine, where nukes are to be used in the conventional war theater.
There is a continuum: the bombing of Hiroshima was presented to public opinion as "safe for civilians" because Hiroshima was identified in President Truman’s August 9, 1945 radio address as "a military base".
"The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.."
(President Harry S. Truman in a radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945, Listen to Excerpt of his speech, By going through Truman’s diary, one has the distinct impression that he firmly believed that Hiroshima was a military target. Was he briefed on the consequences of the atom bomb?(President Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945).
Similarly, the use of nukes against Iran is presented as an act of self-defense, which according to the Pentagon, will minimize the risk of "collateral damage" and protect the lives of civilians.Prior the invasion of Iraq, the use of tactical nuclear weapons had been contemplated as a means to assassinate Saddam Hussein:
"If Saddam was arguably the highest value target in Iraq, then a good case could be made for using a nuclear weapon like the B61-11 to assure killing him and decapitating the regime" (.Defense News, December 8, 2003).
More generally, mini-nukes are considered safe to be used in a conventional war theater:
"What's needed now is something that can threaten a bunker tunneled under 300 meters of granite without killing the surrounding civilian population." (Pentagon Official quoted in Michel Chossudovsky, 2006, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060217&articleId=1988
These statements, which reflect US nuclear doctrine promote according to Federation of American Scientists (FAS) "the illusion that nuclear weapons could be used in ways which minimize their ‘collateral damage’, making them acceptable tools to be used like conventional weapons." (See http://www.fas.org/faspir/2001 / click v54nl, italics added)
7. America’s Wars of the "Post War Era"
What is referred euphemistically as the "post war era" is in fact a period of continuous war and militarization. Since the end of the Second World War, this "long war" seeks to establish US hegemony worldwide.
This period is marked by a succession of US sponsored theater wars (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yugoslavia), various forms of military interventions including low intensity conflicts, "civil wars" (The Congo, Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan) military coups, US sponsored death squadrons and massacres (Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Argentina, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines), covert wars led by US intelligence , etc.
This entire period (1945- present) has been marked by a succession of US sponsored wars and military-intelligence interventions in all major regions of the World (see map below).
Accounting for these various operations, the United States has attacked, directly or indirectly, some 44 countries in different regions of the developing world, since August 1945, a number of them many times (Eric Waddell, 2003):
"The avowed objective of these military interventions has been to effect ‘regime change’. The cloaks of "human rights" and of "democracy were invariably evoked to justify what were unilateral and illegal acts." (Eric Waddell, 2003)
The foreign policy underpinnings of what is now referred to by Bush officials as the "long war" are to be found in what is known as the "Truman Doctrine", first formulated by foreign policy adviser George F. Kennan in a 1948 in State Department brief.
What this 1948 document conveys is continuity in US foreign policy, from "Containment" to "Pre-emptive" War. It states in polite terms that the US should seek economic and strategic dominance through military means:
Furthermore, we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction. (…)
In the face of this situation we would be better off to dispense now with a number of the concepts which have underlined our thinking with regard to the Far East. We should dispense with the aspiration to "be liked" or to be regarded as the repository of a high-minded international altruism. We should stop putting ourselves in the position of being our brothers' keeper and refrain from offering moral and ideological advice. We should cease to talk about vague and—for the Far East—unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better (George f. Kennan, 1948 State Department Brief)
8. Destroying Internationalism
The planned disintegration of the United Nations system as an independent and influential international body has been on the drawing board of US foreign policy since the inception of the United Nations in 1946. Its planned demise was an integral part of the Truman doctrine as defined in 1948. From the very inception of the UN, Washington has sought on the one hand to control it to its advantage, while also seeking to weakening and ultimately destroy the UN system. The outgoing Secretary General Kofi Annan became a tool of US foreign policy.
In the words of George Kennan:
"Occasionally, it [the United Nations] has served a useful purpose. But by and large it has created more problems than it has solved, and has led to a considerable dispersal of our diplomatic effort. And in our efforts to use the UN majority for major political purposes we are playing with a dangerous weapon which may some day turn against us. This is a situation which warrants most careful study and foresight on our part. (George Kennan, 1948)
In our efforts to use the UN majority for major political purposes we are playing with a dangerous weapon which may some day turn against us. This is a situation which warrants most careful study and foresight on our part. (George Kennan, 1948)
Although officially committed to the "international community", Washington has largely played lip service to the United Nations. In recent years it has sought to undermine it as an institution. Since Gulf War I, the UN has largely acted as a rubber stamp. It has closed its eyes to US war crimes, it has implemented so-called peacekeeping operations on behalf of the Anglo-American invaders, in violation of the UN Charter.
9. From the Truman Doctrine to the Neo-Conservatives
The Neo-conservative agenda under the Bush administration should be viewed as the culmination of a (bipartisan) "Post War" foreign policy framework, which provides the basis for the planning of the contemporary wars and atrocities including the setting up of torture chambers, concentration camps and the extensive use of prohibited weapons directed against civilians.
From Korea, Vietnam and Afghanistan, to the CIA sponsored military coups in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the objective has been to ensure US military hegemony and global economic domination, as initially formulated under the "Truman Doctrine". Despite significant policy differences, successive Democratic and Republican administrations, from Harry Truman to George W. Bush have carried out this global military agenda.
10. US War Crimes and Atrocities
This entire "post war period" is marked by extensive war crimes resulting in the death of more than ten million people. This figure does not include those who perished as a result of poverty, starvation and disease.
What we are dealing with is a criminal US foreign policy agenda. Criminalization does not pertain to one or more heads of State. It pertains to the entire State system, it’s various civilian and military institutions as well as the powerful corporate interests behind the formulation of US foreign policy, the Washington think tanks, the creditor institutions which finance the military machine.
War crimes are the result of the criminalization of the US State and foreign policy apparatus. We are dealing specifically with individual war criminals, but with a process involving decision makers acting at different level, with a mandate to carry out war crimes, following established guidelines and procedures.
What distinguishes the Bush administration in relation to historical record of US sponsored crimes and atrocities, is that the concentration camps, targeted assassinations and torture chambers are now openly considered as legitimate forms of intervention, which sustain "the global war on terrorism" and support the spread of Western democracy.
11. Mechanisms of US Intervention
US sponsored crimes are not limited to the casualties of war and the physical destruction of the nation’s infrastructure.
Countries are destroyed, often transformed into territories, sovereignty is foregone, national institutions collapse, the national economy is destroyed through the imposition of "free market" reforms, unemployment becomes rampant, social services are dismantled, wages collapse, and people are impoverished.
In turn, the nation’s assets and natural resources are transferred into the hands of foreign investors through a privatization programme imposed by the invading forces.
12. The Perdana Initiative: Reversing the Tide of War
The Perdana Initiative to Criminalize War seeks to break the consensus.
Once that consensus is broken, the shaky legitimacy of the "Global War on Terrorism" collapses like a deck of cards. The War criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on.
To reverse the tide of war requires a massive campaign of networking and outreach to inform people across the land, nationally and internationally, in neighborhoods, workplaces, parishes, mosques, schools, universities, municipalities, on the dangers of a US sponsored war which contemplates the use of nuclear weapons. The message should be loud and clear: It is not Iran which is a threat to global security but the United States of America and Israel.
Debate and discussion must also take place within the Military and Intelligence community, particularly with regard to the use of tactical nuclear weapons, within the corridors of the US Congress, in municipalities and at all levels of government. Ultimately, the legitimacy of the political and military actors in high office must be challenged.
There seems to be a reluctance by members of Congress to exercise their powers under the US Constitution, with a view to preventing the unthinkable: the onslaught of a US sponsored nuclear war. The consequences of this inaction could be devastating. Once the decision is taken at the political level, it will be very difficult to turn the clock backwards.
Moreover, the antiwar movement has not addressed the US sponsored nuclear threat on Iran in a consistent way, in part due to divisions within its ranks, in part due to lack of information. Moreover, a significant sector of the antiwar movement considers that the "threat of Islamic terrorism" is real. "We are against the war, but we support the war on terrorism." This ambivalent stance ultimately serves to reinforce the legitimacy of the US national security doctrine which is predicated on waging the "Global War on Terrorism" (GWOT).
At this juncture, with the popularity of the Bush-Cheney regime at an all time low, a real opportunity exists to initiate an impeachment process, which could contribute to temporarily stalling the military agenda.
The corporate media also bear a heavy responsibility for the cover-up of US sponsored war crimes. Until recently these war preparations involving the use of nuclear weapons have been scarcely covered by the corporate media. The latter must also be forcefully challenged for their biased coverage of the Middle East war.
What is needed is to break the conspiracy of silence, expose the media lies and distortions, confront the criminal nature of the US Administration and of those governments which support it, its war agenda as well as its so-called "Homeland Security agenda" which has already defined the contours of a police State.
In response to the Perdana initaitve to criminalize war, it is essential to bring the US-Israeli war project to the forefront of political debate, particularly in North America, Western Europe and Israel. Political and military leaders who are opposed to the war must take a firm stance, from within their respective institutions. Citizens must take a stance individually and collectively against war.
