The Senselessness of Joining in a Sunni vs. Shiite War

The Strange War in Yemen

by GARY LEUPP

What sense does this make? The U.S. is abetting Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Jordan. Morocco and Sudan—all ruled by Sunni Muslims who despise Shiite Muslims—to attack and roll back advances by the Shiite Houthis of Yemen who are eager to fight al-Qaeda and ISIL in that impoverished, unstable nation.

Recall that shortly after 9/11, the George W. Bush administration declared that “he who is not for us is against us,” scaring the shit out of anyone hesitant to cooperate with U.S. war plans. Yemeni strongman Ali Abdullah Saleh, who had come to power in 1990, cooperated with the U.S. during the first Gulf War, arranged to get his nation removed from the U.S.’s “terror sponsor” list, purchased weapons from the U.S., and cooperated in the investigation of the al-Qaeda attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemeni waters in 2000, rushed to Washington in November 2001 to declare fealty.

This meeting was followed up by a meeting between Vice President Dick Cheney, de facto leader of the U.S. “War on Terror” and Saleh in Yemen’s capital Sana’a in March 2002. In the interim the U.S. announced that it would send hundreds of troops to Yemen and afterwards the Yemeni government confirmed that the U.S. would dispatch 200 “advisers” to train local troops against al-Qaeda terrorists (whom, by the way, were then small in number but have burgeoned steadily ever since).

In Yemen on March 14 Cheney stated that the U.S. was “being responsive to Yemen’s request for training its special forces in their counter-terrorism mission, [and also] planning to address essential military equipment needs and to increase assistance to Yemen’s Coast Guard and economy.” But on April 11 Saleh told al-Jazeera the real story: “As for the American anti-terror security experts and technical equipment, it is not we who requested them. It is the U.S. government that said ‘prove your genuineness and let the experts in’ so we let them in.”

Meanwhile Yemen’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC) accused U.S. ambassador Edmond Hull of “interfering” in domestic affairs and threatened to expel him. “Since he was appointed (last September), ambassador Edmond Hull has behaved like a high commissioner, not like a diplomat in a country which is opposed to any form of interference” by a foreign state, reported a GPC-linked newspaper. “Edmund Hull adopts a very haughty behaviour, far-removed from his diplomatic duties, when he speaks to certain Yemeni officials,” adding that Hull should “respect Yemen in order not to become persona non grata.” From the very beginning of the U.S.-Yemen alliance, the relationship has been characterized by mutual antipathy.

Thirteen years and countless anti-U.S. demonstrations later—protesting U.S. political interference, the asinine anti-Islam Youtube video of 2012, and most importantly the drone strikes—radical Islamists are more numerous and active than ever in the Arab world’s poorest country, where 45% of the people live under the poverty line. Over 800 “al-Qaeda militants” have supposedly been killed by drone strikes, but it’s hard to know how much credibility to attach to the claim. The Obama administration considers any post-pubescent male in the wrong place at the wrong time a “combatant” suitable for slaughter.

In November 2011, the 40-year-old U.S.-born cleric Anwar Awlaki was killed by a drone strike. Few in this country mourned, although the legal precedent (target-killing a U.S. citizen that way without any trial or conviction of a crime) caused some unease in some quarters. Less attention was given to a separate strike the next day that apparently targeted and killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son and a teenage cousin. Apparently their only crime was the family connection.

According to the Long War Journal, 35 civilians were killed in U.S. drone strikes in 2012, along with 193 considered “militants.” A 12-year-old boy was among the victims of a strike Feb. 9 this year, after which Slate Magazine asked, “What if drones are part of the problem?” What if they’re just generating more of what the CIA calls “blowback”?

Recall that during the “Arab Spring” of 2011, President Obama concluded at some point that Egypt’s President Mubarak, who had long been a “staunch ally” of the U.S. , had become so unpopular with his people that further U.S. support would damage the relationship with Egypt. So he gave Mubarak his marching orders. (You can do that if you’re the president of the United States.

The Egyptian dictator was succeeded by a democratically elected member of the Muslim Brotherhood, then toppled by the military with tacit U.S. approval. In Yemen, where the “spring” also brought massive protests against the regime in power, Obama ordered long-time U.S. ally Saleh to step down.  Saleh was obliged to comply in February 2012, while remaining active behind the scenes in his retirement.

Before that—in the early months of the “Arab Spring” in 2011—Glevum Associates conducted a poll in Yemen of 1005 adult men and women. Its results are telling. It found that 88% of Yemenis at the time thought their country was heading “in the wrong direction.” 98% had an unfavorable perception of the U.S. government (55% “very unfavorable,” 43% “somewhat unfavorable”). Only 40% approved strongly or somewhat with President Saleh’s cooperation with the U.S.

99% opposed the U.S.-led “War on Terrorism.” 99% had an unfavorable perception of U.S. relations with the Islamic world.
66% thought the U.S. had no or very little concern about Yemeni interests. The analysts concluded, “The overwhelming majority of Yemenis think that the economic, military and cultural influence of the U.S. in the world is bad and that the U.S. does not take into account the interests of countries like Yemen when it acts.”

52% of those surveyed thought that the Arab League was best able to help Yemen (only 1% thought this of the U.S.). Perhaps most shocking, Anwar Awlaki’s popularity exceeded that of President Saleh’s.

On September 12, 2012 demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in protest of the anti-Islam film posted on YouTube. They were mistaken in supposing that the U.S. government was behind it, or might have prevented it, but this was an indication of the profoundly anti-U.S. sentiments documented in the Gleuvum Associated study. In November there were more demonstrations in Sana’a, this time in support of the ousted Saleh, blaming the U.S. for his departure. They were largely Shiite-led demonstrations.

This is significant. It showed that Saleh (depicted in U.S. propaganda as a casualty of a popular uprising) actually retained his own social base in a complicated society, and that while he had fought the Houthis in the past, with Saudi and U.S. support, he was now aligning himself with Houthis and his fellow Shiites in general against the U.S.-orchestrated Hadi regime.

The U.S. political class and State Department-briefed mainstream press have shown themselves (again) to be totally clueless about intra-Muslim issues. It is as though they find these problems so arcane, requiring so much homework to figure out, that they can dispense with them all together and boil them all down to one allegation: Iran is the headquarters of global Shiism, and wherever Shiites are struggling to retain or acquire power, Iran must be held responsible for their actions.

