Straying From Our Ideals

Use of Pilotless Drones for Asssasdinstions Violates the Rule of Law

by ALICE SLATER

A secret US government legal memo, prepared for President Obama, was recently ordered to be released to the public by a Federal Court responding to a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. The Administration’s legal reasoning clearly fails to justify the use of pilotless drones, controlled by a killer operator, sitting behind a desk somewhere in the US, aiming his computer joy stick at human targets on the ground, thousands of miles away. The heavily edited “legal” rationale has only highlighted the disgraceful lack of respect for the very laws and constitutional protections that America has always proclaimed as its unique contribution to world order and the advancement of civilization.

More than 4,000 people have been murdered by drones, many of them civilians– old people, and children as well– in attacks aimed at people selected for assassination by the President of the United States in weekly meetings with intelligence and military officials without benefit of charges, evidence, or trial. The President of the United States, a former Constitutional professor at one of America’s most prestigious schools of law, Harvard University, acts as judge, jury and executioner all in one—a terrible violation of the US Constitution’s promise to protect the rights of individuals.

Shortly after the court-ordered release of the memo a new bipartisan commission of former military and security officials issues a report warning that US drone policy had put us on a “slippery slope” towards a proliferation of similar actions by other countries. They made a whole series of recommendations to help America avoid “blowback” from its unregulated use of this lethal new technology, which is easily capable of being replicated by other countries who may wish to wreak similar harm and havoc upon the US.

There is a growing lawlessness at the highest levels of government, justified by the criminal destruction of the World Trade towers in 2001. Instead of treating that tragic catastrophe as a criminal act, punishable in a court of law, a phony “war on terror” was declared and enabled the obscene growth of the US military-industrial complex, and a flagrant disregard for traditional American rights. With the continued incarceration of suspects in Guantanamo prison in Cuba, America has suspended the common law tradition of the ancient Magna Carta, in which it was held that the British king had no right to lock someone away in a dungeon and throw away the key without evidence, charges, and an opportunity for a trial. 

This latest secret memo, now partially revealed by a court decision, which attempts to justify illegal assassinations by drones, serves only to highlight how far America has strayed from its own ideals and professed respect for the rule of law.

Alice Slater is NY Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and serves on the Council of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/30/use-of-pilotless-drones-for-asssasdinstions-violates-the-rule-of-law/

Lebanonisation of Iraq...

By Jamal Kanj

In 1992 British born American Zionist Bernard Lewis wrote in the Foreign Affairs journal "Rethinking the Middle East" calling for the "Lebanonisation" of the Arab world for it was "vulnerable to such a process." Lewis suggested the weakening of central power in countries to the point where "there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common identity."

The current Iraqi mini dictator Nuri Al Maliki and the burgeoning Islamists are direct by-product of the 2003 US invasion. Under the pretence of "war on terror" the Zion-Cons exploited America's might to break up Iraq and the Middle East - as Lewis predicted - into "squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions, and parties," led by leaders like Maliki with parochial sectarian interest lacking national "common identity."

This blueprint for the New Middle East was envisioned by Lewis more than 10 years before Israeli firsters succeeded in steering the gullible George W Bush to fight Israel's wars in the Middle East.

Instead of Condoleezza Rice's - US secretary of state - promise of democracy, the rise of the Al Qaeda-inspired "Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant" along with other affiliated groups, extending from the sub-Saharan Africa to the sub-continent is today's rendition of Rice's growing "'birth pangs" of the New Middle East.

Fearing such an outcome, veteran foreign affairs adviser Brent Scowcroft - former Air Force Lieutenant General and national security adviser in the first Bush administration - warned the Bush administration in 2002 against getting entangled in another costly foreign adventure for it "could turn the whole region into a cauldron and destroy the War on Terror."

Michael Ledeen, a leading Zion-Con from the Bush team dismissed Scowcroft's warning arguing that it was the US "mission in the war" to cauldronise the region, "If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronised, it is the Middle East today." Adding that if the US waged the war effectively, it "will bring down the terror regimes in Iraq, Iran, and Syria, and either bring down the Saudi monarchy or force it to abandon its global assembly line to indoctrinate young terrorists."

Unlike Scowcroft who served faithfully in the US army and as a high-level national security official in several US administrations, Ledeen was an indoctrinated Zionists known for his role in getting the US embroiled in embarrassing scandals.

In the mid-1980s Ledeen was the key mediator between then Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres and Iranian intermediary Manucher Ghorbanifar to supply Iran with American weapons in what became infamously recognised as the Iran-Contra scandal.

Ledeen was also behind the fake documents of supposed Iraqi purchase of yellowcake uranium powder from Niger. His lie was crucial in Tony Blair and Bush's decision to invade Iraq resulting in the death of hundreds of thousands of human life.

In addition, he was one of several Zionist neoconservatives - suspected of spying for Israel and had long been association with Israeli think tanks - who infiltrated the dens of the Pentagon advocating the "creative destruction" theorem to remake the "New Middle East."