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ANNEX
A1 Categorization, Nature of US Intervention (44 countries)
CASUALTIES ARE NOT LIMITED TO KILLINGS IN THE WAR THEATER OR OTHER MILITARY-TYPE OPERATIONS,
WE MUST ALSO ASSESS THE BROAD ECONOMIC, SOCIAL AND INSTITUIONAL MECHANISMS AS WELL AS THE ENVIRONMENTAL CONSEQUENCES OF WAR AND ECONOMIC COLLAPSE
With regard to military and covert intelligence or other command type operations, we may distinguish between:
TW Theater War
MC US Instigated Military Coup
CW US Sponsored Civil War
MP Military policing
CO, Covert Intelligence operation, proxy armies, death squadrons,
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Countries
Afghanistan TW CW MC CO, Angola CW CO, Argentina MC CO, Bangladesh MC, Bolivia MC, Bosnia TW CW, Brazil MC CO, Cambodia TW CW CO, Chile MC CO, Colombia CW CO, Congo TW CW, Dominican Republic MC MP CO, El Salvador CW, MC CO, Eritrea CW, Ethiopia CW , Guatemala MC CO, Grenada MP, Haiti MC MP CO, Honduras MC MP CO, Indonesia MC CO, Iran MC, Iraq MC TW CO, Japan TW , Laos TW CW, Lebanon TW CW CO MP, Liberia, CW, Macedonia MP, CW CO, Mozambique CW CO, Nicaragua CW CO, Nigeria CW CO,North Korea TW CW, Pakistan MC CO, Palestine CW CO, Panama MC MP, Philippines MC MP CO, Rwanda CW CO, Serbia CW CO, Somalia CW MP CO, Sierra Leone CW, South Korea CW TW CO, Sudan CW MP CO, Thailand MC CO, Uruguay MC CO, Venezuela MC, Vietnam TW MC CW, Zimbabwe CW
Historical examples of US sponsored war crimes
SELECTED COUNTRY CASES
Korea (1950-1953)
North Korea lost nearly a third its population of 8 - 9 million people during the 37-month long "hot" war, 1950 - 1953, an unprecedented percentage of suffered by any nation as a result of an armed conflict. General Lemay in charge of US operations in Korea candidly acknowledges that the US killed up to 20 percent of North Korea's population over that three period of intensive bombings’
Vietnam (1954-1975)
According to Vietnamese sources, civilian casualties resulting from the Vietnam War were of the order of 4 million. Out of a population of 38 million during the period 1954-1975, Vietnamese casualties represent a 12-13% of the entire population
Indonesia
While Indonesia was not invaded by US forces, it experienced according to a CIA report, "one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century." Ironically it was the CIA which instigated this plan.
"The 300-page CIA text fails to acknowledge the direct role of the US in the massacres It essentially "blames the victims of the killings -- the supporters of the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) -- for their own deaths… The hundreds of thousands of people shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, or starved to death were labeled perpetrators, or would-be perpetrators of atrocities, just as culpable for the murder of the army generals as the handful of people who were truly guilty."
The Congo (1998-2000)
The Congo (1998-2000) and The Sudan were US sponsored "civil wars". Two years of war in the Congo (1998-2000) caused the deaths of an estimated 3.8 million people, mostly from starvation and disease.
Sudan
Two million deaths resulted from Sudan's 18-year "civil war", which is tied into securing control over oil reserves.
Nigeria-Biafra
One million people also died during the US sponsored Nigeria-Biafra conflict of the late 1960s, which was also linked to oil interests.
Rwanda (1994-1995)
Between 500,000 and a million people died as a result of the Rwandan "civil war" and genocide. Recent reports confirm that the US and Britain played a key role in triggering the ethnic massacres.
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20070201&articleId=4659
Putin and the Geopolitics of the New Cold War: Or, what happens when Cowboys don’t shoot straight like they used to…
The frank words of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin to the assembled participants of the annual Munich Wehrkunde security conference have unleashed a storm of self-righteous protest from Western media and politicians. A visitor from another planet might have the impression that the Russian President had abruptly decided to launch a provocative confrontation policy with the West reminiscent of the 1943-1991 Cold War.
However, the details of the developments in NATO and the United States military policies since 1991 are anything but ‘déjà vu all over again’, to paraphrase the legendary New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra.
This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War, which literally threatens the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin’s frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.
Because of the misleading accounts of most of Putin’s remarks in most western media, it’s worth reading in full in English (go to www.securityconference.de for official English translation).
Putin spoke in general terms of Washington’s vision of a ‘unipolar’ world, with ‘one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, calling it a ‘world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.’
Then the Russian President got to the heart of the matter: ‘Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.’
Putin continued, ‘We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?’
These direct words begin to touch on what Mr Putin is concerned about in US foreign and military policy since the end of the Cold War some 16 or so years back. But it is further in the text that he gets explicit about what military policies he is reacting to. Here is where the speech is worth clarification. Putin warns of the destabilizing effect of ‘space weapons.’—‘it is impossible to sanction the appearance of new, destabilising high-tech weapons…a new area of confrontation, especially in outer space. Star wars is no longer a fantasy – it is a reality…In Russia’s opinion, the militarization of outer space could have unpredictable consequences for the international community, and provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear (arms race-f.w.e.) era.’
He then declares, ‘Plans to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defence system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race?’
What does he refer to here? Few are aware that while claiming it is doing so to protect itself against the risk of ‘rogue state’ nuclear missile attack from the likes of North Korea or perhaps one day Iran, the US recently announced it is building massive anti-missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Poland? Missile defense? What’s this all about?
Missile Defense and a US Nuclear First Strike
On January 29 US Army Brigadier General Patrick J. O`Reilly, Deputy Director of the Pentagon`s Missile Defense Agency, announced US plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile defense elements in Europe by 2011, which the Pentagon claims is aimed at protecting American and NATO installations from enemy threats coming from the Middle East, not Russia. Following Putin’s Munich remarks, the US State Department issued a formal comment noting that the Bush Administration is ‘puzzled by the repeated caustic comments about the envisaged system from Moscow.’
Oops…Better send that press release back to the Pentagon’s Office of Deception Propaganda for rewrite. The Iran missile threat to NATO installations in Poland somehow isn’t quite convincing. Why not ask long-time NATO member Turkey if the US can place its missile shield there, far closer to Iran? Or maybe Kuwait? Or Israel?
US policy since 1999 has called for building some form of active missile defense despite the end of the Cold War threat from Soviet ICBM or other missile launch. The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 (Public Law 106-38) says so: ‘It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate) with funding subject to the annual authorization of appropriations and the annual appropriation of funds for National Missile Defense.’ Missile defense was one of Donald Rumsfeld’s obsessions as Defense Secretary.
Why now?
What is increasingly clear, at least in Moscow and Beijing, is that Washington has a far larger grand strategy behind its seemingly irrational and arbitrary unilateral military moves.
For the Pentagon and the US policy establishment, regardless of political party, the Cold War with Russia never ended. It merely continued in disguised form. This has been the case with Presidents G.H.W. Bush, William Clinton and with George W. Bush.
Missile defense sounded plausible if the United States were vulnerable to attack by a tiny band of dedicated Islamic terrorists able to commandeer a Boeing aircraft with boxcutters. The only problem is missile defense is not aimed at rogue terrorists like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, or states like North Korea or Iran.
From them the threat of a devastating nuclear strike on the territory of the United States is non-existent. The US Navy and Air Force bomber fleet today stands in full preparation to bomb, even nuke Iran back to the stone age only over suspicions she is trying to develop independent nuclear weapon technology. States like Iran have no capability to render America defenceless, without risking nuclear annihilation many times over.
Missile defense came out of the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan proposed developing a system of satellites in space and radar bases around the globe, listening stations and interceptor missiles, to monitor and shoot down nuclear missiles before they hit their intended target.
It was dubbed Star Wars by its critics, but the Pentagon officially has spent more than $130 billion on such a system since 1983. George W. Bush increased that significantly beginning 2002, to $11 billion a year, double the level during the Clinton years. And another $53 billion for the following five years has been budgeted.
Washington’s obsession with Nuclear Primacy
What Washington did not say, but Putin has now alluded to in Munich, is that the US missile defense is not at all defensive. It is offensive, and how.
The possibility of providing a powerful state, one with the world’s most awesome military machinery, a shield to protect it from limited attack, is aimed directly at Russia, the only other nuclear power with anywhere the capacity to launch a credible nuclear counterpunch.
Were the United States able to effectively shield itself from a potential Russian response to a US nuclear First Strike, the US would be able simply to dictate to the entire world on its terms, not only to Russia. That would be what military people term Nuclear Primacy. That is the real meaning of Putin’s unusual speech. He isn’t paranoid. He’s being starkly realistic.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, it’s now clear that the US Government has never for a moment stopped its pursuit of Nuclear Primacy. For Washington and the US elites, the Cold War never ended. They just forgot to tell us all.
The quest for global control of oil and energy pipelines, the quest to establish its military bases across Eurasia, its attempt to modernize and upgrade its nuclear submarine fleet, its Strategic B-52 bomber command, all make sense only when seen through the perspective of the relentless pursuit of US Nuclear Primacy.
The Bush Administration unilaterally abrogated the US-Russian ABM Treaty in December 2001. It’s in a race to complete a global network of missile defense as the key to US nuclear primacy. With even a primitive missile defense shield, the US could attack Russian missile silos and submarine fleets with no fear of effective retaliation, as the few remaining Russian nuclear missiles would be unable to launch a convincing response enough to deter a US First Strike.
The ability of both sides—the Warsaw Pact and NATO—during the Cold War, to mutually annihilate one another, led to a nuclear stalemate dubbed by military strategists, MAD—mutual assured destruction. It was scary but in a bizarre sense, more stable that what we have today with a unilateral US pursuit of nuclear primacy. The prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage for either side, led to a world in which nuclear war had been ‘unthinkable.’
Now, the US pursues the possibility of nuclear war as ‘thinkable.’ That’s really mad.
The first nation with a nuclear missile shield would de facto have ‘first strike ability.’ Quite correctly, Lt. Colonel Robert Bowman, Director of the US Air Force missile defense program, recently called missile defense, ‘the missing link to a First Strike.’