Syria is led by Alewites, a branch or offshoot of Shiism. Ergo, Tehran supports the Assad regime. Hizbollah in Lebanon is a Shiite movement, so it must be a pawn of Iran. The demonstrators in Bahrain as mainly Shiites; thus the mullahs in Iran are instigating their protests. The Houthis are Shiites, so Iran must be driving their rebellion in a bid to dominate Yemen.

This interpretation is absurd. It is immediately refuted by the fact that Iran has not embraced the cause of Azerbaijan, and its claim to Nagorno-Kabarakh, in relation to the Republic of Armenia that supports the independence of the ethnically Armenian region surrounded by and claimed by Azerbaijan. (In 1923 the Soviet government made the decision to make Nagorno-Kabarakh an autonomous oblast within the Azerbaijan SSR. With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the new leaders in Azerbaijan sought to retain control over the region—rather like the new Georgian state tried to retain control over South Ossetia and Abhkazia. Armenia supported the secessionists in the subsequent Nagorno-Karabakh War of 1988 to 1992.)

Iran is the largest primarily Shiite nation in the world, with 81 million people, 90 to 95% of them Shiites. Iraq is number two; of its 32 million people, 60 to 65% are Shiites. Azerbaijan is the third most populous mainly Shiite nation in the world, with 8 million people, around 85% of them Shiites. The Azeris have a mixed Iranian-Turkish culture. And there are only four majority Shiite nations in the world, after all (the last being Bahrain). Shouldn’t Iran be best friends with them?

The answer is no. Tehran is more friendly with Christian Armenia than it is with Shiite Azerbaijan, for various geopolitical reasons that have little to do with the Shiite religion. But how often do you recall this matter being discussed in the U.S. press?

Still, Shiism is an important factor in political and military events in the region. U.S. policy in Iraq from 2003 produced the sort of civil conflict between the Shiite majority and Sunni minority that Baathist secularism had kept in check for decades. The fools in charge, arrogantly traipsing around Baghdad in cowboy boots, had no idea their policies would give rise to Iran-backed Shiite parties and militias rising to power on the one hand, and a Sunni resistance vulnerable to terrorist manipulation and even leadership on the other. The current confrontation between ISIL and combined Iraqi and Iranian forces, that has shaped up so dramatically and unexpectedly, is a lesson in what absolute stupidity and indifference to religious history can produce.

Look at a religious map of the Middle East. I recommend this one.

Notice how there are Shiite communities from Afghanistan to the Anatolian Peninsula and the Levant. (There are also millions in India and Pakistan.) Notice how the island country of Bahrain, located across the Persian Gulf from Iran, is mostly Shiite. Over 60%, in fact, but it is ruled by a Sunni monarch. Feeling themselves victims of discrimination, Shiites rose up in the “Arab Spring” in peaceful demonstrations. The king, Hamad ibn Isa Al Khaifa, cracked down severely, and in March 2011, Saudi Arabia and other member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council invaded to quell disturbances. “I saw them chasing Shiites,” one Sunni resident of the city of Sitra recalled, “like they were hunting.”

It might be worth noting in this connection that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi ambassador to Washington from 1983 to 2005 (and a dear friend of the Bush family) once told MI6 chief Sir Richard Dearlove that, “The time is not far off in the Middle East, Richard, when it will literally be ‘God help the Shia.’ More than a billion Shia have simply had enough of them.” A chilling prediction?

The Saudi-led invasion of Bahrain came just after U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had paid a call on the king to thank him for hosting the U.S. Fifth Fleet. The U.S. position on the suppression of this particular expression of the “Arab Spring” was to reiterate its support for the Bahraini and Saudi governments, both of whom blamed Iran for inciting the Bahrainis to rise up. Little evidence has ever been adduced for that.

Similarly, after Shiites in Lebanon responded to the Israeli invasion in 1982 by forming the resistance movement Hizbollah (now aligned with more secular Shiite-based Amal Movement), that movement has been dismissed by its foes as mere proxies and puppets of Iran. As though oppression and invasion do not in themselves invite resistance, but the latter has to be explained in terms of outside agitators’ nefarious interference!

There is in fact a close relationship between Iran and Hizbollah, due in part to deep religious affinities and the studies of its clerics in Iran’s holy city of Qom. But Hizbollah also enjoys close ties to Baathist Syria, which is a far different and more liberal society than Iran. (Women need not wear headscarves. Beer is brewed and sold legally. The state is officially secular, etc.) Those prone to deny the reality of oppressed people’s agency need to depict them as someone else’s surrogates.

And so we come to Yemen. It seems the Bahrain intervention was a mini-dress rehearsal for this, just without the bombs. The Saudis are amassing a huge force to invade, abetted by their allies and receiving logistical and intelligence support from the U.S. Why?

The Yemeni government has long faced multiple insurgencies, including a southern secessionist movement dating back the unification of North Yemen (the Republic of Yemen) and South Yemen (the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) in 1990. That movement has Baathist and Nasserite elements and is a separate phenomenon from al-Qaeda and ISIL movements in the south. Neither is related to the Shiite movement led by the powerful Houthi tribe in the north. (The Shiite population of Yemen is estimated at 30-35% of the population, the great majority members of the Zaidi denomination of Shiism. This is quite distinct from the form of Shiism prevalent in Iran.)

For many years Houthis have campaigned for a more representative government in Sana’a, and for a greater Houthi voice in parliament (which they dissolved last month). Their primarily peaceful protests, which have never evolved into secessionist demands, met with violent repression in 2004, by the Saleh regime. This led to a six-year war ending in a ceasefire in 2010.

Ironically perhaps, President Saleh was and is a Zaidi Shiite himself, like the Houthis. But he is not overly religious and (according to the Gleuven report) was as well supported by the Sunnis as the Shiites in Yemen while in power. He resigned as noted above in February 2012. In the election for his successor, Vice President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, a Sunni, ran unopposed with U.S. blessing. The point was to appease the masses who had called for Saleh’s resignation (not that he lacked a certain social base which remains supportive), while insuring the continuation of the status quo particularly the U.S. alliance.

But Hadi was less adept at handling the situation(s) in the south, raising Houthi concerns of an al-Qaeda or ISIL takeover or division of the country. Having already obtained control over the governates of Sa’da and al-Jawf (where they have eradicated al-Qaeda), they pressed south to the capital of Sana’a, taking it virtually without bloodshed in January. Representing maybe 40% of the Yemeni population, they seem to enjoy considerable support. They indeed appear to have ex-president Saleh’s support at this point.