Ironically Lewis, Scowcroft and Ledeen were right in their predictions or objectives. For Scowcroft, the Middle East has turned into a cauldron of conflict costing the US trillions of tax payers' money.

For Lewis and Ledeen, a US mission to "cauldronise" Iraq, Syria, Sudan and Libya has made Israel safer. An enterprise paid for by American money and cemented by hundreds of thousands of lives.

The Zion-Con cauldronisation is not over yet.

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=379595

The World Is Sick Of Israel And Its Insanities

Israel is discovering that it’s no longer the center of attention as it always was before.

What a cruel world: Three yeshiva students were kidnapped, and the world isn’t interested; three mothers are crying out, and the world doesn’t answer. It’s all because the entire world is against us; it’s anti-Semitic and hates Israel. The Anti-Defamation League is already preparing a report. But the truth is, that’s just the way things are: When you openly thumb your nose at the world for years on end, eventually, it thumbs its nose back.

The three mothers went all the way to Geneva. One of them went abroad for the first time in her life to go to the United Nations Human Rights Council. But the world, and the council, went on their merry ways. It’s the irony of fate: About two years ago, Israel officially suspended cooperation with that council; together with the Marshall Islands, Palau and the U.S., it opposed the council’s very establishment. But now, in its distress and the mothers’ distress, it has turned to the council, which is indeed hostile to Israel and spends more time on it than on any other country. Suddenly, Israel needs the world. It even needs the UN, which all of a sudden isn’t the worthless body Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion once termed it.

It takes considerable effrontery to demand that the world interests itself in the fate of three abducted Israelis, and considerable chutzpah to be disappointed by the fact that it has kept silent. Granted, Israel tried to move heaven and earth, and its ambassador/propagandist at the UN gave a moving speech in an effort to scrape up a few more public diplomacy points against Hamas. But once it was paying attention already, that bizarre world was more interested in the campaign of collective punishment imposed on thousands of West Bank residents after the kidnapping.

That’s the way things are with the world-that’s-entirely-against-us: It’s more interested in the half-century-old occupation; it’s more upset over the fate of three million Palestinians than the fate of three Israelis. The world has no lack of kidnapping victims, but none of them ever got the attention received by kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. With the three current kidnap victims, however, Israel no longer had a chance. Over the last two weeks, which I spent in Sweden, I didn’t run across a single mention of the abduction in the media. Not one.

That’s what rotten fruit looks like. The world has no reason be more interested in the fate of Naftali Fraenkel, Eyal Yifrah and Gilad Shaar than it is in the fate of their age mate Mohammed Dudin, a boy of 15 who was killed by live fire from Israeli soldiers in Dura last Friday.
It has no reason to be especially moved by the haunting words of Rachel Fraenkel, who related that her Naftali is a good boy who loves to play guitar and soccer, when Mohammed was also a good boy, who helped his father build their house during his school vacations and sold sweets to help support his family. Rachel wants to hug Naftali? Jihad, Mohammed’s bereaved father, also wants to hug his son. Incidentally, nobody brought him to Geneva. He remained alone with his mourning, at the wretched house whose construction hasn’t yet been finished, and perhaps never will be.

The world is a mess, as they say. In Iraq, Nigeria, Syria and even Ukraine, the situation is far crueler. Yet the complete lack of interest in the kidnapped Israelis doesn’t stem from that alone. It’s impossible to demand sympathy from the world when Israel ignores the world’s decisions; it’s impossible to demand action when Israel is perpetuating the occupation; and it’s impossible to demand solidarity with the fate of Israeli victims when that same victimized Israel continues to kill, wound and arrest innocents as a matter of routine.

Now Israel is discovering that it’s no longer the center of attention as it always was before, and that the fate of its kidnapping victims no longer stops the world in its tracks, not even in the United States. The world is sick of Israel and its insanities. Unfortunately, the world has also lost interest in what happens here. When Israel was a more just country, the world identified with its victims. It continued to do so even when Israel became less just. But now, when Israeli rejectionism is hitting new heights and its oppression of the Palestinians is returning to what it was during the very worst periods, the world has started getting tired of it all. Even the kidnapped Nigerian girls interest it more.

© Haaretz Daily Newspaper Ltd. All Rights Reserved

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38945.htm

Nek Chand’s wonderland

EARTH TALES

ZERIN ANKLESARIA

A man who never stepped into an art school has left behind the world’s largest single repository of folk art.

At first glance, Chandigarh neither looks nor feels like an Indian city. Le Corbusier’s strikingly original buildings, as much reviled as admired, give the impression of Western transplants, and the grid layout with arrow-straight criss-crossing roads is too regimented. You can never round a corner and come upon the unexpected, at least not until you step into the enchanted environs of Nek Chand’s Rock Garden.