More alarming is the fact no one outside a handful of Pentagon planners or senior intelligence officials in Washington discusses the implications of Washington’s pursuit of missile defense in Poland, Czech Republic or its drive for Nuclear Primacy.
It calls to mind ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ the September 2000 report of the hawkish Project for the New American Century, where Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were members. There they declared, ‘The United States must develop and deploy global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world.’ (author’s emphasis).
Before becoming Bush’s Defense Secretary in January 2001, Rumsfeld headed a Presidential Commission advocating the development of missile defense for the United States.
So eager was the Bush-Cheney Administration to advance its missile defense plans, that the President and Defense Secretary ordered waiving usual operational testing requirements essential to determining whether the highly complex system of systems was effective.
The Rumsfeld missile defense program is strongly opposed within the military command. On March 26, 2004 no less than 49 US generals and admirals signed an Open Letter to the President, appealing for missile defense postponement.
As they noted, ‘US technology, already deployed, can pinpoint the source of a ballistic missile launch. It is, therefore, highly unlikely that any state would dare to attack the US or allow a terrorist to do so from its territory with a missile armed with a weapon of mass destruction, thereby risking annihilation from a devastating US retaliatory strike.’
The 49 generals and admirals, including Admiral William J. Crowe, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, went on to argue to the President, ‘As you have said, Mr. President, our highest priority is to prevent terrorists from acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction. We agree. We therefore recommend, as the militarily responsible course of action, that you postpone operational deployment of the expensive and untested GMD (Ground-based Missile Defense) system and transfer the associated funding to accelerated programs to secure the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials, and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists who may attempt to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States.’
What the seasoned military veterans did not say was that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and company had quite another agenda than rogue terror threats. They were after Full Spectrum Dominance, the New World Order, and the elimination, for once and all, of Russia as a potential rival for power.
The rush to deploy a missile defense shield is clearly not aimed at North Korea or terror attacks. It is aimed at Russia and much less so, the far smaller nuclear capacities of China. As the 49 generals and admirals noted in their letter to the President in 2004, the US already had more than sufficient nuclear warheads to hit a thousand bunkers or caves of a potential rogue state.
Kier Lieber and Daryl Press, two US military analysts, writing in the influential Foreign Affairs of the New York Council on Foreign Relations in March 2006, noted, ‘If the United States’ nuclear modernization were really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country’s nuclear force would not need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the W-76 modernization program. The current and future US nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a pre-emptive disarming strike against Russia or China.’
Referring to the aggressive new Pentagon deployment plans for missile defense, Lieber and Press add, ‘the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one—as an adjunct to a US First Strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal—if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes…’
This is the real agenda in Washington’s Eurasian Great Game. Naturally, to state so openly would risk tipping Washington’s hand before the noose had been irreversibly tightened around Moscow’s metaphorical neck. So the State Department and Defense Secretary Gates try to make jokes about the recent Russian remarks, as though they were Putin’s paranoid delusions.
This entire US program of missile defense and nuclear First Strike modernization is hair-raising enough as an idea. Under the Bush Administration, it has been made operational and airborne, hearkening back to the dangerous days of the Cold War with fleets of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers and Trident nuclear missile submarines on ready alert around the clock, a nuclear horror scenario.
Global Strike: Pentagon Conplan 8022
The march towards possible nuclear catastrophe by intent or by miscalculation, as a consequence of the bold new Washington policy, took on significant new gravity in June 2004, only weeks after the 49 generals and admirals took the highly unusual step of writing to their President.
That June, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld approved a Top Secret order for the Armed Forces of the United States to implement something called Conplan 8022, ‘which provides the President a prompt, global strike capability.’
The term, Conplan, is Pentagon shorthand for Contingency Plan. What ‘contingencies’ are Pentagon planners preparing for? A pre-emptive conventional strike against tiny North Korea or even Iran? Or a full-force pre-emptive nuclear assault on the last formidable nuclear power not under the thumb of the US’ Full Spectrum Dominance-- Russia?
The two words, ‘global strike’, are also notable. It’s Pentagon-speak to describe a specific pre-emptive attack which, for the first time since the earliest Cold War days, includes a nuclear option, counter to the traditional US military notion of nuclear weapons being only used in defense to deter attack.
Conplan 8022, as has been noted by some, is unlike traditional Pentagon war plans which have been essentially defensive responses to invasion or attack.
In concert with the aggressive pre-emptive 2002 Bush Doctrine, Bush’s new Conplan 8022 is offensive. It could be triggered by the mere ‘perception’ of an imminent threat, and carried out by Presidential order, without Congress.
Given the details about false or faked ‘perceptions’ in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President about Iraq’s threat of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the new Conplan 8022 suggests a US President might order the missiles against any and every perceived threat or even potential, unproven threat.
In response to Rumsfeld’s June 2004 order, General Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed the order to make Conplan 8022 operational. Selected nuclear-capable bombers, ICBMs, SSBNs, and ‘information warfare’ (sic) units have been deployed against unnamed high-value targets in ‘adversary’ countries.
Was Iran an adversary country, even though it had never attacked the United States? Was North Korea, even though it had never in five decades launched a direct attack on South Korea, let alone any one else? Is China an ‘adversary’ because it’s simply becoming economically too influential?
Is Russia now an adversary because she refuses to lay back and accept being made what Brzezinski terms a ‘vassal’ state of the American Empire?
Because there has been zero open debate inside the United States about Conplan 8022, there has been virtually no discussion of any of these potentially nuclear-loaded questions.
What makes the June 2004 Rumsfeld order even more unsettling to a world which truly had hoped nuclear mushroom clouds had become a threat of the past, is that Conplan 8022 contains a significant nuclear attack component.
It’s true that the overall number of nuclear weapons in the US military stockpile has been declining since the end of the Cold War. But not, it seems, because the US is moving the world back from the brink of nuclear war by miscalculation.
The new missile defense expansion to Poland and Czech Republic is better understood from the point of the remarkable expansion of NATO since 1991. As Putin noted, ‘NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders… think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?’
US bases encircle Russia
As Russian strategist and military expert, Yevgeny Primakov, a close adviser to Putin, recently noted, NATO was ‘founded during the Cold War era as a regional organization to ensure the security of US allies in Europe.’ He adds, ‘NATO today is acting on the basis of an entirely different philosophy and doctrine, moving outside the European continent and conducting military operations far beyond its bounds. NATO…is rapidly expanding in contravention to earlier accords. The admission of new members to NATO is leading to the expansion of bases that host the U.S. military, air defense systems, as well as ABM components.’
Today, NATO member states include not only the Cold War core in Western Europe, commanded by an American. NATO also includes former Warsaw Pact or Soviet Union states Poland, Latvia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, formerly of Yugoslavia. Candidates to join include the Republic of Georgia, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia. Ukraine’s President, Victor Yushchenko, has tried aggressively to bring Ukraine into NATO. This is a clear message to Moscow, not surprisingly, one they don’t seem to welcome with open arms.
New NATO structures have also been formed while old ones were abolished: The NATO Response Force (NRF) was launched at the 2002 Prague Summit. In 2003, just after the fall of Baghdad, a major restructuring of the NATO military commands began. The Headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic was abolished. A new command, Allied Command Transformation (ACT), was established in Norfolk, Virginia. ACT is responsible for driving ‘transformation’ in NATO.
By 2007 Washington had signed an agreement with Japan to co-operate on missile defense development. She was deeply engaged in testing a missile defense system with Israel. She has now extended her European Missile Defense to Poland, where the Minister of Defense is a close friend and ally of Pentagon neo-conservative war-hawks, and to the Czech Republic. NATO has agreed to put the question of the Ukraine and Republic of Georgia’s bids for NATO membership on a fast track. The Middle East, despite the debacle in Iraq, is being militarized with a permanent network of US bases from Qatar to Iraq and beyond.
On February 15, the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved a draft, the Orwellian-named NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007 reaffirming US backing for the further enlargement of NATO, including support for Ukraine to join along with Georgia.
From the Russian point of view, NATO's eastward expansion since the end of the cold war has been in clear breach of an agreement between then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H.W. Bush which allowed for a peaceful unification of Germany. NATO's expansion policy is seen as a continuation of a Cold War attempt to surround and isolate Russia.
Nnew bases to guard ‘democracy’?
An almost unnoticed consequence of Washington’s policy since the bombing of Serbia in 1999, has been establishment of an extraordinary network of new US military bases, bases in parts of the world where it seems little justified as a US defensive precaution, given the threat, huge taxpayer expense, let alone other global military commitments.
In June 1999, following the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces began construction of Camp Bondsteel, at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was the lynchpin in what was to be a new global network of US bases.
Bondsteel put US air power within easy striking distance of the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian Sea, as well as Russia. Camp Bondsteel was at the time the largest US military base built since the Vietnam War, with nearly 7,000 troops. The base had been built by the largest US military construction company, Halliburton’s KBR. Halliburton’s CEO at the time was Dick Cheney.
Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post matter-of-factly noted, ‘With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.’
Camp Bondsteel was but the first of a vast chain of US bases that have been built during this decade. The US military went on to build military bases in Hungary, Bosnia, Albania and Macedonia, in addition to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, then still legally part of Yugoslavia.
One of the most important and least mentioned new US bases was in Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite and now new NATO member. In a conflict---and in Pentagon-speak there are only ‘conflicts,’ no longer wars, which involved issues of asking the US Congress to declare them officially, and provide just reason---the military would use Bezmer to ‘surge’ men and materiel toward the front lines. Where? In Russia?
The US has been building its bases in Afghanistan. It built three major US bases in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001, at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was built some 100 kilometers from the border with Iran.
Afghanistan had historically been the heart of the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby gaining a warm water port for its navy and threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.