In a New York Times interview published February 10 the leader of the Houthi militia, Saleh Ali al-Sammad, said he wanted Yemen to have good relations with the U.S. and other countries, including Saudi Arabia, so long as national sovereignty was respected. He added that the Houthies would reach out to political rivals. Why is Saudi Arabia so determined to crush them—if not to strike terror into the hearts of Shiites everywhere, particularly the rulers of Iran?

The current round of Saudi bombing of the Houthis is by no means the first. In 2009 alone, the Saudi Air Force dropped U.S.-made cluster bombs on 164 locations in the northern province of Sa’ada from U.S.-supplied F-15S fighter jets and UK-supplied Tornado aircraft. On January 22, 2010 UPI reported that Saudi fighter jets had made bombing raids over Houthi rebel positions in northern Yemen, killing about a dozen people and destroying homes.

In late 2010, the director of Amnesty international UK, Kate Allen, reported that over the previous year “Saudi Arabia’s fighter bombers – very likely supplied by the UK – have taken part in the Yemeni government’s massive bombardments of entire villages in Yemen’s restive north, an operation targeting Shia rebels. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of civilians have been killed, with thousands more forced to flee their homes.” Such reports have drawn little attention, much less outrage, in this country wedded at the hip to the Saudi absolute monarchy that routinely beheads people found guilt of adultery, homosexuality or even “witchcraft.”

Some talking head on CNN or MSNBC was noting how odd it is for the U.S. to be supporting Shiite militias led by Iranian officers against (Sunni) ISIL fighters in Iraq, while supporting Sunnis against Shiites in Yemen. Of course there’s more to it than U.S. forces siding confusedly with this or that form of Islam in the Middle East, or tolerating the expansion of Iranian influence in one country while challenging it in another. It’s not that simple.

In Iraq, the U.S. cannot allow the regime it brought to power (however disappointing its performance has been, causing some to charge in exasperation that “We did all this for them, and then they blew it!”) to fall to forces even more hideous than al-Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Even if it does mean making common cause with Iran and the al-Sadr Brigades. The alternative—ISIL in Baghdad, crucifying and beheading, blowing up monuments—would show the world all too clearly how utterly evil and inexcusable the invasion and occupation of Iraq (that directly produced these results) have been.

And on the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaeda’s original breeding ground, it cannot alienate the Saudi leaders, whose cooperation is vital in containing al-Qaeda and ISIL, promoting peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict and most importantly supplying a steady flow of cheap oil to the world market. A Shiite-led Yemen engaged in ongoing conflict with its Wahhabi Sunni-ruled neighbor could lead to all-out war in the Middle East, pitting Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hizbollah against a coalition of Sunni tyrannies whose religious prejudices (that mean nothing to Washington) could draw this country into even more disaster.

The arrogant Americans who once thought they could call the shots in Yemen have been forced to flee the country with their tails between their legs. Obama, who as recently as last September proclaimed Yemen as a model of the “strategy of taking out terrorists who threaten us, while supporting partners on the front lines” has been embarrassed by the collapse of his partners.

In January Hadi resigned as president, citing an irresolvable political “stalemate.” Under house arrest, his home surrounded by Houthi forces, he was able to flee to Aden in February, pronouncing himself once again as “president of the republic” before fleeing the country for Somalia March 25 after Houthis seized the Aden airport.

Meanwhile on February 10 the U.S. embassy, which had evacuated non-essential staff in August 2013, closed down entirely, citing security issues in Sana’a. On February 12 al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula overran a government military base in southern Yemen. Five weeks later 100 U.S. troops evacuated a hitherto secret base near the city of al-Houta as al-Qaeda forces attacked. Not since the retreat of the last U.S. forces from South Vietnam in 1975, or the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979, has U.S. imperialism met with such abject humiliation.

Now Washington must rely on Saudi Arabia and its anti-Shia, anti-Iran coalition to re-impose an acceptable level of stability in Yemen. Meanwhile Obama seeks rapprochement with Iran in part to stabilize Iraq, the current catastrophic condition of which is basically the result of U.S. crimes.

GARY LEUPP is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/30/the-senselessness-of-joining-in-a-sunni-vs-shiite-war/

Israel: The Stark Truth David Shulman

David Shulman

Benjamin Netanyahu has won again. He will have no difficulty putting together a solid right-wing coalition. But the naked numbers may be deceptive. What really counts is the fact that the Israeli electorate is still dominated by hypernationalist, in some cases proto-fascist, figures. It is in no way inclined to make peace. It has given a clear mandate for policies that preclude any possibility of moving toward a settlement with the Palestinians and that will further deepen Israel’s colonial venture in the Palestinian territories, probably irreversibly.

Netanyahu’s shrill public statements during the last two or three days before the vote may account in part for Likud’s startling margin of victory. For the first time since his Bar Ilan speech in 2009, he explicitly renounced a two-state solution and swore that no Palestinian state would come into existence on his watch. He promised vast new building projects in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. He made it clear that Israel would make no further territorial concessions, anywhere, since any land that would be relinquished would, in his view, immediately be taken over by Muslim terrorists.

And then there was his truly astonishing, by now notorious statement on election day itself, in which he urged Jewish voters to rush to the polls because “the Arabs are voting in droves.” One might have thought that those Arab voters were members of the body politic he headed as prime minister. Imagine a white American president calling on whites to vote because “blacks are voting in large numbers.” If there’s a choice to be made between democratic values and fierce Jewish tribalism, there’s no doubt what the present and future prime minister of Israel would choose.

Mindful of Netanyahu’s long record of facile mendacity, commentators on the left have tended to characterize these statements as more dubious “rhetoric”; already, under intense pressure from the United States, he has waffled on the question of Palestinian statehood in comments directed at a foreign, English-speaking audience. But I think that, for once, he was actually speaking the truth in that last pre-election weekend—a popular truth among his traditional supporters. What does this mean? On the face of it, things are not all that different today than before the election. But the now seemingly impregnable rule of the right has at least four likely consequences for the near and mid-term future.

First, the notion that there will someday be two states in historic Palestine has been savagely undermined. We have Netanyahu’s word for it. If he has his way—and why shouldn’t he?—Palestinians are destined for the foreseeable future to remain subject to a regime of state terror, including the remorseless loss of their lands and homes and, in many cases, their very lives; they will continue to be, as they are now, disenfranchised, without even minimal legal recourse, hemmed into small discontinuous enclaves, and deprived of elementary human rights.