Here is a fairyland fashioned out of the humblest materials. Like As a sculptor sees a statue in a roadside rock, Nek Chand saw creative possibilities in throwaway items. While going on his rounds as a road inspector, he picked up broken tiles, bricks, pipes, hoses, bathroom accessories, discarded pottery and jewellery, dented pots and pans, oil drums, bicycle and car parts, glass, feathers, and human hair from barber shops, all the detritus from the small towns and villages that were bulldozed to make way for the building of Chandigarh. In addition, he secretly transported strange rock formations from the Himalayan foothills by bicycle, and dumped them in a jungle gorge, and learnt how to use cement by watching Le Corbusier. Every night for 18 years he would visit his hideout and work on his hoard by the light of burning tar, till in 1975 officials came upon it fashioned into 2,000 statuettes of elephants, bears, horses, monkeys, birds and humans — an entire world in itself. Initially, he was threatened with imprisonment for stealing 12 acres of land, but eventually it was gifted to him with additional space and the services of 50 labourers to create his wonder world of waste.

One enters through a low archway tiled with mosaic in pink, yellow and blue and discovers a labyrinthine cobbled pathway lined with tin drums, matkas, and discarded electrical fittings embedded into cement walls. It opens out onto a small amphitheatre with a stage and seats cut into the hillside, for this is not just a rock garden but a mini-city built into the natural contours of the gorge.

Village belles with matkas on their heads stand beneath waterfalls topped with small temples, and shady trees loom overhead, their huge knotted roots exposed at eye level. Multiple bridges span rivulets, buffaloes wallow in a pond and women rest by the roadside their water pots beside them, every fold in their saris clearly etched with ridged tiles. Elsewhere, a feast is in progress with dancers, drummers and pipers. A man pours drinks from a wine bottle while his neighbour quaffs from a glass, and a scruffy–looking waiter wearing a chipped bowl upside down on his head offers tea in a dented kettle on a broken wooden slat serving as a tray.

Schoolboys, uniformed in brown shorts and shirts of white mosaic tiles, are lined up performing some kind of drill, stick figures dance in a meadow, and there are martial activities too. A soldier wearing a tin helmet salutes smartly, and another rides the cutest horse you ever saw, covered in white, blue, tan and pink tiling with rein and bridle made of white pebbles to match the soldier’s uniform. Elsewhere ranks of soldiers of another age dressed in blue and white tiles resembling body armour relax in a parade ground with a huge horse (The Trojan Horse perhaps?) in their midst.

The Rock Garden is a place of magical transformations where a broken bathtub becomes a swimming pool, a toilet bowl is a pond bordered with flowers, inner tubes of tyres and cycle wheels are arms and legs, and a space station, or it could be an alien spaceship, is made from dismembered bicycles. There is a launching pad, spiky antennae point skywards at odd angles, and rockets appear ready for take-off. Since there are no captions, the viewer’s imagination is free to fill in the blanks and join the dots, a fun-filled exercise.

Entire walls are embedded with vividly-coloured broken Chinaware and elegant ladies wear full-length gowns made of broken bangles. Bangles are used again to create a stunning gallery of peacocks, pink and blue, green and gold, purple and orange, gorgeous to behold as the sunlight glints on their iridescent ‘feathers’. There are crows, sparrows and geese too; and menageries of monkeys, elephants, bears and exotic animals. On an elevation stands an entire temple complex, only its spires and domes visible.

No amount of description can do justice to Nek Chand’s inventiveness or the sheer fecundity of his imagination. He is whimsical, playful and witty, but the sombre note is not entirely absent. A totemic tribal head with huge jade-green eyes stares hypnotically at the viewer, a three-headed woman has the body of a penguin, and women with mournful, hooded eyes swathed in dark brown clothing sit in a field, their torsos curved in ranks of brooding arcs. These mysterious, surreal figures are neither surprising nor out of place considering that its creator first saw his garden envisioned in a dream that became a magnificent obsession. In the process, this man of humble origin who never saw the inside of an art school has left us with the world’s largest single repository of folk art.

Honoured with the Padma Shri and accolades from the US and many European countries, here his success inevitably aroused jealousy. He has fought court cases to retain his land and, returning from a lecture tour, was horrified to find his figurines vandalised.

Critics, unable to fit this one-man genre into any known category, have called it Outsider Art, but he insisted that he was not an artist, since his work was never meant for public viewing. ‘I did it only for my own pleasure’, he said. Today the Nek Chand Garden is the most popular tourist site in India after the Taj, drawing an average of 5,000 visitors a day, and standing as a monument to the dedication of the man who created it.

http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/nek-chands-wonderland/article6158051.ece?homepage=true

ISIL declares new 'Islamic caliphate'