Afghanistan is also seen by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military might could directly threaten Russia and China as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little had changed in that respect over more than a century of wars.
Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, had been in negotiations, together with Cheney’s Halliburton and with Enron, for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai.
At that same time, the Pentagon came to an agreement with the government of Kyrgystan in Central Asia, to build a strategically important base there, Manas Air Base at Bishkek’s international airport. Manas is not only near to Afghanistan; it is also in easy striking distance to Caspian Sea oil and gas, as well as to the borders of both China and Russia.
As part of the price of accepting him as a US ally in the War on Terror rather than a foe, Washington extracted an agreement from Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, to allow the airport at Jacobabad, about 400km north of Karachi, to be used by the US Air Force and NATO ‘to support their campaign in Afghanistan.’ Two other US bases were built at Dalbandin and Pasni.
This all is merely a small part of the vast web of US-controlled military bases Washington has been building globally since the so-called end of the Cold War.
It’s becoming clear to much of the rest of the world that Washington might even itself be instigating or provoking wars or conflicts with nations across the world, not merely to control oil, though strategic control of global oil flows had been at the heart of the American Century since the 1920’s. That’s the real significance of what Vladimir Putin said in Munich. He told the world what it did not want to hear: The American ‘Emperor’s New Clothes did not exist. The Emperor was clothed in naked pursuit of global military control.
During the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, the Yeltsin government had asked Washington for a series of mutual reductions in the size of each superpower’s nuclear missile and weapons arsenal. Russian nuclear stockpiles were ageing and Moscow saw little further need to remain armed to its nuclear teeth once the Cold War had ended.
Washington clearly saw in this a golden opportunity to go for nuclear primacy, for the first time since the 1950’s, when Russia first developed Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile delivery capability for its growing nuclear weapons arsenal.
Nuclear primacy is an aggressive offensive policy. It means that one superpower, USA, would have the possibility to launch a full nuclear First Strike at Russia’s nuclear sites and destroy enough targets in the first blow, that Russia would be crippled from making any effective retaliation.
With no credible threat of retaliation, Russia had no credible nuclear deterrent. It was at the mercy of the supreme power. Never before in history had the prospect of such ultimate power in the hands of one single nation seemed so near at hand.
This stealthy move by the Pentagon for Nuclear Primacy has, up until now, been carried out in utmost secrecy, disguised amid rhetoric of a USA-Russia ‘Partnership for Peace.’
Rather than take advantage of the opportunity to climb down from the brink of nuclear annihilation following the end of the Cold War, Washington has turned instead to upgrading its nuclear arsenal, at the same time it was reducing its numbers.
While the rest of the world was still in shock over the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration unilaterally moved to rip up its earlier treaty obligations with Russia to not build an anti-missile defense.
On December 13, 2001, President Bush announced that the United States Government was unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, and committing $8 billion for the 2002 Budget to build a National Missile Defense system. It was pushed through Congress, promoted as a move to protect US territory from rogue terror attacks, from states including North Korea or Iraq.
The rogue argument was a fraud, a plausible cover story designed to sneak the policy reversal through without debate, in the wake of the September 11 shock.
The repeal of the ABM Treaty was little understood outside qualified military circles. In fact, it represented the most dangerous step by the United States towards nuclear war since the 1950’s. Washington is going at a fast pace to the goal of total nuclear superiority globally, Nuclear Primacy.
Washington has dismantled its highly lethal MX missiles by 2005. But that’s misleading. At the same time, it significantly improved its remaining ICBM’s by installing the MX’s high-yield nuclear warheads and advanced re-entry vehicles on its Minuteman ICBMs. The guidance system of the Minuteman has been upgraded to match that of the dismantled MX.
The Pentagon began replacing ageing ballistic missiles on its submarines with far more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles with new larger-yield nuclear warheads.
The Navy shifted more of its nuclear ballistic missile-launching SSBN submarines to the Pacific to patrol the blind spot of Russia’s early warning radar net as well as patrolling near China’s coast. The US Air Force completed refitting its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles believed invisible to Russian air defense radar. New enhanced avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers gave them the ability to fly at extremely low altitudes avoiding radar detection as well.
A vast number of stockpiled weapons is not necessary to the new global power projection. Little-publicized new technology has enabled the US to deploy a ‘leaner and meaner’ nuclear strike force. A case in point is the Navy’s successful program to upgrade the fuse on the W-76 nuclear warheads sitting atop most US submarine-launched missiles, which makes them able to hit very hard targets such as ICBM silos.
No one has ever presented credible evidence that Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah or any other organization on the US State Department’s Terrorist Organization Black List possessed nuclear missiles in hardened underground silos. Aside from the US and perhaps Israel, only Russia and to a far smaller degree, China, have these in any number.
In 1991 at the presumed end of the Cold War, in a gesture to lower the danger of strategic nuclear miscalculation, the US Air Force was ordered to remove its fleet of nuclear bombers from Ready Alert status. After 2004 that too changed.
Conplan 8022 again put US Air Force long-range B-52 and other bombers on ‘Alert’ status. The Commander of the 8th Air Force stated at the time, that his nuclear bombers were ‘essentially on alert to plan and execute Global Strikes’ on behalf of the US Strategic Command or STRATCOM, based in Omaha, Nebraska.
Conplan 8022 included not only long-range nuclear and conventional weapons launched from the US, but also nuclear and other bombs deployed in Europe, Japan and other sites. It gave the US what the Pentagon termed Global Strike, the ability to hit any point on the earth or sky with devastating force, nuclear as well as conventional. Since the Rumsfeld June 2004 readiness order, the US Strategic Command has boasted it was ready to execute an attack anywhere on earth ‘in half a day or less,’ from the moment the President gave the order.
In the January 24, 2006 London Financial Times, the US Ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and wife of a leading Washington neo-conservative warhawk, declared that the US wanted a ‘globally deployable military force’ that would operate everywhere – from Africa to the Middle East and beyond.
It would include Japan and Australia as well as the NATO nations. Nuland added, ‘It’s a totally different animal (sic) whose ultimate role will be subject to US desires and adventures.’ Subject to US desires and adventures? Those were hardly calming words given the record of Nuland’s former boss in faking intelligence to justify wars in Iraq and elsewhere.
Now, with the deployment of even a crude missile defense, under Conplan 8022, the US would have what Pentagon planners called ‘escalation dominance’—the ability to win a war at any level of violence, including nuclear war.
As some more sober minds argued, were Russia and China to respond to these US moves with even minimal self-protection measures, the risks of a global nuclear conflagration by miscalculation would climb to levels far beyond any seen even during the Cuba Missile Crisis or the danger days of the Cold War.
Mackinder’s Nightmare
In a few brief years Washington has managed to create the nightmare of Britain’s father of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, the horror scenario feared by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and other Cold War veterans of US foreign policy who have studied and understood the power calculus of Mackinder.
The vast resources-rich and population-rich Eurasian Heartland and landmass is building economic and military ties with one another for the first time in history, ties whose driving force is the increasingly aggressive Washington role in the world.
The driver of the emerging Eurasian geopolitical cooperation is obvious. China, with the world’s largest population and an economy expanding at double digits, urgently needs secure alliance partners who could secure her energy security. Russia, an energy goliath, needs secure trade outlets independent of Washington control to develop and rebuild its tattered economy. These complimentary needs form the seed crystal of what Washington and US strategists define as a new Cold War, this one over energy, over oil and natural gas above all. Military might is the currency this time as in the earlier Cold War.
By 2006 Moscow and Beijing had clearly decided to upgrade their cooperation with their Eurasian neighbors. They both agreed to turn to a moribund loose organization that they had co-founded in 2001, in the wake of the 1998 Asia crisis, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO. The SCO had highly significant members, geopolitically seen. SCO included oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as China and Russia. By 2006 Beijing and Moscow began to view the SCO as a nascent counterweight to increasingly arbitrary American power politics. The organization was discussing projects of energy cooperation and even military mutual defense.
The pressures of an increasingly desperate US foreign policy are forcing an unlikely ‘coalition of the unwilling’ across Eurasia. The potentials of such Eurasian cooperation between China, Kazakhstan, Iran are real enough and obvious. The missing link, however, is the military security that could make it invulnerable or nearly, to the sabre-rattling from Washington and NATO. Only one power on the face of the earth has the nuclear and military base and know-how able to provide that—Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The Russian Bear sharpens its nuclear teeth…
With NATO troops creeping up to Russia’s borders on all sides, US nuclear B-52s and SSBN submarines being deployed to strategic sites on Russia’s perimeter, Washington extending its new missile shield from Greenland to the UK, to Australia, Japan and now even Poland and the Czech Republic, it should be no surprise that the Russian Government is responding.
While Washington planners may have assumed that because the once-mighty Red Army was a shell of its former glory, that the state of Russian military preparedness since the end of the Cold War was laughable.
But Russia never let go of its one trump card—its strategic nuclear force.
During the entire economic chaos of the Yeltsin years, Russia never stopped producing state-of-the art military technology.
In May 2003, some months after George Bush unilaterally ripped up the bilateral Anti-Missile Defense Treaty with Moscow, invaded Afghanistan and bombed Baghdad into subjugation, Russia’s President delivered a new message in his annual State of the Union Address to the Russian nation.
Putin spoke for the first time publicly of the need to modernize Russia’s nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, ‘which will ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term.’
In response to the abrogation by the Bush Administration of the ABM Treaty, and with it Start II, Russia predictably stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles. Start II had called for full phase out of multiple warhead or MIRVed missiles, by both sides by 2007.
At that point Russia began to reconfigure its SS-18 MIRV missiles to extend their service life to 2016. Fully loaded SS-18 missiles had a range of 11,000 kilometers. In addition, it redeployed mobile rail-based SS-24 M1 nuclear missiles.
