After the Berlin
Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two
years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red
army tanks in front of Moscow's White House, a dark era in human history
came to an end.
The
world had descended into what had been a 77-year global war,
incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in
August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by
all the depredations which germinated in the Great War,
its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history
into the world war and cold war which followed
inexorably thereupon.
To
wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The
toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the
murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the
ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and
all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea
and Vietnam.
We have
elaborated more fully on this proposition in "The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow
Wilson's War", but the seminal point cannot be
gainsaid. The end of the cold war meant world peace was
finally at hand, yet 26 years later there is still no peace
because Imperial Washington confounds it.
In
fact, the War Party entrenched in the nation's capital is dedicated
to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee
perpetual war; they ensure endless waste on armaments and the
inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st century high
tech warfare and the terrorist blowback it inherently generates among
those upon which the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.
In short, there was a virulent threat to peace still
lurking on the Potomac after the 77-year war ended. The great general and
president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex”
in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been
abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in
a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.
So
restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday
afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway
busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA,
State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It
constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony
since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.
In
a word, the real threat to peace circa 1991 was that Pax
Americana would not go away quietly in the night.
In
fact, during the past 26 years Imperial Washington has lost all
memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today
it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St.
Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.
Back
then a few months after the slaughter had been unleashed, soldiers
along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas
celebration, singing and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment
they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of
hell.
The
truthful answer is that there was no good reason. The world
had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional
imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into
a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political
calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the
consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.
The
peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time for the same
reasons. Historians can readily name the culprits from 100 years ago, such
as the German general staff's plan for a lightening mobilization
and strike on the western front called the Schlieffen Plan or Britain's
secret commitments to France to guard the North Sea while the latter covered
the Mediterranean.
Since
these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all
that metastisized thereafter, it might do well to name the
institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The
fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces
that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.
Imperial
Washington--------Global Menace
There
is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial
Washington------ not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah.
The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.
What
should have happened is that Bush the elder should have declared "mission
accomplished" and slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $200
billion; demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on
all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and
dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the
US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand;
and organized and led a world disarmement and peace campaign, as did
his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.
Unfortunately,
George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence.
He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who
single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty
arguement between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the gluttonous
Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business.
By
contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some
kind of dumbkopf politician, he well understood that the Great War
had been for naught, and that to insure it never happened again
the nations of the world needed to rid themselves of their huge navies and
standing armies.
To
that end, he achieved the largest global disarmament
agreement ever during the Washington Naval conference of
1921, which halted the construction of new battleships for more than a
decade.
And
while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. So doing, he
gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist candidate for
president and vehement anti-war protestor, who Wilson had thrown in prison
for exercising his first amendment right to speak against US entry
into a pointless European war, had been right all along.
In
short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over, and the folly of Wilson's
1917 plunge into Europe's bloodbath should not be repeated at all hazards.
Not
George H.W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes
of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their
neocon pack of jackals to come to power----even if he has denounced them
in his bumbling old age.
Even
more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the
Persian Gulf in 1991 he opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation
with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the
world today save for forces unleashed by George Bush's petulant quarrel
with Saddam Hussein.
We
will momentarily get to the 45-year old error that holds the Persian Gulf
is an American Lake and that the answer to high old prices and energy security
is the Fifth Fleet. Actually, the answer to high oil prices everywhere and
always is high oil prices-----a truth driven home in spades again two years
ago when the Brent oil price plunged below $35 per barrel.
But first it is well to remember that there was no plausible
threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens
of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA when the cold war ended.
The
Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign
statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and
far-flung Republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian
motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would leave it
with a GDP about the size of the Philadelphia SMSA.
Likewise,
China's GDP was even smaller and more primitive than Russia's. Even as Mr.
Deng was discovering the PBOC printing press that would
enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient
threat to national security was never in the cards. After all, it was 4,000
Wal-Marts in America upon which the prosperity of the new red capitalism
inextricably depended and upon which the rule of the communist
oligarchs in Beijing was ultimately anchored.
No Islamic Or Jihadi Terrorist Threat Circa 1990
In
1991 there was no global Islamic threat or jihadi terrorist
menace at all. What existed under those headings were sundry
fragments and deposits of middle eastern religious, ethnic and
tribal history that were of moment in their immediate region, but no
threat to America whatsoever.
The
Shiite/Sunni divide had co-existed since 671AD, but its episodic eruptions
into battles and wars over the centuries had rarely extended beyond the
region, and certainly had no reason to fester into open conflict in 1991.
Inside
the artificial state of Iraq, which had been drawn on a map by
historically ignorant European diplomats in 1916, for instance,
the Shiite and Sunni got along tolerably well. That's because the nation
was ruled by Saddam Hussein's Baathist brand of secular Arab nationalism.