Rebels fighting in Iraq under ISIL banner announce creation of Islamic state, extending from Diyala to Syria's Aleppo. In an audio recording distributed online on Sunday, the ISIL declared its chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as "the caliph" and "leader for Muslims everywhere". Baghdadi is believed to be the leader of ISIL, which announced that it is now called "The Islamic State". According to the statement, the new caliphate stretches from Iraq's Diyala province to Syria's Aleppo. "The Shura (council) of the Islamic State met and discussed this issue (of the caliphate)... The Islamic State decided to establish an Islamic caliphate and to designate a caliph for the state of the Muslims," said ISIL spokesman Abu Mohammad al-Adnani. "The words 'Iraq' and 'the Levant' have been removed from the name of the Islamic State in official papers and documents," Adnani said, describing the caliphate as "the dream in all the Muslims' hearts" and "the hope of all jihadists". Al Jazeera's Imran Khan reporting from the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, said that a caliphate is effectively an Islamic Republic led by one leader, regardless of national boundaries. With the announcement, the armed group is declaring that they are now legitimate, declaring the caliphate as the "true Muslim state", he said. The announcement might bring up problems with other Sunni fighters in Iraq, who are fighting the central government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and not fighting for the caliphate, our correspondent said. -- -- http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/06/isil-declares-new-islamic-caliphate-201462917326669749.html

Bill Moyers Essay: What We Can Learn From Lawrence of Arabia

by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship

As fears grow of a widening war across the Middle East, fed by reports that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) envisions a region-wide, all controlling theocracy, we found ourselves talking about another war. The Great War – or World War I, as it would come to be called — was triggered one hundred years ago this month when an assassin shot and killed Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Through a series of tangled alliances and a cascade of misunderstandings and blunders, that single act of violence brought on a bloody catastrophe. More than 37 million people were killed or wounded.

Col. T.E. Lawrence, shown Oct. 3, 1928. (AP Photo)

In America, if we reflect on World War I at all, we think mostly about the battlefields and trenches of Europe and tend to forget another front in that war — against the Ottoman Empire of the Turks that dominated the Middle East. A British Army officer named T.E. Lawrence became a hero in the Arab world when he led nomadic Bedouin tribes in battle against Turkish rule. Peter O’Toole immortalized him in the epic movie, “Lawrence of Arabia.”

You may remember the scene when, after dynamiting the Hijaz railway and looting a Turkish supply train, Lawrence is asked by an American reporter, “What, in your opinion, do these people hope to gain from this war?”

“They hope to gain their freedom,” Lawrence replies, and when the journalist scoffs, insists, “They’re going to get it. I’m going to give it to them.”

At war’s end, Lawrence’s vision of Arab independence was shattered when the Versailles peace conference confirmed the carving of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine into British and French spheres of influence; arbitrary boundaries drawn in the sand to satisfy the appetites of empire – Britain’s Foreign Office even called the former Ottoman lands “The Great Loot.”

The hopeful Lawrence drew his own “peace map” of the region, one that paid closer heed to tribal allegiances and rivalries. The map could have saved the world a lot of time, trouble and treasure, one historian said, providing the region “with a far better starting point than the crude imperial carve up.” Lawrence wrote to a British major in Cairo: “I’m afraid you will be delayed a long time, cleaning up all the messes and oddments we have left behind us.”

Since 2003, as the reckless invasion of Iraq unfolded, demand for Lawrence’s book, “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” increased eightfold. It was taught at the Pentagon and Sandhurst — Britain’s West Point — for its insights into fighting war in the Middle East. In 2010, Major Niel Smith, who had served as operations officer for the US Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Center, told The Christian Science Monitor, “T.E. Lawrence has in some ways become the patron saint of the US Army advisory effort in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

But then and now, Lawrence’s understanding of the ancient and potent jealousies of the people among whom he had lived and fought generally was ignored. In 1920, he wrote for the Times of London an unsettling and prophetic article about Iraq – then under the thumb of the British. He decried the money spent, the number of troops and loss of life, and warned that his countrymen had been led “into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It… may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.”

Not for the last time in the Middle East would disaster come from the blundering ignorance and blinding arrogance of foreign intruders convinced by magical thinking of their own omnipotence and righteousness. How soon we forget. How often we repeat.

http://billmoyers.com/2014/06/27/learning-from-lawrence-of-arabia/

​Chaos theory: ISIS & Western foreign policy

Dr. Roslyn Fuller 

Currently a Research Associate at the INSYTE Group, Dr. Roslyn Fuller has previously lectured at Trinity College and the National University of Ireland. She tweets at @roslynfuller

As ISIS/ISIL cuts a swathe through the Middle East, retroactively transforming Osama Bin Laden into the highbrow arm of modern Islamic terrorism, we’ve quite naturally begun the game of deciding who to blame for its existence.

In fact, Tony Blair showed admirable consistency in sticking to the doctrine of preemptive self-defense by firing off a statement that the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant had nothing to do with his policies in Iraq - the moment they made their big break into mainstream television.

This back and forth over responsibility is really at the heart of the matter, but in a far deeper way than we usually get around to discussing.

After all, a good deal of Western foreign policy post-Cold War has revolved around NATO states voluntarily assuming responsibility for issues that were, strictly-speaking, not their responsibility. Someone needs to ‘police the world’, ‘bring the bad guys to book’, exercise their ‘R2P’ (‘responsibility to protect’ – yes, we have descended into text-speak) and‘nation-build’.