In its 2003 Budget, the Russian government made funding of its SS-27 or Topol-M single-warhead missiles a ‘priority.’ And the Defense Ministry resumed test launches of both SS-27 and Topol-M.
In December 2006, Putin told Russian journalists that deployment of the new Russian mobile Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile system was crucial for Russia’s national security. Without naming the obvious US threat, he declared, ‘Maintaining a strategic balance will mean that our strategic deterrent forces should be able to guarantee the neutralization of any potential aggressor, no matter what modern weapons systems he possesses.’
It was unmistakable whom he had in mind, and it wasn’t the Al Qaeda cave-dwellers of Tora Bora.
Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Ivanov, announced at the same time that the military would deploy another 69 silo-based and mobile Topol-M missile systems over the following decade. Just after his Munich speech Putin announced he had named his old KGB/FSB friend, Ivanov to be his First Deputy Prime Minister overseeing the entire military industry.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported that as of January 2006, Russia possessed 927 nuclear delivery vehicles and 4,279 nuclear warheads against 1,255 and 5,966 respectively for the United States. Nop two other powers on the face of the earth even came close to these massive overkill capacities. This was the ultimate reason all US foreign policy, military and economic, since the end of the Cold War had covertly had as endgame the complete deconstruction of Russia as a functioning state.
In April 2006, the Russian military tested the K65M-R missile, a new missile designed to penetrate US missile defense systems. It was part of testing and deploying a uniform warhead for both land and sea-based ballistic missiles. The new missile was hypersonic and capable of changing flight path.
Four months earlier, Russia successfully tested its Bulava ICBM, a naval version of the Topol-M. It was launched from one of its Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarines in the White Sea, travelling a thousand miles before hitting a dummy target successfully on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Bulava missiles were to be installed on Russian Borey-class nuclear submarines beginning 2008.
During a personal inspection of the first regiment of Russian mobile Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles in December 2006, Putin told reporters the deployment of mobile Topol-M ICBMs were crucial for Russia’s national security, stating, ‘This is a significant step forward in improving our defense capabilities.’
‘Maintaining a strategic balance,’ he continued, ’will mean that our strategic deterrent forces should be able to guarantee the neutralization of any potential aggressor, no matter what modern weapons systems he possesses.’
Putin clearly did not have France in mind when he referred to the unnamed ‘he.’ President Putin had personally given French President Chirac a tour of one of Russia’s missile facilities that January, where Putin explained the latest Russian missile advances. ‘He knows what I am talking about,’ Putin told reporters afterwards, referring to Chirac’s grasp of the weapon’s significance.
Putin also did not have North Korea, China, Pakistan or India in mind, nor Great Britain with its ageing nuclear capacity, not even Israel. The only power surrounding Russia with weapons of mass destruction was its old Cold War foe--the United States.
The Commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, General Nikolai Solovtsov, was more explicit. Commenting on the successful test of the K65M-R at Russia’s Kapustin Yar missile test site last April, he declared that US plans for a missile defense system, ‘could upset strategic stability. The planned scale of the United States’ deployment of a…missile defense system is so considerable that the fear that it could have a negative effect on the parameters of Russia’s nuclear deterrence potential is quite justified.’ Put simply, he referred to the now open US quest for Full Spectrum Dominance—Nuclear Primacy.
A new Armageddon is in the making. The unilateral military agenda of Washington has predictably provoked a major effort by Russia to defend herself. The prospects of a global nuclear conflagration, by miscalculation, increase by the day. At what point might an American President, God forbid, decide to order a pre-emptive full-scale nuclear attack on Russia to prevent Russia from rebuilding a state of mutual deterrence?
The new Armageddon is not exactly the Armageddon which George Bush’s Christian fanatics pray for as they dream of their Rapture. It is an Armageddon in which Russia and the United States would irradiate the planet and, perhaps, end human civilization in the process.
Ironically, oil, in the context of Washington’s bungled Iraq war and soaring world oil prices after 2003, has enabled Russia to begin the arduous job of rebuilding its collapsed economy and its military capacities. Putin’s Russia is no longer a begger-thy-neighbor former Superpower. It’s using its oil weapon and rebuilding its nuclear ones.
Bush’s America is a hollowed-out debt-ridden economy engaged on using its last card, its vast military power to prop up the dollar and its role as world sole Superpower.
Putin has obviously realized that his new-found ‘partner-in-prayer’, George W., has a large black spot hiding the secrets of his heart. It reminded of a popular country and western ballad from the late Tammy Wynette, ‘Cowboys don’t shoot straight like they used to. They look you in the eye and lie with their white hats on.’ That’s certainly the case with the famous cowboy of Crawford, Texas in his dealings with Vladimir Putin and the rest of the world.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, and the soon-to-be published Seeds of Destruction: the dark side of gene manipulation. This article was drawn from his new book, in preparation, on the history of the American Century. He may be reached through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
However, the details of the developments in NATO and the United States military policies since 1991 are anything but ‘déjà vu all over again’, to paraphrase the legendary New York Yankees catcher, Yogi Berra.
This time round we are already deep in a New Cold War, which literally threatens the future of life on this planet. The debacle in Iraq, or the prospect of a US tactical nuclear pre-emptive strike against Iran are ghastly enough. In comparison to what is at play in the US global military buildup against its most formidable remaining global rival, Russia, they loom relatively small. The US military policies since the end of the Soviet Union and emergence of the Republic of Russia in 1991 are in need of close examination in this context. Only then do Putin’s frank remarks on February 10 at the Munich Conference on Security make sense.
Because of the misleading accounts of most of Putin’s remarks in most western media, it’s worth reading in full in English (go to www.securityconference.de for official English translation).
Putin spoke in general terms of Washington’s vision of a ‘unipolar’ world, with ‘one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making, calling it a ‘world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.’
Then the Russian President got to the heart of the matter: ‘Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of force – military force – in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts. As a result we do not have sufficient strength to find a comprehensive solution to any one of these conflicts. Finding a political settlement also becomes impossible.’
Putin continued, ‘We are seeing a greater and greater disdain for the basic principles of international law. And independent legal norms are, as a matter of fact, coming increasingly closer to one state’s legal system. One state and, of course, first and foremost the United States, has overstepped its national borders in every way. This is visible in the economic, political, cultural and educational policies it imposes on other nations. Well, who likes this? Who is happy about this?’
These direct words begin to touch on what Mr Putin is concerned about in US foreign and military policy since the end of the Cold War some 16 or so years back. But it is further in the text that he gets explicit about what military policies he is reacting to. Here is where the speech is worth clarification. Putin warns of the destabilizing effect of ‘space weapons.’—‘it is impossible to sanction the appearance of new, destabilising high-tech weapons…a new area of confrontation, especially in outer space. Star wars is no longer a fantasy – it is a reality…In Russia’s opinion, the militarization of outer space could have unpredictable consequences for the international community, and provoke nothing less than the beginning of a nuclear (arms race-f.w.e.) era.’
He then declares, ‘Plans to expand certain elements of the anti-missile defence system to Europe cannot help but disturb us. Who needs the next step of what would be, in this case, an inevitable arms race?’
What does he refer to here? Few are aware that while claiming it is doing so to protect itself against the risk of ‘rogue state’ nuclear missile attack from the likes of North Korea or perhaps one day Iran, the US recently announced it is building massive anti-missile defense installations in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Poland? Missile defense? What’s this all about?
Missile Defense and a US Nuclear First Strike
On January 29 US Army Brigadier General Patrick J. O`Reilly, Deputy Director of the Pentagon`s Missile Defense Agency, announced US plans to deploy anti-ballistic missile defense elements in Europe by 2011, which the Pentagon claims is aimed at protecting American and NATO installations from enemy threats coming from the Middle East, not Russia. Following Putin’s Munich remarks, the US State Department issued a formal comment noting that the Bush Administration is ‘puzzled by the repeated caustic comments about the envisaged system from Moscow.’
Oops…Better send that press release back to the Pentagon’s Office of Deception Propaganda for rewrite. The Iran missile threat to NATO installations in Poland somehow isn’t quite convincing. Why not ask long-time NATO member Turkey if the US can place its missile shield there, far closer to Iran? Or maybe Kuwait? Or Israel?
US policy since 1999 has called for building some form of active missile defense despite the end of the Cold War threat from Soviet ICBM or other missile launch. The National Missile Defense Act of 1999 (Public Law 106-38) says so: ‘It is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as is technologically possible an effective National Missile Defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate) with funding subject to the annual authorization of appropriations and the annual appropriation of funds for National Missile Defense.’ Missile defense was one of Donald Rumsfeld’s obsessions as Defense Secretary.
Why now?
What is increasingly clear, at least in Moscow and Beijing, is that Washington has a far larger grand strategy behind its seemingly irrational and arbitrary unilateral military moves.
For the Pentagon and the US policy establishment, regardless of political party, the Cold War with Russia never ended. It merely continued in disguised form. This has been the case with Presidents G.H.W. Bush, William Clinton and with George W. Bush.
Missile defense sounded plausible if the United States were vulnerable to attack by a tiny band of dedicated Islamic terrorists able to commandeer a Boeing aircraft with boxcutters. The only problem is missile defense is not aimed at rogue terrorists like Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, or states like North Korea or Iran.
From them the threat of a devastating nuclear strike on the territory of the United States is non-existent. The US Navy and Air Force bomber fleet today stands in full preparation to bomb, even nuke Iran back to the stone age only over suspicions she is trying to develop independent nuclear weapon technology. States like Iran have no capability to render America defenceless, without risking nuclear annihilation many times over.