Take a mild, almost innocuous example, entirely typical of life in the territories. Last weekend I was in the south Hebron hills with Palestinian shepherds at a place called Zanuta, whose historic grazing grounds have been taken over, in large part, by a settlement inhabited by a single Jewish family. Soldiers turned up with the standard order, signed by the brigade commander, declaring the area a Closed Military Zone; the order is illegal, according to a Supreme Court ruling, but the writ of the court hardly impinges on reality on the ground in south Hebron. Within minutes, three of the shepherds and an Israeli activist were arrested.

The people of Zanuta live with such arbitrary decrees on a daily basis, as they live under the constant threat of violent assault by Israeli settlers, acting with impunity. In short, these Palestinian villagers are slated for dispossession and expulsion. We are doing what we can to stop the process, but it isn’t easy. The situation in the northern West Bank is considerably worse.

Secondly, we may see the emergence in the West Bank of a situation like that in Gaza, with Hamas or other extremist organizations assuming power. It seems ridiculous to have to write this, but in case anyone has any doubt: there is no way a privileged collective can sit forever on top of a disenfranchised, systematically victimized minority of millions. We can expect mass violent protests of one sort or another (maybe, with luck, some large-scale nonviolent protest as well). Sooner or later, the territories will probably explode, and the Palestinian Authority may be washed away. At that point Netanyahu will complain loudly that you can never trust the Arabs.

In fact, however, there is an ongoing, intimate, many-layered relationship between Israelis and Palestinians, and what one side chooses to do always has a very direct impact on the other side. More generally, if we Israelis fail to cut a deal with the Palestinian moderates, or at least to strive in earnest for an agreement, we will by our own actions bring their extremists to power. There is no dearth of examples from recent decades.

Thirdly, Palestinians will rightly turn to the International Criminal Court in The Hague (as early as April 1, according to the official announcement) and to international forums such as the UN Security Council, where Israel may soon no longer enjoy the protection of an automatic American veto. The international boycott will intensify to a level far beyond what we have seen. It may in the end force a change, at immense cost to the cohesion of Israeli society and to the state’s claim to legitimacy. In this respect, I think we are approaching the tipping point.

Fourthly, and most important, the moral fiber of the country will continue to unravel. Already for years the public space has been contaminated by ugly, violent voices coming from the heart of the right-wing establishment. As Zvi Barel has cogently written inHaaretz, “Netanyahu has succeeded in overturning the principle that the state exists for the sake of its citizens and putting in its place the Fascist belief that the citizens exist for the state.”

In accordance with that belief, there will be more hypernationalist, antidemocratic legislation, more deliberate and consistent attempts to undermine the authority of the courts, more rampant racism, more thugs in high office, more acts of cruelty inflicted on innocents, more attacks on moderates perceived as enemies of the state, more paranoid indoctrination in the schools, more hate propaganda and self-righteous whining by official spokesmen, more discrimination against the Israeli-Arab population, more wanton destruction of the villages of Israeli Bedouins, more war-mongering, and quite possibly more needless war.

The danger from within—to who we are and how we live in the world—is infinitely greater than any external threat. The corruption (I am not talking about money) is already far advanced. Israel has, in effect, knowingly moved further toward a full-fledged apartheid system. Those who don’t like the word can suggest another one for what I see each week in the territories and more and more inside the Green Line.

Is there any good news? The Joint List, a new alliance of four Arab parties, having won thirteen seats in the election, is now the third largest party in the Knesset and two seats stronger than the combined Arab parties in the outgoing Knesset. A certain tentative awakening was evident in the Arab sector during the campaign. We will have to see if it continues. The great discovery of this period was the eloquent, charming, always unruffled leader of the Joint List, Ayman Odeh. They have called for full equality for the Arab-Palestinian minority within Israel and for an end to racist discrimination and to the occupation of the West Bank. A little new energy on the left can’t hurt. For the moment, it won’t be enough to challenge the right-wing tide.

We have work to do. Holding on to hope is part of that work. Though Netanyahu has now won four elections, it is in his nature that he will eventually destroy himself (and probably many others along the way). In the end, the alliance between moderates and activists on both sides may turn out to be as strong, or stronger, than the unspoken blood alliance of Netanyahu with Hamas, Hezbollah, and ISIS. We will have many opportunities to test this proposition.

Justice, generosity, and empathy are not foreign to the Jewish tradition, though at times they go underground. Perhaps hope lies in a vision of all the territory west of the Jordan River as somehow more than one state but less than two, under conditions of true equality. Already there are groups within what is left of the Israeli left that are thinking creatively, and practically, along these lines. One thing is certain. The demand to fully enfranchise the Palestinians now suffering under Israeli rule will eventually prove irresistible. What happens after that, no one can say.

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An expanded version of this article will appear in a coming issue of The New York Review

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2015/mar/21/israel-elections-ugly-truth/

A Middle East Holocaust

By Paul Craig Roberts

Paulcraigroberts.org

I have been around for a long time and have experienced more than most. The current situation in my experience is the most dangerous time of all for humanity.

Nuclear weapons are no longer restrained by the Cold War MAD doctrine. Washington has released them into pre-emptive first strike form.

The targets of these pre-emptive strikes–Russia and China–know it, because Washington proudly proclaims its immorality in public documents describing its war doctrine.

The result is to maximize the chance of nuclear war. If you were Russia and China, and you knew that Washington had a war doctrine that permits a surprise nuclear attack, would you sit there waiting while Washington cranks up its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese propaganda machine, demonizing both countries as a threat to “freedom and democracy”?

The fools in Washington are playing with nuclear fire. Noam Chomsky points out that in a less dangerous time than currently exists, we came very close to nuclear war.https://philosophynow.org/issues/107/Noam_Chomsky_on_Institutional_Stupidity

Harold Pinter, one of the last Western intellects, understood the danger in Western arrogance. He denounced the West’s crimes and called for the crimes to be subject to established law before it is too late for humanity.

“We have brought torture, cluster bombs, depleted uranium, innumerable acts of random murder, misery, degradation and death to the Iraqi people and call it ‘bringing freedom and democracy to the Middle East’. How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.” Harold Pinter, 2005 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech.