The
latter championed law and order, state driven economic development and
politically apportioned distribution from the spoils of the
extensive government controlled oil sector. To be sure, Baathist
socialism didn't bring much prosperity to the well-endowed lands of
Mesopotamia, but Hussein did have a Christian foreign minister and no
sympathy for religious extremism or violent pursuit of sectarian causes.
As
it happened, the bloody Shiite/Sunni strife that plagues Iraq today and
functions as a hatchery for angry young jihadi terrorists in their
thousands was unleashed only after Hussein had been driven from
Kuwait and the CIA had instigated an armed uprising in the Shiite heartland
around Basra. That revolt was brutally suppressed by Hussein's
republican guards, but it left an undertow of resentment and revenge
boiling below the surface.
Needless
to say, the younger Bush and his cabal of neocon warmongers could not
leave well enough alone. When they foolishly destroyed Saddam Hussein
and his entire regime in the pursuit of nonexistent WMDs and ties with
al-Qaeda, they literally opened the gates of hell, leaving Iraq as a lawless
failed state where both recent and ancient religious and tribal
animosities are given unlimited violent vent.
Likewise,
the Shiite theocracy ensconced in Tehran was an unfortunate albatross on the
Persian people, but it was no threat to America's safety and security. The very
idea that Tehran is an expansionist power bent on exporting terrorism to the rest
of the world is a giant fiction and tissue of lies invented by the
Washington War Party and its Bibi Netanyahu branch in order to win
political support for their confrontationist policies.
Indeed,
the three decade long demonization of Iran has served one over-arching
purpose. Namely, it enabled both branches of the War Party to conjure
up a fearsome enemy, thereby justifying aggressive policies that call for a
constant state of war and military mobilization.
When
the cold-war officially ended in 1991, the Cheney/neocon cabal feared the
kind of drastic demobilization of the US military-industrial complex
that was warranted by the suddenly more pacific strategic environment. In
response, they developed an anti-Iranian doctrine that was explicitly described
as a way of keeping defense spending at high cold war levels.
And
the narrative they developed to this end is one of the more egregious Big Lies
ever to come out of the beltway. It puts you in mind of the young boy who
killed his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the courts on the
grounds that he was an orphan!
To
wit, during the 1980s the neocons in the Reagan Administration issued their own
fatwa again the Islamic Republic based on its rhetorical hostility to
America. Yet that enmity was grounded in Washington’s 25-year
support for the tyrannical and illegitimate regime of the Shah, and constituted
a founding narrative of the Islamic Republic that was not much different than
America's revolutionary castigation of King George.
That
the Iranians had a case is beyond doubt. The open US archives now
prove that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953
and put the utterly unsuited and megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Shah on the
peacock throne to rule as a puppet in behalf of US security and
oil interests.
During
the subsequent decades the Shah not only massively and baldly
plundered the wealth of the Persian nation; with the help of the CIA and US
military, he also created a brutal secret police force known as the
Savak. The latter made the East German Stasi look civilized by comparison.
All
elements of Iranian society including universities, labor unions, businesses,
civic organizations, peasant farmers and many more were
subjected to intense surveillance by the Savak agents and paid informants. As
one critic described it:
Over the years, Savak became a law unto itself, having legal
authority to arrest, detain, brutally interrogate and torture suspected people
indefinitely. Savak operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as Qezel-Qalaeh
and Evin facilities and many suspected places throughout the country as well.
Many of those activities were carried out without any institutional checks.
Ironically,
among his many grandiose follies, the Shah embarked on a massive civilian
nuclear power campaign in the 1970s, which envisioned literally paving the
Iranian landscape with dozens of nuclear power plants.
He
would use Iran’s surging oil revenues after 1973 to buy all the equipment
required from Western companies—– and also fuel cycle support services
such as uranium enrichment——in order to provide his kingdom with cheap power
for centuries.
At
the time of the Revolution, the first of these plants at Bushehr was nearly
complete, but the whole grandiose project was put on hold amidst the turmoil of
the new regime and the onset of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in
September 1980. As a consequence, a $2 billion deposit languished
at the French nuclear agency that had originally obtained it from the Shah
to fund a ramp-up of its enrichment capacity to supply his
planned battery of reactors.
Indeed,
in this very context the new Iranian regime proved quite dramatically that it
was not hell bent on obtaining nuclear bombs or any other weapons of mass
destruction. In the midst of Iraq's unprovoked invasion of Iran in the
early 1980s the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against biological
and chemical weapons.