Missile defense came out of the 1980’s when Ronald Reagan proposed developing a system of satellites in space and radar bases around the globe, listening stations and interceptor missiles, to monitor and shoot down nuclear missiles before they hit their intended target.
It was dubbed Star Wars by its critics, but the Pentagon officially has spent more than $130 billion on such a system since 1983. George W. Bush increased that significantly beginning 2002, to $11 billion a year, double the level during the Clinton years. And another $53 billion for the following five years has been budgeted.
Washington’s obsession with Nuclear Primacy
What Washington did not say, but Putin has now alluded to in Munich, is that the US missile defense is not at all defensive. It is offensive, and how.
The possibility of providing a powerful state, one with the world’s most awesome military machinery, a shield to protect it from limited attack, is aimed directly at Russia, the only other nuclear power with anywhere the capacity to launch a credible nuclear counterpunch.
Were the United States able to effectively shield itself from a potential Russian response to a US nuclear First Strike, the US would be able simply to dictate to the entire world on its terms, not only to Russia. That would be what military people term Nuclear Primacy. That is the real meaning of Putin’s unusual speech. He isn’t paranoid. He’s being starkly realistic.
Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, it’s now clear that the US Government has never for a moment stopped its pursuit of Nuclear Primacy. For Washington and the US elites, the Cold War never ended. They just forgot to tell us all.
The quest for global control of oil and energy pipelines, the quest to establish its military bases across Eurasia, its attempt to modernize and upgrade its nuclear submarine fleet, its Strategic B-52 bomber command, all make sense only when seen through the perspective of the relentless pursuit of US Nuclear Primacy.
The Bush Administration unilaterally abrogated the US-Russian ABM Treaty in December 2001. It’s in a race to complete a global network of missile defense as the key to US nuclear primacy. With even a primitive missile defense shield, the US could attack Russian missile silos and submarine fleets with no fear of effective retaliation, as the few remaining Russian nuclear missiles would be unable to launch a convincing response enough to deter a US First Strike.
The ability of both sides—the Warsaw Pact and NATO—during the Cold War, to mutually annihilate one another, led to a nuclear stalemate dubbed by military strategists, MAD—mutual assured destruction. It was scary but in a bizarre sense, more stable that what we have today with a unilateral US pursuit of nuclear primacy. The prospect of mutual nuclear annihilation with no decisive advantage for either side, led to a world in which nuclear war had been ‘unthinkable.’
Now, the US pursues the possibility of nuclear war as ‘thinkable.’ That’s really mad.
The first nation with a nuclear missile shield would de facto have ‘first strike ability.’ Quite correctly, Lt. Colonel Robert Bowman, Director of the US Air Force missile defense program, recently called missile defense, ‘the missing link to a First Strike.’
More alarming is the fact no one outside a handful of Pentagon planners or senior intelligence officials in Washington discusses the implications of Washington’s pursuit of missile defense in Poland, Czech Republic or its drive for Nuclear Primacy.
It calls to mind ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ the September 2000 report of the hawkish Project for the New American Century, where Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were members. There they declared, ‘The United States must develop and deploy global missile defenses to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world.’ (author’s emphasis).
Before becoming Bush’s Defense Secretary in January 2001, Rumsfeld headed a Presidential Commission advocating the development of missile defense for the United States.
So eager was the Bush-Cheney Administration to advance its missile defense plans, that the President and Defense Secretary ordered waiving usual operational testing requirements essential to determining whether the highly complex system of systems was effective.
The Rumsfeld missile defense program is strongly opposed within the military command. On March 26, 2004 no less than 49 US generals and admirals signed an Open Letter to the President, appealing for missile defense postponement.
As they noted, ‘US technology, already deployed, can pinpoint the source of a ballistic missile launch. It is, therefore, highly unlikely that any state would dare to attack the US or allow a terrorist to do so from its territory with a missile armed with a weapon of mass destruction, thereby risking annihilation from a devastating US retaliatory strike.’
The 49 generals and admirals, including Admiral William J. Crowe, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the Armed Forces, went on to argue to the President, ‘As you have said, Mr. President, our highest priority is to prevent terrorists from acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction. We agree. We therefore recommend, as the militarily responsible course of action, that you postpone operational deployment of the expensive and untested GMD (Ground-based Missile Defense) system and transfer the associated funding to accelerated programs to secure the multitude of facilities containing nuclear weapons and materials, and to protect our ports and borders against terrorists who may attempt to smuggle weapons of mass destruction into the United States.’
What the seasoned military veterans did not say was that Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush and company had quite another agenda than rogue terror threats. They were after Full Spectrum Dominance, the New World Order, and the elimination, for once and all, of Russia as a potential rival for power.
The rush to deploy a missile defense shield is clearly not aimed at North Korea or terror attacks. It is aimed at Russia and much less so, the far smaller nuclear capacities of China. As the 49 generals and admirals noted in their letter to the President in 2004, the US already had more than sufficient nuclear warheads to hit a thousand bunkers or caves of a potential rogue state.
Kier Lieber and Daryl Press, two US military analysts, writing in the influential Foreign Affairs of the New York Council on Foreign Relations in March 2006, noted, ‘If the United States’ nuclear modernization were really aimed at rogue states or terrorists, the country’s nuclear force would not need the additional thousand ground-burst warheads it will gain from the W-76 modernization program. The current and future US nuclear force, in other words, seems designed to carry out a pre-emptive disarming strike against Russia or China.’
Referring to the aggressive new Pentagon deployment plans for missile defense, Lieber and Press add, ‘the sort of missile defenses that the United States might plausibly deploy would be valuable primarily in an offensive context, not a defensive one—as an adjunct to a US First Strike capability, not as a stand-alone shield. If the United States launched a nuclear attack against Russia (or China), the targeted country would be left with a tiny surviving arsenal—if any at all. At that point, even a relatively modest or inefficient missile defense system might well be enough to protect against any retaliatory strikes…’
This is the real agenda in Washington’s Eurasian Great Game. Naturally, to state so openly would risk tipping Washington’s hand before the noose had been irreversibly tightened around Moscow’s metaphorical neck. So the State Department and Defense Secretary Gates try to make jokes about the recent Russian remarks, as though they were Putin’s paranoid delusions.
This entire US program of missile defense and nuclear First Strike modernization is hair-raising enough as an idea. Under the Bush Administration, it has been made operational and airborne, hearkening back to the dangerous days of the Cold War with fleets of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers and Trident nuclear missile submarines on ready alert around the clock, a nuclear horror scenario.
Global Strike: Pentagon Conplan 8022
The march towards possible nuclear catastrophe by intent or by miscalculation, as a consequence of the bold new Washington policy, took on significant new gravity in June 2004, only weeks after the 49 generals and admirals took the highly unusual step of writing to their President.
That June, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld approved a Top Secret order for the Armed Forces of the United States to implement something called Conplan 8022, ‘which provides the President a prompt, global strike capability.’
The term, Conplan, is Pentagon shorthand for Contingency Plan. What ‘contingencies’ are Pentagon planners preparing for? A pre-emptive conventional strike against tiny North Korea or even Iran? Or a full-force pre-emptive nuclear assault on the last formidable nuclear power not under the thumb of the US’ Full Spectrum Dominance-- Russia?
The two words, ‘global strike’, are also notable. It’s Pentagon-speak to describe a specific pre-emptive attack which, for the first time since the earliest Cold War days, includes a nuclear option, counter to the traditional US military notion of nuclear weapons being only used in defense to deter attack.
Conplan 8022, as has been noted by some, is unlike traditional Pentagon war plans which have been essentially defensive responses to invasion or attack.
In concert with the aggressive pre-emptive 2002 Bush Doctrine, Bush’s new Conplan 8022 is offensive. It could be triggered by the mere ‘perception’ of an imminent threat, and carried out by Presidential order, without Congress.
Given the details about false or faked ‘perceptions’ in the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President about Iraq’s threat of weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the new Conplan 8022 suggests a US President might order the missiles against any and every perceived threat or even potential, unproven threat.
In response to Rumsfeld’s June 2004 order, General Richard Myers, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signed the order to make Conplan 8022 operational. Selected nuclear-capable bombers, ICBMs, SSBNs, and ‘information warfare’ (sic) units have been deployed against unnamed high-value targets in ‘adversary’ countries.
Was Iran an adversary country, even though it had never attacked the United States? Was North Korea, even though it had never in five decades launched a direct attack on South Korea, let alone any one else? Is China an ‘adversary’ because it’s simply becoming economically too influential?
Is Russia now an adversary because she refuses to lay back and accept being made what Brzezinski terms a ‘vassal’ state of the American Empire?
Because there has been zero open debate inside the United States about Conplan 8022, there has been virtually no discussion of any of these potentially nuclear-loaded questions.
What makes the June 2004 Rumsfeld order even more unsettling to a world which truly had hoped nuclear mushroom clouds had become a threat of the past, is that Conplan 8022 contains a significant nuclear attack component.
It’s true that the overall number of nuclear weapons in the US military stockpile has been declining since the end of the Cold War. But not, it seems, because the US is moving the world back from the brink of nuclear war by miscalculation.
The new missile defense expansion to Poland and Czech Republic is better understood from the point of the remarkable expansion of NATO since 1991. As Putin noted, ‘NATO has put its frontline forces on our borders… think it is obvious that NATO expansion does not have any relation with the modernisation of the Alliance itself or with ensuring security in Europe. On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?’
US bases encircle Russia
As Russian strategist and military expert, Yevgeny Primakov, a close adviser to Putin, recently noted, NATO was ‘founded during the Cold War era as a regional organization to ensure the security of US allies in Europe.’ He adds, ‘NATO today is acting on the basis of an entirely different philosophy and doctrine, moving outside the European continent and conducting military operations far beyond its bounds. NATO…is rapidly expanding in contravention to earlier accords. The admission of new members to NATO is leading to the expansion of bases that host the U.S. military, air defense systems, as well as ABM components.’