“An Iraqi Holocaust” by Gideon Polya http://www.countercurrents.org/polya230315.htm and “Genocide In Iraq”http://www.countercurrents.org/polya150315.htm provide abundant evidence for convicting Bush and Blair.

Dr. Gideon Polya is a professor of science in one of Australia’s leading universities. He has a moral conscience, something increasingly rare in the Western world.

His articles are based largely on the just published by Clarity Press two volume heavily documented Genocide in Iraq by Abdul-Haq Al-Ani and Tarik Al-Ani. Abdul-Haq Al-Ani is a British-educated lawyer with a Ph.D. in International Law and a Ph.D. in electronics engineering. Tarik Al-Ani, is an architect, translator, and researcher.

Currently I am reading the two-volume work and intended to review it. But Professor Polya’s articles suffice as an introduction to Genocide in Iraq. Washington has committed a terrible crime in our name. Washington not only murdered Iraq, Washington has murdered the Middle East. Washington and its despicable vassals–”the Coalition of the Willing”–are responsible for a Middle East Holocaust.

For people in the Anglo-American world who have a moral conscience, the facts are soul-wrenching. The populations of the countries whose governments comprised “the Coalition of the Willing” are contaminated with war crimes committed by their governments in the Iraq Genocide. A progressive modern state was obliterated, and 2.7 million Iraqi people were murdered.

The crime was covered up with propaganda that demonized Saddam Hussein and created fear of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.

The Iraqi genocide was based on a lie, and both Bush and Blair knew it. The two satanic leaders simply decided to destroy a people who they first demonized and marginalized.

Cheney and the neocons continue to justify the genocide and the illegal torture regime that they created in order to produce fake “terrorists” as a justification for their war crimes. The Western media, especially the New York Times, is also complicit in the Iraqi Genocide as are the insouciant Western peoples themselves who stood by cheering while millions of people were destroyed on the basis of a blatant and transparent lie.

What does the West represent? Greed? Lies? War? Torture? War Crimes? Selfishness, Intolerance? Destruction of life on earth?

The “Christian” West is a master at propaganda and self-deception. Look at the evangelical churches. They support a criminal, inhumane regime while professing to be followers of Christ.

Look at American “conservatives.” They support the militarized police state. They support the routine police murders of dark-skinned American citizens. They support every war Washington dreams up and even more. Indeed, there are not enough wars for the satisfaction of Congressional Republicans who now want war with Russia and with Iran.

Look at the Republicans in Congress and in state governments. They hate the environment. They love polluters. They worship Israel and Israel’s destruction of the Palestinians and the ongoing theft of the Palestinians’ country, a 60-year old activity. Just look at the map of shrinking Palestine. More is stolen each day.

Washington has supported this theft of an entire country. Yet, Washington is able to masquerade as a great defender of human rights. Whose rights? Washington’s and Israel’s. No one else’s rights count.

How does the world survive the American-Israeli aggression? Probably it will not. The evil is now directed at Iran, Russia, and China. These countries cannot be bombed year after year after year with no consequences to the bombers.

Iran is limited in its destructive ability. But Iran could destroy Saudi Arabia and Israel. Russia and China can destroy the US and all of Washington’s vassal states. The intensity of Washington’s propaganda war is driving the world to destruction.

How can it be stopped when Putin himself says over and over that Washington continually ignores every thing that the Russian government says. Putin is the peacemaker. Every peace proposal he brings is ignored by Washington whose response is to beat the drums of war louder.

Unless European governments recognize the danger in Washington’s aggression and dissolve NATO, planet earth hasn’t long to live.

The American public needs to understand the consequences of Washington’s illegality and criminality. On the one hand it means that those subject to Washington’s aggression have to endure war crimes, but on the other hand it means a growing hatred for America. As Washington’s easy targets are used up, Washington engages countries that can reply to force with force.

Unless the neoconservatives are ejected from the Obama regime and banned from inclusion in any future American government, mushroom clouds will go up over Washington, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston, St. Louis, Cleveland, Chicago. The American mid-west, which hosts the ICBM silos, will become uninhabitable except by cockroaches.

Americans, and the populations of the American puppet states, desperately need to understand that Washington is incapable of speaking the truth about anything. Washington is an evil force. Washington is Sauron. Washington is Satan.

Look at Iraq. Look at Afghanistan. Look at Libya. Look at Syria. Look at Somalia. Look at Ukraine. Nothing but destruction comes from Washington. Will life on earth be Washington’s next victim?

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts' latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West and How America Was Lost.

http://www.countercurrents.org/roberts300315.htm

Migration as a Universal Human Right

We All Started in One Place and Ended Up in Another

by ALVARO HUERTA

In life, as the saying goes, nothing is certain except for death and taxes. I propose another: migration.

Migration represents a universal human right.

Some economists want us to believe that humans migrate, especially the global poor, to more developed countries for better jobs and higher wages. But throughout time, humans also migrate because of climate change, natural disaster, disease, violence, war, repression, dictatorships, religious persecution, drug and gang warfare, free trade agreements and global capitalism.

Humans have been in constant movement throughout history, and always will be. If migration is certain and constant, why do so many Americans and their leaders, particularly conservatives, fuss about Latino immigration to the United States?

As a scholar, I’m interested in this and other questions as I try to understand the complex nature of international migration. When leaders label immigrants “illegal aliens,” “anchor babies” or “threats to national security,” the greater society will have less sympathy for these human beings when they are exploited or deported.

Instead of attacking and objectifying immigrants, let’s appreciate their humanity and positive contributions to society. For me, this is not just an academic issue. It’s personal.

I will never forget the stories my father, Salomon Chavez Huerta, told me about his experiences in the U.S. as a guest worker under the Bracero Program during the mid-1900s, toiling in this country’s agricultural fields for meager wages.

I remember him telling me how he felt about being sprayed with chemicals and forced to live in overcrowded housing. He and other Mexican immigrants, his paisanos, were treated like beasts of burden. He was charged for food and rent from the company store. When people insult immigrants, I feel they are insulting the memory of my father.

Once my father’s agricultural contract expired, my family moved from a small rancho in the state of Michoacán to the border city of
Tijuana. Once settled in Tijuana, my mother, Carmen Mejia Huerta, worked as a transborder domestic worker, cleaning the homes of Americans and raising their children.

She treated these children like her own. And for this, what did my mother receive? Poor wages, lack of work benefits and disrespect.

During one of her extended work stays in the U.S., my mother was pregnant with me. With the help of extended family members in Sacramento, I was born in the California capital.