It looks good on paper.

But if you really look at how this policy has played out on the ground, you will notice that far from nation-building, this voluntary ‘assumption of responsibility’ has instead sown a level of chaos and dissension that cannot plausibly be blamed purely on ‘mistakes’ or ‘unforeseeable circumstances’.

Instead, it seems to be the old divide and conquer strategy at work and we probably have keen minds like Richard Perle and Bill Kristol of the neo-conservative think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) to thank for this modern take on an old classic. We will return to the thoughtful documents penned and disseminated by PNAC shortly. But first, let’s try to figure out what is really going on beyond the rhetoric when it comes to our ‘responsibilities’ around the world.

I think we can discern a few key trends.

The first trend is that Western countries do engage in what could be termed nation-building activities in a few select, small countries, provided those countries have for one reason or another really made headlines. Think of Timor L’Este (now independent after a mere 30 years of occupation); Rwanda (yes, 800,000 people were killed, but we did give them a tribunal once activists remembered to play the racism card), and Kosovo (presents a somewhat more contested narrative, but it was too close to the EU’s future borders for comfort).

Other troubled nations like Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire (another contested narrative) have certainly seen their fortunes improve in recent years, thanks in part to international peacekeeping missions and efforts to facilitate community reconciliation and post-conflict justice.

But those are, in a certain sense, ‘the lucky few’. In most other places, we have chosen to ‘take responsibility’ along more Blair-ish lines, which means that our sense of responsibility tends to come and go with astonishing rapidity. Consider the following:

Somalia

The failed state par excellence. Americans were apparently willing to ‘take responsibility’ for restoring law and order in Somalia until 19 of them were killed. That was too much ‘responsibility’ and Somalia was left minus a government and awash with weapons next to one of the greatest shipping lanes in the world. All things considered, it took Somalis a surprisingly long time to master modern piracy.

A Somali Al-Shebab fighter (AFP Photo / Mohamed Abdiwahab)

Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo

All rocking around on the cusp of failed statehood for decades now; in the case of the DRC ever since Western countries decided to rid the world of Patrice Lumumba back in the ’60s.

Mali

Currently a respectable No. 38 on the Fund for Peace’s Failed State Index, but Taureg rebels control an impressive hunk of territory.

Ukraine and Pakistan

Both pretty nearly failed states, run along semi-feudal lines by leaders who are openly oligarchs, whether that be the‘new money’ of Ukrainian industrialists or the ‘old money’ of tribal leadership in Pakistan.

Libya

Currently rated an uneasy No. 54 on the Failed State Index, down from a comfortable No. 111 in 2010 (on par with South Africa) before we decided to get rid of Gaddafi, only to be instantly stricken with amnesia about the country he ran for 42 years.

Yemen

Despite having the latest technology in drone strikes lavished upon it, Yemen maintains a virtually unbroken record in the top 10 failed states, currently at No. 6.

Syria

Locked in a civil war, which has seen a once secular-oriented nation become the home of armed jihadists, who were permitted to obtain their weapons and cash with remarkable ease. Apparently ‘getting rid of Assad’ was the sum total of our planning abilities on what should happen in Syria.

Egypt

Round and round she goes, and where she stops nobody knows. Spiraling somewhere.

Iraq and Afghanistan

I’m not even sure what the correct term for Iraq and Afghanistan, rated No. 11 and No.7 respectively on the Failed State Index, would be these days. Suffice it to see that after more than a decade of nation-building, we are having difficulty discerning progress on these construction sites, which I’m pretty sure haven’t even gone one day without a work-related accident. Of course, the already abysmal ratings were handed out before ISIS went big last week. (Interesting fact: current ISIS head Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who, unlike many detainees, truly did have a history of terrorist involvement, was captured by Americans in Iraq in 2004 but released in 2009. You had one job…)

Then there are places like Western Sahara, Transdniester and Palestine, which cannot fail because they do not even count as states. To add to our woes, the UN recently announced that there are more displaced persons today than at any time since the end of WWII.

These are a lot of open problems to have for a world hegemony so bent on nation-building and stability, especially when you consider that its citizens spend something like a trillion dollars annually on ‘defense’.

Members of a newly formed brigade of Iraqi Shiite fighters parade in military fatigues with their weapons on June 24, 2014 in the southern city of Basra as thousands of Shiite volunteers join Iraqi security forces in the fight against Sunni Jihadist militants who have taken over several northern Iraqi cities. (AFP Photo / Haidar Mohammed Ali)

When you are forking over that kind of money, you like to see results, and not hear excuses about the world’s instability being ‘also’ rooted in local problems. I can see very well that organizations like ISIS are ‘also’ rooted in local problems. However, I am also fairly certain that if some alien power used its superior resources to bomb us back to the Stone Age and then failed to provide any meaningful replacement infrastructure, that our ‘local’ problems would begin to get uglier too. And the reason is that they would have destroyed the social fabric and rule of law that keeps any place running as well as it does. Create that kind of power vacuum and anything can happen. To expect ‘the locals’ to pick themselves up, dust themselves off and jolly well carry on because we have suddenly lost interest in our overwhelming ‘responsibility’ to them is little short of delusional.