Today, NATO member states include not only the Cold War core in Western Europe, commanded by an American. NATO also includes former Warsaw Pact or Soviet Union states Poland, Latvia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia, formerly of Yugoslavia. Candidates to join include the Republic of Georgia, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia. Ukraine’s President, Victor Yushchenko, has tried aggressively to bring Ukraine into NATO. This is a clear message to Moscow, not surprisingly, one they don’t seem to welcome with open arms.
New NATO structures have also been formed while old ones were abolished: The NATO Response Force (NRF) was launched at the 2002 Prague Summit. In 2003, just after the fall of Baghdad, a major restructuring of the NATO military commands began. The Headquarters of the Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic was abolished. A new command, Allied Command Transformation (ACT), was established in Norfolk, Virginia. ACT is responsible for driving ‘transformation’ in NATO.
By 2007 Washington had signed an agreement with Japan to co-operate on missile defense development. She was deeply engaged in testing a missile defense system with Israel. She has now extended her European Missile Defense to Poland, where the Minister of Defense is a close friend and ally of Pentagon neo-conservative war-hawks, and to the Czech Republic. NATO has agreed to put the question of the Ukraine and Republic of Georgia’s bids for NATO membership on a fast track. The Middle East, despite the debacle in Iraq, is being militarized with a permanent network of US bases from Qatar to Iraq and beyond.
On February 15, the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee approved a draft, the Orwellian-named NATO Freedom Consolidation Act of 2007 reaffirming US backing for the further enlargement of NATO, including support for Ukraine to join along with Georgia.
From the Russian point of view, NATO's eastward expansion since the end of the cold war has been in clear breach of an agreement between then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H.W. Bush which allowed for a peaceful unification of Germany. NATO's expansion policy is seen as a continuation of a Cold War attempt to surround and isolate Russia.
Nnew bases to guard ‘democracy’?
An almost unnoticed consequence of Washington’s policy since the bombing of Serbia in 1999, has been establishment of an extraordinary network of new US military bases, bases in parts of the world where it seems little justified as a US defensive precaution, given the threat, huge taxpayer expense, let alone other global military commitments.
In June 1999, following the bombing of Yugoslavia, US forces began construction of Camp Bondsteel, at the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. It was the lynchpin in what was to be a new global network of US bases.
Bondsteel put US air power within easy striking distance of the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian Sea, as well as Russia. Camp Bondsteel was at the time the largest US military base built since the Vietnam War, with nearly 7,000 troops. The base had been built by the largest US military construction company, Halliburton’s KBR. Halliburton’s CEO at the time was Dick Cheney.
Before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, the Washington Post matter-of-factly noted, ‘With the Middle-East increasingly fragile, we will need bases and fly-over rights in the Balkans to protect Caspian Sea oil.’
Camp Bondsteel was but the first of a vast chain of US bases that have been built during this decade. The US military went on to build military bases in Hungary, Bosnia, Albania and Macedonia, in addition to Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, then still legally part of Yugoslavia.
One of the most important and least mentioned new US bases was in Bulgaria, a former Soviet satellite and now new NATO member. In a conflict---and in Pentagon-speak there are only ‘conflicts,’ no longer wars, which involved issues of asking the US Congress to declare them officially, and provide just reason---the military would use Bezmer to ‘surge’ men and materiel toward the front lines. Where? In Russia?
The US has been building its bases in Afghanistan. It built three major US bases in the wake of its occupation of Afghanistan in winter of 2001, at Bagram Air Field north of Kabul, the US’ main military logistics center; Kandahar Air Field, in southern Afghanistan and Shindand Air Field in the western province of Herat. Shindand, the largest US base in Afghanistan, was built some 100 kilometers from the border with Iran.
Afghanistan had historically been the heart of the British-Russia Great Game, the struggle for control of Central Asia during the 19th and early 20th Centuries. British strategy was to prevent Russia at all costs from controlling Afghanistan and thereby gaining a warm water port for its navy and threatening Britain’s imperial crown jewel, India.
Afghanistan is also seen by Pentagon planners as highly strategic. It is a platform from which US military might could directly threaten Russia and China as well as Iran and other oil-rich Middle East lands. Little had changed in that respect over more than a century of wars.
Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, had been in negotiations, together with Cheney’s Halliburton and with Enron, for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai.
At that same time, the Pentagon came to an agreement with the government of Kyrgystan in Central Asia, to build a strategically important base there, Manas Air Base at Bishkek’s international airport. Manas is not only near to Afghanistan; it is also in easy striking distance to Caspian Sea oil and gas, as well as to the borders of both China and Russia.
As part of the price of accepting him as a US ally in the War on Terror rather than a foe, Washington extracted an agreement from Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, to allow the airport at Jacobabad, about 400km north of Karachi, to be used by the US Air Force and NATO ‘to support their campaign in Afghanistan.’ Two other US bases were built at Dalbandin and Pasni.
This all is merely a small part of the vast web of US-controlled military bases Washington has been building globally since the so-called end of the Cold War.
It’s becoming clear to much of the rest of the world that Washington might even itself be instigating or provoking wars or conflicts with nations across the world, not merely to control oil, though strategic control of global oil flows had been at the heart of the American Century since the 1920’s. That’s the real significance of what Vladimir Putin said in Munich. He told the world what it did not want to hear: The American ‘Emperor’s New Clothes did not exist. The Emperor was clothed in naked pursuit of global military control.
During the early 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, the Yeltsin government had asked Washington for a series of mutual reductions in the size of each superpower’s nuclear missile and weapons arsenal. Russian nuclear stockpiles were ageing and Moscow saw little further need to remain armed to its nuclear teeth once the Cold War had ended.
Washington clearly saw in this a golden opportunity to go for nuclear primacy, for the first time since the 1950’s, when Russia first developed Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile delivery capability for its growing nuclear weapons arsenal.
Nuclear primacy is an aggressive offensive policy. It means that one superpower, USA, would have the possibility to launch a full nuclear First Strike at Russia’s nuclear sites and destroy enough targets in the first blow, that Russia would be crippled from making any effective retaliation.
With no credible threat of retaliation, Russia had no credible nuclear deterrent. It was at the mercy of the supreme power. Never before in history had the prospect of such ultimate power in the hands of one single nation seemed so near at hand.
This stealthy move by the Pentagon for Nuclear Primacy has, up until now, been carried out in utmost secrecy, disguised amid rhetoric of a USA-Russia ‘Partnership for Peace.’
Rather than take advantage of the opportunity to climb down from the brink of nuclear annihilation following the end of the Cold War, Washington has turned instead to upgrading its nuclear arsenal, at the same time it was reducing its numbers.
While the rest of the world was still in shock over the events of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration unilaterally moved to rip up its earlier treaty obligations with Russia to not build an anti-missile defense.
On December 13, 2001, President Bush announced that the United States Government was unilaterally abandoning the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia, and committing $8 billion for the 2002 Budget to build a National Missile Defense system. It was pushed through Congress, promoted as a move to protect US territory from rogue terror attacks, from states including North Korea or Iraq.
The rogue argument was a fraud, a plausible cover story designed to sneak the policy reversal through without debate, in the wake of the September 11 shock.
The repeal of the ABM Treaty was little understood outside qualified military circles. In fact, it represented the most dangerous step by the United States towards nuclear war since the 1950’s. Washington is going at a fast pace to the goal of total nuclear superiority globally, Nuclear Primacy.
Washington has dismantled its highly lethal MX missiles by 2005. But that’s misleading. At the same time, it significantly improved its remaining ICBM’s by installing the MX’s high-yield nuclear warheads and advanced re-entry vehicles on its Minuteman ICBMs. The guidance system of the Minuteman has been upgraded to match that of the dismantled MX.
The Pentagon began replacing ageing ballistic missiles on its submarines with far more accurate Trident II D-5 missiles with new larger-yield nuclear warheads.
The Navy shifted more of its nuclear ballistic missile-launching SSBN submarines to the Pacific to patrol the blind spot of Russia’s early warning radar net as well as patrolling near China’s coast. The US Air Force completed refitting its B-52 bombers with nuclear-armed cruise missiles believed invisible to Russian air defense radar. New enhanced avionics on its B-2 stealth bombers gave them the ability to fly at extremely low altitudes avoiding radar detection as well.
A vast number of stockpiled weapons is not necessary to the new global power projection. Little-publicized new technology has enabled the US to deploy a ‘leaner and meaner’ nuclear strike force. A case in point is the Navy’s successful program to upgrade the fuse on the W-76 nuclear warheads sitting atop most US submarine-launched missiles, which makes them able to hit very hard targets such as ICBM silos.
No one has ever presented credible evidence that Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah or any other organization on the US State Department’s Terrorist Organization Black List possessed nuclear missiles in hardened underground silos. Aside from the US and perhaps Israel, only Russia and to a far smaller degree, China, have these in any number.
In 1991 at the presumed end of the Cold War, in a gesture to lower the danger of strategic nuclear miscalculation, the US Air Force was ordered to remove its fleet of nuclear bombers from Ready Alert status. After 2004 that too changed.
Conplan 8022 again put US Air Force long-range B-52 and other bombers on ‘Alert’ status. The Commander of the 8th Air Force stated at the time, that his nuclear bombers were ‘essentially on alert to plan and execute Global Strikes’ on behalf of the US Strategic Command or STRATCOM, based in Omaha, Nebraska.