I was shortly reunited with my siblings in Tijuana, where I spent the first four years of my life. My parents eventually migrated to el norte and we settled in East Los Angeles’ notorious Ramona Gardens housing project.

My father worked as janitor, and my mother was a domestic worker in West Los Angeles. Thanks to their hard work, four of their eight children attended elite universities.

I received two degrees from UCLA and a doctorate from UC Berkeley. My wife graduated from UCLA, too. Our immigrant parents sacrificed so we could have opportunities not available to them in their home country.

We all benefit from immigrant labor, provided by millions of people like my parents. So why are Americans so fixated with borders? Can we imagine a world without borders?

Professor Bridget Anderson of Oxford University argues that, yes, we should strive for this reality. While some claim that her views represent a utopia, she counters that borders represent a dystopia.

Similarly, should we, those of us who envision a more just world, demand that President Barack Obama tear down our southern border?

In his book about the failure of borders, Walls Won’t Work, professor Michael Dear of UC Berkeley argues that the U.S. government should tear down the U.S.-Mexico border. Borders don’t work and will eventually come down, he contends.

We all started in one place and ended up in another place. We don’t know where we’ll land tomorrow. Before people judge and denigrate immigrants, they must ask themselves where their ancestors migrated from and if they have migrated or plan to do so in the future.

Dr. Alvaro Huerta is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning and ethnic and women’s studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He is the author of “Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Towards a Humanistic Paradigm,” published by San Diego State University Press (2013).

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/30/migration-as-a-universal-human-right/

Black America's State of Surveillance

By Malkia Amala Cyril

Ten years ago, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, my mother, a former Black Panther, died from complications of sickle cell anemia. Weeks before she died, the FBI came knocking at our door, demanding that my mother testify in a secret trial proceeding against other former Panthers or face arrest. My mother, unable to walk, refused. The detectives told my mother as they left that they would be watching her. They didn’t get to do that. My mother died just two weeks later. 

My mother was not the only black person to come under the watchful eye of American law enforcement for perceived and actual dissidence. Nor is dissidence always a requirement for being subject to spying. Files obtained during a break-in at an FBI office in 1971 revealed that African Americans, J. Edger Hoover’s largest target group, didn’t have to be perceived as dissident to warrant surveillance. They just had to be black. As I write this, the same philosophy is driving the increasing adoption and use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies across the United States. 

Today, media reporting on government surveillance is laser-focused on the revelations by Edward Snowden that millions of Americans were being spied on by the NSA. Yet my mother’s visit from the FBI reminds me that, from the slave pass system to laws that deputized white civilians as enforcers of Jim Crow, black people and other people of color have lived for centuries with surveillance practices aimed at maintaining a racial hierarchy. 

It’s time for journalists to tell a new story that does not start the clock when privileged classes learn they are targets of surveillance. We need to understand that data has historically been overused to repress dissidence, monitor perceived criminality, and perpetually maintain an impoverished underclass.

In an era of big data, the Internet has increased the speed and secrecy of data collection. Thanks to new surveillance technologies, law enforcement agencies are now able to collect massive amounts of indiscriminate data. Yet legal protections and policies have not caught up to this technological advance. 

Concerned advocates see mass surveillance as the problem and protecting privacy as the goal. Targeted surveillance is an obvious answer—it may be discriminatory, but it helps protect the privacy perceived as an earned privilege of the inherently innocent.

The trouble is, targeted surveillance frequently includes the indiscriminate collection of the private data of people targeted by race but not involved in any crime. 

For targeted communities, there is little to no expectation of privacy from government or corporate surveillance. 

Instead, we are watched, either as criminals or as consumers. We do not expect policies to protect us. Instead, we’ve birthed a complex and coded culture—from jazz to spoken dialects—in order to navigate a world in which spying, from AT&T and Walmart to public benefits programs and beat cops on the block, is as much a part of our built environment as the streets covered in our blood. 

In a recent address, New York City Police Commissioner Bill Bratton made it clear: “2015 will be one of the most significant years in the history of this organization. It will be the year of technology, in which we literally will give to every member of this department technology that would’ve been unheard of even a few years ago.” 

Predictive policing, also known as “Total Information Awareness,” is described as using advanced technological tools and data analysis to “preempt” crime. It utilizes trends, patterns, sequences, and affinities found in data to make determinations about when and where crimes will occur.

This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination, predictive policing is a face of what author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime prevention or punishment. 

In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken Windows.” This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death. Without oversight, accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices.

As local law enforcement agencies increasingly adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three.

They will use technologies like license plate readers, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified. 

They will use facial recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by local police departments for any criminal justice purpose.

They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many other issues, remain unclear.

They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who happen to be nearby.

The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas.

They will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true.

Predictive policing doesn’t just lead to racial and religious profiling—it relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime, suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color. One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color.

This is the future of policing in America, and it should terrify you as much as it terrifies me. Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t, because my life is at far greater risk than the lives of white Americans, especially those reporting on the issue in the media or advocating in the halls of power.

One of the most terrifying aspects of high-tech surveillance is the invisibility of those it disproportionately impacts.

The NSA and FBI have engaged local law enforcement agencies and electronic surveillance technologies to spy on Muslims living in the United States. According to FBI training materials uncovered by Wired in 2011, the bureau taught agents to treat “mainstream” Muslims as supporters of terrorism, to view charitable donations by Muslims as “a funding mechanism for combat,” and to view Islam itself as a “Death Star” that must be destroyed if terrorism is to be contained. From New York City to Chicago and beyond, local law enforcement agencies have expanded unlawful and covert racial and religious profiling against Muslims not suspected of any crime. There is no national security reason to profile all Muslims.

At the same time, almost 450,000 migrants are in detention facilities throughout the United States, including survivors of torture, asylum seekers, families with small children, and the elderly. Undocumented migrant communities enjoy few legal protections, and are therefore subject to brutal policing practices, including illegal surveillance practices. According to the Sentencing Project, of the more than 3 million people incarcerated 

in the United States, more than 60 percent are racial and ethnic minorities.

But by far, the widest net is cast over black communities. Black people alone represent 40 percent of those incarcerated. More black men are incarcerated than were held in slavery in 1850, on the eve of the Civil War. Lest some misinterpret that statistic as evidence of greater criminality, a 2012 study confirms that black defendants are at least 30 percent more likely to be imprisoned than whites for the same crime.