Yet
at that very time, Saddam was dropping these horrific weapons on
Iranian battle forces—-some of them barely armed teenage boys—- with
the spotting help of CIA tracking satellites and the concurrence of
Washington. So from the very beginning, the Iranian posture was
wholly contrary to the War Party’s endless blizzard of false charges about
its quest for nukes.
However
benighted and medieval its religious views, the theocracy which rules Iran does
not consist of demented war mongers. In the heat of battle they were
willing to sacrifice their own forces rather than violate their religious
scruples to counter Saddam’s WMDs.
Then in 1983
the new Iranian regime decided to complete the Bushehr power plant and some
additional elements of the Shah’s grand plan. But when they attempted to
reactivate the French enrichment services contract and buy necessary power
plant equipment from the original German suppliers they were stopped cold by
Washington. And when the tried to get their $2 billion deposit back, they were
curtly denied that, too.
To
make a long story short, the entire subsequent history of off again/on again
efforts by the Iranians to purchase dual use equipment and components on
the international market, often from black market sources like Pakistan, was in
response to Washington’s relentless efforts to block its legitimate rights as a
signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to complete some
parts of the Shah’s civilian nuclear project.
Needless
to say, it did not take much effort by the neocon “regime change” fanatics
which inhabited the national security machinery, especially after the 2000
election, to spin every attempt by Iran to purchase even a lowly pump or pipe
fitting as evidence of a secret campaign to get the bomb.
The
exaggerations, lies, distortions and fear-mongering which came out of
this neocon campaign are truly disgusting. Yet they incepted way
back in the early 1990s when George H.W. Bush actually did reach out
to the newly elected government of Hashemi Rafsanjani to bury the hatchet after
it had cooperated in obtaining the release of American prisoners being
held in Lebanon in 1989.
The
latter was self-evidently a pragmatist who did not want conflict with the
United States and the West; and after the devastation of the eight year war
with Iraq was wholly focused on economic reconstruction and even free
market reforms of Iran's faltering economy.
It
is one of the great tragedies of history that the neocons managed to squelch
even George Bush's better instincts with respect to rapprochement with
Tehran.
So the
prisoner release opening was short-lived---especially
after the top post at the CIA was assumed in 1991 by
Robert Gates. He was one of the very worst of the
unreconstructed cold war apparatchiks who looked peace in the eye,
and elected, instead, to pervert John Quincy Adams' wise maxim by
searching the globe for monsters to fabricate.
In
this case the motivation was especially loathsome. Gates had been Bill Casey's
right hand man during the latter's rogue tenure at the CIA
in the Reagan administration. Among the many untoward projects
that Gates shepherded was the Iran-Contra affair that
nearly destroyed his career when it blew-up, and for which he blamed the
Iranian's for its public disclosure.
From
his post as deputy national security director in 1989 and then as CIA head
Gates pulled out all the stops to get even. Almost single-handedly he
killed-off the White House goodwill from the prisoner release, and
launched the blatant myth that Iran was both sponsoring terrorism and
seeking to obtain nuclear weapons.
Indeed,
it was Gates who was the architect of the demonization of Iran that became
a staple of War Party propaganda after the 1991. In time that morphed into
the utterly false claim that Iran is an aggressive would be hegemon that is a
fount of terrorism and is dedicated to the destruction of the state of
Israel, among other treacherous purposes.
That
giant lie was almost single-handedly fashioned by the neocons and Bibi
Netanyahu's coterie of power-hungry henchman after the mid-1990s. Indeed, the
false claim that Iran posses an “existential threat” to Israel is a product of
the pure red meat domestic Israeli politics that have kept Bibi in
power for much of the last two decades.
But
the truth is Iran has only a tiny fraction of Israel's
conventional military capability. And compared to the latter's 200
odd nukes, Iran has never had a nuclear weaponization program after a
small scale research program was ended in 2003.
That
is not merely our opinion. It's been the sober assessment of the
nation's top 17 intelligence agencies in the official National
Intelligence Estimates ever since 2007. And now in conjunction with
a further study in conjunction with the nuclear accord that will
straight-jacket even Iran's civilian program and eliminate most of its enriched
uranium stock piles and spinning capacity, the IAEA has
also concluded the Iran had no secret program after 2003.
On
the political and foreign policy front, Iran is no better or worse than
any of the other major powers in the Middle East. In many ways it is
far less of a threat to regional peace and stability than the military
butchers who now run Egypt on $1.5 billion per year of US aid.
And
it is surely no worse than the corpulent tyrants who squander the massive
oil resources of Saudi Arabia in pursuit of unspeakable opulence and decadence
to the detriment of the 30 million citizens which are not part of
the regime, and who one day may well reach the point of revolt.
When
it comes to the support of terrorism, the Saudis have funded more
jihadists and terrorists throughout the region than Iran ever even imagined.