The second trend that I think emerges is closely linked to the first.

It is the deliberate ripping of the social fabric within states that are still relatively stable and prosperous. That this could in any way be connected to the first trend occurred to me while reading ‘A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm’, which was written by Richard Perle for Benjamin Netanyahu back in the 1990s. Now - and I do not say this lightly - not only does this document have a title that sounds like its composer was experiencing LARP-withdrawal at the time he wrote it, the text itself resembles the creation of an eight-year-old who was subjected to a crash course on international relations followed by a heavy dose of LSD. There are sudden switches in topic, where the free associative connection is at first less-than-obvious to the sober reader.

One of these switches was an abrupt change from harping on Israel’s alleged need to pursue a no-compromises peace strategy to urging a comprehensive privatization plan on the state. According to this paper, efforts to salvage Israel’s socialist institutions were undermining the legitimacy of the State of Israel and “Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, re-legislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises — moves which will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders, including [then-]Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.”

Why Newt Gingrich’s support was synonymous with self-reliance was left unexplained.

However, like many things that happen on acid, ‘Securing the Realm’ has a weird strain of truth to it, because it combined, albeit clumsily, two separate ways to erode the social fabric. The first was to become much more aggressive externally and seek to crush foreign entities as oppose to negotiate with them, even when those negotiations had yielded results, most notably under the leadership of Yitzhak Rabin, assassinated just one year before ‘Securing the Realm’ was written. The second was to actually work on eroding Israel’s alleged socialism from within by selling off the same public goods, which they under no circumstances would give to Palestinians, to private bidders.

I would argue that we can see both of these strains at work around the world, in that we push aggressive, no compromises foreign policy to its limits (witness Ukraine and Syria) without much thought for the destabilization that this engenders, not to mention its quite extreme effect on our own bank balance.

We are also hard at work undermining our own prosperity. Western countries are the most prosperous on earth. We unequivocally enjoy the highest standard of living. China, India and Brazil are still a long way off the kind of lifestyle most of us are accustomed to. And enjoy that lifestyle partly because we were pretty successful at ripping other people’s wealth off them in the past and partly because we invented a brilliant economic system after WWII which centered on what Richard Perle - aka the Prince of Darkness - would probably designate ‘socialist institutions’.

Western nations may not have fully gotten the knack for doing good in the world, but there was certainly what I would term growing interest and truly altruistic concern for people in other parts of the world among ordinary Western citizens pre-9/11.

Thanks to policies like those the Prince of Darkness so thoughtfully outlined for Netanyahu all those years ago, we have privatized, liberalized and cut taxes to the point that most people in Western nations are now experiencing a deterioration in their own living standards and society is increasingly divided between the haves and have-nots. We are, in other words, tearing up our own social fabric.

What that means is that the place that would have been most able to use its resources to truly stabilize and improve those parts of the globe most in need now not only refuses to do so (which was bad enough), in the future it might be unable to so do. We may, in short, be destabilizing the rest of the world, while simultaneously reducing our own capabilities to ever put it back together.

The natural consequence of being responsible in short, sharp bursts.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

http://rt.com/op-edge/168336-isis-western-foreign-policy-chaos/

U.S. State Dept. Document Confirms Regime Change Agenda in Middle East

The Obama Administration has been pursuing a policy of covert support for the Muslim Brotherhood and other insurgent movements in the Middle East since 2010.  MEB has obtained a just-released U.S. State Department document through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that confirms the Obama Administration’s pro-active campaign for regime change throughout the Middle East and North Africa region.

The October 22, 2010 document, titled “Middle East Partnership Initiative: Overview,” spells out an elaborate structure of State Department programs aimed at directly building “civil society” organizations, particularly non-governmental organizations (NGOs), to alter the internal politics of the targeted countries in favor of U.S. foreign policy and national security objectives.

The five-page document, while using diplomatic language, makes clear that the goal is promoting and steering political change in the targeted countries:  “The Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI) is a regional program that empowers citizens in the Middle East and North Africa to develop more pluralistic, participatory, and prosperous societies.  As the figures in this overview illustrate, MEPI has evolved from its origins in 2002 into a flexible, region-wide tool for direct support to indigenous civil society that mainstreams that support into the daily business of USG diplomacy in the region.  MEPI engages all the countries of the NEA region except Iran.  In the seven of NEA’s eighteen countries and territories with USAID missions, country-level discussions and communication between MEPI and USAID in Washington ensure that programming efforts are integrated and complementary.”