This is not a broken system, it is a system working perfectly as intended, to the detriment of all. The NSA could not have spied on millions of cellphones if it were not already spying on black people, Muslims, and migrants.

As surveillance technologies are increasingly adopted and integrated by law enforcement agencies today, racial disparities are being made invisible by a media environment that has failed to tell the story of surveillance in the context of structural racism.

Reporters love to tell the technology story. For some, it’s a sexier read. To me, freedom from repression and racism is far sexier than the newest gadget used to reinforce racial hierarchy. As civil rights protections catch up with the technological terrain, reporting needs to catch up, too. Many journalists still focus their reporting on the technological trends and not the racial hierarchies that these trends are enforcing. 

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “Everything we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.” Journalists have an obligation to tell the stories that are hidden from view.

We are living in an incredible time, when migrant activists have blocked deportation buses, and a movement for black lives has emerged, and when women, queer, and trans experiences have been placed right at the center. The decentralized power of the Internet makes that possible.

But the Internet also makes possible the high-tech surveillance that threatens to drive structural racism in the twenty-first century. 

We can help black lives matter by ensuring that technology is not used to cement a racial hierarchy that leaves too many people like me dead or in jail. Our communities need partners, not gatekeepers.

Together, we can change the cultural terrain that makes killing black people routine. We can counter inequality by ensuring that both the technology and the police departments that use it are democratized. We can change the story on surveillance to raise the voices of those who have been left out.

There are no voiceless people, only those that ain’t been heard yet. Let’s birth a new norm in which the technological tools of the twenty-first century create equity and justice for all—so all bodies enjoy full and equal protection, and the Jim Crow surveillance state exists no more. 

Malkia Amala Cyril is founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and co-founder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a national network of 175 organizations working to ensure media access, rights, and representation for marginalized communities.

- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americas-state-surveillance#sthash.rzE4OQrE.dpuf

China’s Bank & Waning USA Hegemony

A Global Economic ‘Grand Game’?

by JACK RASMUS

Two events occurred last week that mark a further phase in the waning of US global economic hegemony: China introduced its own Economic Development Bank, the ‘Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank’ (AIIB); the IMF simultaneously announced it will decide in May to include the Chinese currency as a global reserve-trading currency alongside the dollar, pound, and euro—an almost certainly ‘done deal’ as well.

The dual moves caught the US off guard, especially as the USA’s erstwhile main economic ally, Britain, was the first to announce it would join China’s AIIB as a founding member. That announcement set off a quick succession of further announcements by major western economies that they too were now joining the AIIB—by Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg, and Switzerland—as major European capitalist economies scurried to ensure a piece of the Asian economic action and to tap China’s huge foreign currency reserves for investment in their own economies. Singapore and Australia followed within days. South Korea and Canada are now reconsidering joining, as are other once solid USA economic allies.

The initial USA response to Britain was to accuse it of “constant accommodation” of China. US Treasury Secretary, Jack Lew, even made telephone calls to British finance minister, George Osborne, requesting that he ‘hold off’ after Britain’s initial announcement, according to reports in the international business press. That effort was apparently to no avail, however, as British politicians, including prime minister, David Cameron, facing re-election within weeks, chose to leverage the decision for political purposes as well as economic. Reportedly the US also attempted to strong-arm Singapore into not joining, but failed there as well.

The entire affair caught USA political bureaucrats by surprise. The matter of joining the AIIB was thought to have been raised in European centers at low levels, but not at senior financial minister or ambassador levels. No decisions appeared imminent. Events in recent weeks show the Europeans successfully kept USA out of the loop concerning their real intentions, as Britain last week ‘jumped the gun’, as they say, with British government officials giving the reason for their decision to join the AIIB as “We want to be a Chinese partner of choice in international finance”(read: we want a slice of the economic pie before someone else gets to eat it).

The China-UK Connection

In making their announcement, British officials vowed that they want the UK to become the main destination for Chinese investments. In 2013-14, when the British and Euro economies were in particularly bad shape, major trade delegations from China repeatedly visited both Britain and Germany on numerous occasions. Much of Britain’s recent tentative economic recovery the past two years has been driven by infrastructure and property deals that have been heavily financed by massive China private capital inflows into London real estate, infrastructure projects, and south England investments. Deals to revitalize investment in Britain’s nuclear power sector are also being financed by China investment. Without China investments in the UK in recent years, and other capital inflows from emerging markets, British economic ‘recovery’ would have remained British ‘stagnation’ at best.

USA vs. China policies toward British banks offer another example of a growing divergence of interests between the USA and Britain with regard to China.

USA bank regulators have been targeting and fining London banks for their repeated scandals, money laundering, global interest rate (Libor) manipulations, and speculative excesses. London in recent years has become a veritable ‘wild west’ of international banking. The US levying of fines on UK banks has been justified. But banking is one of the few industries that keep Britain from becoming a ‘third tier’ economy. British Prime Minister Cameron therefore has done—and will do—whatever it takes to protect and advance the economic interests of his so-called ‘City of London’ (UK banking sector). He is even prepared to leave the European Union, if necessary, to prevent re-regulation of the British banking sector. So it should not have been a surprise to the USA when Cameron and other conservative British politicians turned to China and quickly joined China’s AIIB. All the signals were there already. British finance capital had already last year, in 2014, announced an agreement with China that London would become the global trading center for China’s currency, the Yuan. And Britain has become increasingly dependent on China money capital inflows in recent years, as noted. So the recent AIIB decision is just a logical consequence of deepening British-China economic relations that have been already underway now for some time, even though the USA didn’t totally ‘see it coming’.

Deepening China-Europe economic relations extend to the Eurozone and eastern Europe economies as well, not just to Britain. Trade integration between China and Germany has been growing sharply. China is Germany’s fourth largest trading partner. China has been setting up investment funds in eastern European economies from the Baltics to the Balkans; China has an offer on the table to buy Greece’s main port at Pireaus; and in recent years has been repeatedly purchasing Italian and other southern European countries sovereign bonds to help those economies weather their recent debt crisis.

Origins of the AIIB

The origins of the AIIB announcement trace back at least to 2010, when the USA quietly agreed to allow China to increase its influence in the USA-dominated international economic institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since then, however, the USA has reneged on that agreement, in order to ensure that China’s influence in the IMF would remain minimal. So China went off last October 2014 and formed its own AIIB, in what amounts in effect to a fundamental challenge to the IMF’s parallel USA-dominated institution, the World Bank.