Conplan 8022 included not only long-range nuclear and conventional weapons launched from the US, but also nuclear and other bombs deployed in Europe, Japan and other sites. It gave the US what the Pentagon termed Global Strike, the ability to hit any point on the earth or sky with devastating force, nuclear as well as conventional. Since the Rumsfeld June 2004 readiness order, the US Strategic Command has boasted it was ready to execute an attack anywhere on earth ‘in half a day or less,’ from the moment the President gave the order.
In the January 24, 2006 London Financial Times, the US Ambassador to NATO, Victoria Nuland, former adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney and wife of a leading Washington neo-conservative warhawk, declared that the US wanted a ‘globally deployable military force’ that would operate everywhere – from Africa to the Middle East and beyond.
It would include Japan and Australia as well as the NATO nations. Nuland added, ‘It’s a totally different animal (sic) whose ultimate role will be subject to US desires and adventures.’ Subject to US desires and adventures? Those were hardly calming words given the record of Nuland’s former boss in faking intelligence to justify wars in Iraq and elsewhere.
Now, with the deployment of even a crude missile defense, under Conplan 8022, the US would have what Pentagon planners called ‘escalation dominance’—the ability to win a war at any level of violence, including nuclear war.
As some more sober minds argued, were Russia and China to respond to these US moves with even minimal self-protection measures, the risks of a global nuclear conflagration by miscalculation would climb to levels far beyond any seen even during the Cuba Missile Crisis or the danger days of the Cold War.
Mackinder’s Nightmare
In a few brief years Washington has managed to create the nightmare of Britain’s father of geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, the horror scenario feared by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger and other Cold War veterans of US foreign policy who have studied and understood the power calculus of Mackinder.
The vast resources-rich and population-rich Eurasian Heartland and landmass is building economic and military ties with one another for the first time in history, ties whose driving force is the increasingly aggressive Washington role in the world.
The driver of the emerging Eurasian geopolitical cooperation is obvious. China, with the world’s largest population and an economy expanding at double digits, urgently needs secure alliance partners who could secure her energy security. Russia, an energy goliath, needs secure trade outlets independent of Washington control to develop and rebuild its tattered economy. These complimentary needs form the seed crystal of what Washington and US strategists define as a new Cold War, this one over energy, over oil and natural gas above all. Military might is the currency this time as in the earlier Cold War.
By 2006 Moscow and Beijing had clearly decided to upgrade their cooperation with their Eurasian neighbors. They both agreed to turn to a moribund loose organization that they had co-founded in 2001, in the wake of the 1998 Asia crisis, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization or SCO. The SCO had highly significant members, geopolitically seen. SCO included oil-rich Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as well as China and Russia. By 2006 Beijing and Moscow began to view the SCO as a nascent counterweight to increasingly arbitrary American power politics. The organization was discussing projects of energy cooperation and even military mutual defense.
The pressures of an increasingly desperate US foreign policy are forcing an unlikely ‘coalition of the unwilling’ across Eurasia. The potentials of such Eurasian cooperation between China, Kazakhstan, Iran are real enough and obvious. The missing link, however, is the military security that could make it invulnerable or nearly, to the sabre-rattling from Washington and NATO. Only one power on the face of the earth has the nuclear and military base and know-how able to provide that—Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
The Russian Bear sharpens its nuclear teeth…
With NATO troops creeping up to Russia’s borders on all sides, US nuclear B-52s and SSBN submarines being deployed to strategic sites on Russia’s perimeter, Washington extending its new missile shield from Greenland to the UK, to Australia, Japan and now even Poland and the Czech Republic, it should be no surprise that the Russian Government is responding.
While Washington planners may have assumed that because the once-mighty Red Army was a shell of its former glory, that the state of Russian military preparedness since the end of the Cold War was laughable.
But Russia never let go of its one trump card—its strategic nuclear force.
During the entire economic chaos of the Yeltsin years, Russia never stopped producing state-of-the art military technology.
In May 2003, some months after George Bush unilaterally ripped up the bilateral Anti-Missile Defense Treaty with Moscow, invaded Afghanistan and bombed Baghdad into subjugation, Russia’s President delivered a new message in his annual State of the Union Address to the Russian nation.
Putin spoke for the first time publicly of the need to modernize Russia’s nuclear deterrent by creating new types of weapons, ‘which will ensure the defense capability of Russia and its allies in the long term.’
In response to the abrogation by the Bush Administration of the ABM Treaty, and with it Start II, Russia predictably stopped withdrawing and destroying its SS-18 MIRVed missiles. Start II had called for full phase out of multiple warhead or MIRVed missiles, by both sides by 2007.
At that point Russia began to reconfigure its SS-18 MIRV missiles to extend their service life to 2016. Fully loaded SS-18 missiles had a range of 11,000 kilometers. In addition, it redeployed mobile rail-based SS-24 M1 nuclear missiles.
In its 2003 Budget, the Russian government made funding of its SS-27 or Topol-M single-warhead missiles a ‘priority.’ And the Defense Ministry resumed test launches of both SS-27 and Topol-M.
In December 2006, Putin told Russian journalists that deployment of the new Russian mobile Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile system was crucial for Russia’s national security. Without naming the obvious US threat, he declared, ‘Maintaining a strategic balance will mean that our strategic deterrent forces should be able to guarantee the neutralization of any potential aggressor, no matter what modern weapons systems he possesses.’
It was unmistakable whom he had in mind, and it wasn’t the Al Qaeda cave-dwellers of Tora Bora.
Russian Defense Minister, Sergei Ivanov, announced at the same time that the military would deploy another 69 silo-based and mobile Topol-M missile systems over the following decade. Just after his Munich speech Putin announced he had named his old KGB/FSB friend, Ivanov to be his First Deputy Prime Minister overseeing the entire military industry.
The Russian Defense Ministry reported that as of January 2006, Russia possessed 927 nuclear delivery vehicles and 4,279 nuclear warheads against 1,255 and 5,966 respectively for the United States. Nop two other powers on the face of the earth even came close to these massive overkill capacities. This was the ultimate reason all US foreign policy, military and economic, since the end of the Cold War had covertly had as endgame the complete deconstruction of Russia as a functioning state.
In April 2006, the Russian military tested the K65M-R missile, a new missile designed to penetrate US missile defense systems. It was part of testing and deploying a uniform warhead for both land and sea-based ballistic missiles. The new missile was hypersonic and capable of changing flight path.
Four months earlier, Russia successfully tested its Bulava ICBM, a naval version of the Topol-M. It was launched from one of its Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarines in the White Sea, travelling a thousand miles before hitting a dummy target successfully on the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Bulava missiles were to be installed on Russian Borey-class nuclear submarines beginning 2008.
During a personal inspection of the first regiment of Russian mobile Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missiles in December 2006, Putin told reporters the deployment of mobile Topol-M ICBMs were crucial for Russia’s national security, stating, ‘This is a significant step forward in improving our defense capabilities.’
‘Maintaining a strategic balance,’ he continued, ’will mean that our strategic deterrent forces should be able to guarantee the neutralization of any potential aggressor, no matter what modern weapons systems he possesses.’
Putin clearly did not have France in mind when he referred to the unnamed ‘he.’ President Putin had personally given French President Chirac a tour of one of Russia’s missile facilities that January, where Putin explained the latest Russian missile advances. ‘He knows what I am talking about,’ Putin told reporters afterwards, referring to Chirac’s grasp of the weapon’s significance.
Putin also did not have North Korea, China, Pakistan or India in mind, nor Great Britain with its ageing nuclear capacity, not even Israel. The only power surrounding Russia with weapons of mass destruction was its old Cold War foe--the United States.
The Commander of Russia’s Strategic Rocket Forces, General Nikolai Solovtsov, was more explicit. Commenting on the successful test of the K65M-R at Russia’s Kapustin Yar missile test site last April, he declared that US plans for a missile defense system, ‘could upset strategic stability. The planned scale of the United States’ deployment of a…missile defense system is so considerable that the fear that it could have a negative effect on the parameters of Russia’s nuclear deterrence potential is quite justified.’ Put simply, he referred to the now open US quest for Full Spectrum Dominance—Nuclear Primacy.
A new Armageddon is in the making. The unilateral military agenda of Washington has predictably provoked a major effort by Russia to defend herself. The prospects of a global nuclear conflagration, by miscalculation, increase by the day. At what point might an American President, God forbid, decide to order a pre-emptive full-scale nuclear attack on Russia to prevent Russia from rebuilding a state of mutual deterrence?
The new Armageddon is not exactly the Armageddon which George Bush’s Christian fanatics pray for as they dream of their Rapture. It is an Armageddon in which Russia and the United States would irradiate the planet and, perhaps, end human civilization in the process.
Ironically, oil, in the context of Washington’s bungled Iraq war and soaring world oil prices after 2003, has enabled Russia to begin the arduous job of rebuilding its collapsed economy and its military capacities. Putin’s Russia is no longer a begger-thy-neighbor former Superpower. It’s using its oil weapon and rebuilding its nuclear ones.
Bush’s America is a hollowed-out debt-ridden economy engaged on using its last card, its vast military power to prop up the dollar and its role as world sole Superpower.
Putin has obviously realized that his new-found ‘partner-in-prayer’, George W., has a large black spot hiding the secrets of his heart. It reminded of a popular country and western ballad from the late Tammy Wynette, ‘Cowboys don’t shoot straight like they used to. They look you in the eye and lie with their white hats on.’ That’s certainly the case with the famous cowboy of Crawford, Texas in his dealings with Vladimir Putin and the rest of the world.
F. William Engdahl is author of A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, and the soon-to-be published Seeds of Destruction: the dark side of gene manipulation. This article was drawn from his new book, in preparation, on the history of the American Century. He may be reached through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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