In a section of the document titled “How MEPI Works,” three core elements of the program were spelled out:  region-wide and multi-country programming, local grants, and country-specific projects.  The objectives of the region-wide and multi-country programming were described as:  “builds networks of reformers to learn from and support one another, and to catalyze progressive change in the region.”  The local grants “provide direct support to indigenous civic groups, and now represent more than half of MEPI’s projects.”  Under the country-specific aspect of the program, designated officers of the U.S. embassies manage the funding and work as direct liaisons to the various funded local NGOs and other civil society groups.   The “country-specific projects” are tasked “to respond to local developments and local needs, as identified by our embassies, local reformers, and our own field analysis.  Political developments in a country may produce new opportunities or challenges for USG policy goals, and MEPI will shift funds to respond to these needs.”

According to the October 2010 document, the Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) at every U.S. embassy in the MENA (Middle East/North Africa) is in charge of the MEPI program, giving it a clear high priority.  The document makes clear that the Middle East Partnership Initiative is not coordinated with host governments:  “MEPI works primarily with civil society, through NGO implementers based in the United States and in the region.  MEPI does not provide funds to foreign governments, and does not negotiate bilateral assistance agreements.  As a regional program, MEPI can shift funds across countries and to new issue-areas as needed.”

The document makes clear that special priority, as early as 2010, was given to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt and Bahrain, and that project headquarters in Abu Dhabi and Tunis were overall coordinating centers for the entire regional program.  Within a year of its inception, Libya and Syria were added to the list of countries on the priority list for civil society intervention.

The State Department document was released as part of an FOIA suit focused on Presidential Study Directive 11, which remains classified “secret” and has not yet been released to the public.  According to MEB sources, PSD-11 spelled out the Obama Administration’s plans to support the Muslim Brotherhood and other allied “political Islam” movements believed at the time to be compatible with U.S. foreign policy objectives in the region.

The MEPI is currently directed by Paul Sutphin, who was previously U.S. consul general in Erbil, Iraq and more recently, Director of the Office of Israel and Palestinian Affairs at the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.  His deputy is Catherin Bourgeois, who was first assigned to MEPI in February 2009 as Division Chief of Policy and Programming.  Her past State Department assignments have involved the development of Information Technology uses in advancing U.S. foreign policy goals.

Two other senior State Department officials have overseen the development and expansion of the program since the drafting of the October 2010 MEPI document, spelling out its transformation into a regime-change force.  Tomicah S. Tillemann is the Senior Advisor for Civil Society and Emerging Democracies, appointed to that post by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in October 2010.  He remains in that post under Secretary John Kerry.  He was the founder of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, itself an NGO named after Tilleman’s grandfather, the former U.S. Congressman, Tom Lantos.

In September 2011, Ambassador William B. Taylor was appointed to head the then-newly established Office of the Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions, after having served as the U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine during the “Orange Revolution” of 2006-2009.  According to a State Department paper, “The Office of the Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions (D/MET), established in September 2011, coordinates United States Government assistance to incipient democracies arising from popular revolts across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.  The Special Coordinator for Middle East Transitions implements a coordinated interagency strategy to support designated MENA countries undergoing transitions to democracy—currently, Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.”

The complete State Department documents released under the FOIA will soon be available as part of a comprehensive MEB Special Report now in production on the regime-change program and its consequences for the region.   For upcoming details on this report, check the MEB website.

http://mebriefing.com/?p=789

Syrian ‘moderates’ aren’t so moderate in Iraq -ROBERT FISK

Well, God bless Barack Obama – he’s found some “moderate” rebels in Syria. Enough to supply them with weapons and training worth $500m. Congress wants to arm these brave freedom fighters, you see. And Obama, having sent his 300 elite Spartan lads to Iraq to help Nouri al-Maliki fight the rebels there, needs to send help to the rebels in Syria – even though most of them are on the side of the rebels in Iraq whom Obama wants Maliki to defeat.

Confusing? You bet. So first steps first. Who are the “moderate” rebels whom Obama wants to train and arm? He doesn’t name them – and he can’t, because the original “moderates” whom America swore to arm (with the help of the CIA, the Brits, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey) were the so-called “Free Syrian Army”, mostly composed of deserters from Assad’s government forces. But the FSA – briefly beloved of John McCain until he discovered a pro-al-Qa’ida fighter sharing a photo-op with him in northern Syria – has decomposed.

Its men have gone home, switched to the bearded Islamists of the Nusrah or Isis – or Isil if we heed the latest acronym – or re-deserted to the government army and taken up arms for Assad again. Some freedom fighters! They weren’t given enough weapons, we are told. Now they’ll get more. And no doubt sell them – as they did the last lot. For it is a sad fact of war that whenever a gun crosses a border, it represents not loyalty but cash.

Give an FSA man – if you can find one – an anti-aircraft missile and it will be sold to the highest bidder. In all the civil wars I’ve covered, I’ve never seen a weapon in the hands of a militia which hasn’t bought it from someone else. In a humiliating interview on Channel 4, our own Defence Secretary admitted that weapons given to Syrian rebels had fallen into the hands of the bad guys. How do you monitor all the guys whom you give a gun to? Send them off with a personal drone to make sure they don’t sell it?