With 27 nations having already signed on, including Britain and other Europeans, Australia, Singapore, and others, the AIIB represents a major challenge to the USA-dominated development banks, the World Bank, as well as to the Asian Development Bank (USA and Japan dominated ADB) located in Manila, Philippines. Initially the AIIB is to be funded with $50 billion to invest in Asian infrastructure. That compares with $160 billion in the Asian Development Bank (ADB). However, the near term AIIB target is to provide $100 billion in funding. And by 2020, potentially up to $730 billion. That’s a lot of projects and potential profits for European and British businesses.

Britain and the other European economies were quick to join China’s AIIB because it allows their own companies almost guaranteed participation in the AIIB’s lending projects—thus giving them a ‘leg up’, as they say, in their competition with USA and Japanese companies involving development and infrastructure investment projects in the EMEs. It also gives them, the British and the Europeans, the opportunity to redirect some of that investment capital to companies inside their own economies, where their own companies get to provide semi-finished goods and services to the infrastructure projects in Asia that the AIIB will approve with its initial (and no doubt soon to expand) $50 billion fund.

Indeed, Europeans have become increasingly frustrated with USA dominated World Bank and IMF, in which the USA typically vetoes decisions of those institutions that it dislikes with as little as 20% of the ‘voting rights’ in those bodies. At the same time, conservatives in the US Congress continue to refuse to provide the US’s share of the operating funds for those institutions. China’s AIIB enters the global infrastructure investment field with a promise by China not to veto and to hold no more than 49% of voting rights in the AIIB. It is an attractive alternative to the USA’s World Bank and IMF dominated bodies. Not surprising, Europe and other major economies are therefore seriously interested in participating in the AIIB. However, to the extent they do, it represents a waning of USA economic influence over its once, almost completely economically subservient allies.

The ‘Old Order’ of US Economic Hegemony

The USA’s dominance of the IMF and World Bank since 1945 has provided Washington with great leverage in influencing both political events and economic directions in emerging market economies (EMEs). Often multi-billion dollar lending projects are dangled before an EME, or threatened with suspension, if the EME in question fails to do the bidding of Washington involving a political decision Washington wants, or an investment concession Washington wants from the EME for a US bank or company.

A good example of the kind of ‘economic arm-twisting’ by the USA still going on today is the pressure exerted by USA government and courts to force Argentina to agree to terms demanded by USA shadow banksters with regard to the repayment of loans; or the moves underway by USA government and banksters to drain Venezuela’s currency reserves to effect a collapse of its currency, the Bolivar, to set off import inflation to set the stage for another coup and political intervention. Those are extreme, but not untypical, examples; countless ‘lesser’ forms of pressure on EMEs occur frequently by the USA through its control of decisions by the IMF and World Bank. Ukraine is another, perhaps more traditional example, where the USA has influenced the IMF to install US citizen, shadow bankers, like private equity CEO, Natalia Jaresko, to run the Ukraine’s economy as finance minister as a condition for the Ukraine receiving IMF loans.

But by providing an alternative source of infrastructure project funding, the China AIIB reduces potential USA economic and political influence over EMEs.

From 1944 to 1973 the U.S. maintained more or less total economic hegemony in the global economy. The U.S. dollar was the prime currency for trading and reserve purposes. This dominance was challenged in the post-1973 period briefly, however, as the U.S. economy experienced an economic crisis at that time. The institutional arrangements by which the U.S. retained dominance from 1944 to 1973 were restructured and rearranged. The U.S. economy and its world dominance was restored in a new set of arrangements and relationships with other states and economies starting in the 1980s, which is sometimes referred to as ‘Neoliberalism’. The symbol of that economic dominance, the U.S. dollar, after having seriously weakened in the 1970s was restored again to unchallenged status as the global currency in the 1980s and after.

But the restructuring of the global economy in the 1980s, led by the United States (and a junior partner the UK) has now run its course for a second time.

      Recent events surrounding the AIIB, and the IMF adding the Yuan to its currency mix, are just a subset of the broader and even more strategically significant rise of the Yuan as a global trading and reserve currency and of alternative institutions developed that break the hegemonic control of global economic institutions by the USA.

A Global Economic ‘Grand Game’?

As China continues to successfully target Europe for economic integration, the USA has been clumsily targeting Russia for European de-integration.

What’s ironic is that the USA today is directing its most aggressive efforts against Russia, in an attempt to prevent Europe from deepening its economic relationships with that country and to roll back those relationships by means of economic sanctions. Since at least 2010, Europe’s growing resource and trade integration with Russia since has made the USA increasingly nervous. Much of the USA’s policies toward Ukraine (especially the USA initiated coup there in 2014), and subsequent efforts to get Europe to impose severe sanctions on Russia, should be viewed in this light. The USA wants to sever the growing Europe (especially German)-Russian trade connections and, in particular, Europe’s recent growing dependence on Russian energy. It is at least arguable that the USA initiated and supported the coup in the Ukraine with that in mind: i.e. to provoke a Russian military response, in order to force Europe to impose severe sanctions leading to a roll back economic relations with Russia. The USA sees its economic influence in Europe as strategic. Severing Russia economically from Europe ensures that. It would ensure Europe’s continuing dependence on the USA, economically, and therefore politically and militarily. The Ukraine-Russia conflict should thus be viewed in the context of a much bigger ‘competition’ between Russia and the USA over economic influence in Europe.

But while the USA focuses on undermining economic relations between Europe and Russia, China continues to ‘slip in the back door’ and deepen its economic relationships with Europe. Today it’s the AIIB.Tomorrow the Yuan as an officially accepted trading currency. Thereafter the Yuan as the dominant trading and reserve currency, and an even deeper European dependence on China money capital flows.

China thus represents by far a much greater challenge to US economic hegemony in Europe, and indeed globally as well. But the USA blindly continues to engage in economic adventurism in Europe to contain a Russian threat there that doesn’t exist.

Jack Rasmus is the author of the forthcoming book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy’, by Clarity Press, 2015, and the prior book’s, ‘Epic Recession: Prelude to Global Depression’, 2012, and ‘Obama’s Economy: Recovery for the Few’, 2012. He has been a local union president, negotiator and representative for several American unions. He blogs at jackrasmus.com.

This piece first appeared at teleSUR.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/30/chinas-bank-waning-usa-hegemony/