Besides, how do you actually find a “moderate” these days in Syria’s war? The Islamist rebels fight to the death. No “moderates” they. And – accursed facts now intervene – these are the very same Islamist rebels now threatening the Iraqi state. And just to make things even more confusing, Maliki has just been thanking Assad’s boys for air-raiding his own rebel enemies on the Iraqi-Syrian border on the grounds that Syria and Iraq are “friends”.

So now to our own real friend, the Department of Home Truths. What’s left of the FSA has been fighting the Islamist Isis-Isil forces. So have the Kurdish militias in northern Syria. So have a few village militias. And the Syrians have a suspicion that this is Obama’s half-baked plan: to arm the anti-Islamist Syrian rebels to fight the pro-al-Qa’ida rebels and thus – indirectly – keep both the Assad and Maliki regimes in power.

The problem is that Obama must do this without revealing that the Syrian-Iraqi battle against Sunni Wahabis is one and the same war, that Assad’s Syrian army – using Russian jets – is struggling against exactly the same enemy as Maliki’s Iraqi army, also soon to be augmented (if we are to believe Maliki’s blather to the BBC Arabic Service) with Russian jets. In other words, Assad not only has the public support of Moscow; he has the private support of Washington (and therefore, of course, of Israel).

Why else would the White House say that the money for Syrian “moderates” would help “counter terrorist threats” – “terrorist” being Assad’s description of his enemies. But of course, Obama must keep calling Assad a “brutal dictator”. Difficult to explain all this on Fox News, of course. So just keep repeating the word “moderate”. Over and over again.

http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/syrian-moderates-arent-so-moderate-in-iraq-9569548.html

Chimpanzees prefer African and Indian music

SCIENCE

 by KATIE COLLINS

The rhythms of Indian and African tunes are music to the ears of chimpanzees, according to a new study published by a research team from Emory University.

Previous research has established that chimps would rather be in silence than listen to Western music and that they generally prefer slower tempos, but the new research published by the American Psychological Association has revealed that they actively enjoy music from Africa and India. Although it has long been established that non-human primates can easily distinguish between musical properties such as rhythm, these are the first findings that suggest the primates may in fact have a preference for different types of rhythmical patterns.

In order to establish this, researchers played music near to the chimpanzee enclosures and found that they were more likely to spend time in the areas where they would be able to hear the music when African and Indian songs were playing. When Japanese music was played, however, they tended to move to areas where it was difficult or impossible to hear the music. "Our objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music. We used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties," said study co-author Frans de Waal.

Unlike Japanese music, which tends to possess regular strong beats, much like Western music, African and Indian music tends to have extreme ratios of strong to weak beats.

"Chimpanzees may perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects," said de Waal.

Sixteen chimpanzees housed separately in two groups were exposed to 40 minutes of music. The proximity of each of the chimps to the speaker was recorded every two minutes and compared to the positions of a control group. Western music was not used in the test as previous exposure may have biased the results.

In the study, the researchers point out that: "Although Western music, such as pop, blues and classical, sound different to the casual listener, they all follow the same musical and acoustic patterns. Therefore, by testing only different Western music, previous research has essentially replicated itself."

You can read the full study, published by the American Psychological Association in the  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, here.

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/28/chimpanzees-music-taste

Russia ‘will not sit idly by’ as jihadists press Iraq assault

AFP & AP

• Damascus: Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in Damascus on Saturday that his country “will not remain passive” as jihadists push an offensive in Syria’s neighbour Iraq.
  “Russia will not remain passive to the attempts by some groups to spread terrorism in the region,” Ryabkov told journalists after meeting with President Bashar Al Assad.
  Jihadists led by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) which is active in both Syria and Iraq, have seized vast territory north and west of Baghdad since launching their offensive two weeks ago.
  Ryabkov, whose country is Al Assad’s main backer, did not elaborate on what steps Russia might take.
• “The situation is very dangerous in Iraq and the foundations of the Iraqi state are under threat,” he said.

  Ryabkov also reiterated Moscow’s position that the crises in Syria and Iraq must be resolved “through a genuine national dialogue”.

  Asked about Washington’s decision to support moderate rebels in Syria, Ryabkov said: “There can be no alternative to a political solution.”

  He added: “We reject this US policy. It is in everybody’s interest, including the Americans, to act responsibly on Syria.”

  President Barack Obama has asked US lawmakers to authorise a $500 million plan to arm and train the Syrian opposition, which has been fighting both Al Assad’s troops and the jihadist Isil.

  Ryabkov said Damascus had taken a “responsible” decision in handing over its chemical weapons arsenal, while calling on Israel to “abide by” the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.

  Ryabkov also called on the United States and Europe to take “serious” steps to combat terrorism, warning that several Middle Eastern countries are threatened.

  --
  • http://gulfnews.com/news/region/iraq/russia-will-not-sit-idly-by-as-jihadists-press-iraq-assault-1.1353369
• -
  
  -