Myth Of The Shiite Crescent
In
this context, the War Party’s bloviation about Iran’s leadership of the
so-called Shiite Crescent is another component of Imperial Washington's 26-year
long roadblock to peace. Iran wasn't a threat to American security in 1991, and
it has never since then organized a hostile coalition of terrorists that
require Washington's intervention.
Start
with Iran's long-standing support of Bashir Assad's
government in Syria. That alliance that goes back to his father’s era and
is rooted in the historic confessional politics of the Islamic world.
The
Assad regime is Alawite, a branch of the Shiite, and despite the
regime’s brutality, it has been a bulwark of protection for all of
Syria’s minority sects, including Christians, against a majority-Sunni ethnic
cleansing. The latter would surely have occurred if the Saudi
(and Washington) supported rebels, led by the Nusra Front
and ISIS, had succeeded in taking power.
Likewise,
the fact that the Bagdhad government of the broken state of
Iraq——that is, the artificial 1916 concoction of two stripped pants
European diplomats (Messrs. Sykes and Picot of the British and French foreign
offices, respectively)——–is now aligned with Iran is also a result of
confessional politics and geo-economic propinquity.
For
all practical purposes, the Kurds of the northeast have declared their
independence; and the now "liberated" western Sunni lands of the
upper Euphrates have been physically and economically destroyed----
after first being conquered by ISIS with American weapons dropped in
place by the hapless $25 billion Iraqi army minted by Washington’s
departing proconsuls.
Accordingly,
what is left of Iraq is a population that is overwhelmingly Shiite, and
which nurses bitter resentments after two decades of violent conflict with
the Sunni forces. Why in the world, therefore, wouldn’t they ally with
their Shiite neighbor?
Likewise,
the claim that Iran is now trying to annex Yemen is pure claptrap. The ancient
territory of Yemen has been racked by civil war off and on since the early
1970s. And a major driving force of that conflict has been confessional
differences between the Sunni south and the Shiite north.
In
more recent times, Washington’s blatant drone war inside Yemen against alleged
terrorists and its domination and financing of Yemen’s governments
eventually produced the same old outcome. That is, another failed state and an
illegitimate government which fled at the 11th hour, leaving another vast cache
of American arms and equipment behind.
Accordingly,
the Houthis forces now in control of substantial parts of the country are not
some kind of advanced guard sent in by Tehran. They are indigenous partisans
who share a confessional tie with Iran, but which have actually been armed by
the US.
And
the real invaders in this destructive civil war are the Saudis, whose vicious
bombing campaign against civilian populations controlled by the Houthis are
outright war crimes if the word has any meaning at all.
Finally,
there is the fourth element of the purported Iranian axis—–the Hezbollah controlled
Shiite communities of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley. Like
everything else in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a product of historical
European imperialism, Islamic confessional politics and the frequently
misguided and counterproductive security policies of Israel.
In
the first place, Lebanon was not any more a real country than Iraq was when
Sykes and Picot laid their straight-edged rulers on a map. The result was a
stew of religious and ethnic divisions—-Maronite Catholics, Greek
Orthodox, Copts, Druse, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Armenians,
Jews and countless more—– that made the fashioning of a viable state
virtually impossible.
At
length, an alliance of Christians and Sunnis gained control of the country,
leaving the 40% Shiite population disenfranchised and economically
disadvantaged, as well. But it was the inflow of Palestinian refugees in the
1960s and 1970s that eventually upset the balance of sectarian forces and
triggered a civil war that essentially lasted from 1975 until the turn of the
century.
It
also triggered a catastrophically wrong-headed Israeli invasion of southern
Lebanon in 1982, and a subsequent repressive occupation of mostly Shiite
territories for the next eighteen years. The alleged purpose of this invasion
was to chase the PLO and Yassir Arafat out of the enclave in southern Lebanon
that they had established after being driven out of Jordan in 1970.
Eventually Israel
succeeded in sending Arafat packing to north Africa, but in the process created
a militant, Shiite-based resistance movement that did not even exist in 1982,
and which in due course became the strongest single force in
Lebanon’s fractured domestic political arrangements.
After
Israel withdrew in 2000, the then Christian President
of the county made abundantly clear that Hezbollah had become a legitimate
and respected force within the Lebanese polity, not merely some subversive
agent of Tehran:
“For us Lebanese, and I can tell you the majority of Lebanese,
Hezbollah is a national resistance movement. If it wasn’t for them, we couldn’t
have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the
Hezbollah movement.”[
So,
yes, Hezbollah is an integral component of the so-called Shiite Crescent
and its confessional and political alignment with Tehran is entirely plausible.
But that arrangement—-however uncomfortable for Israel—–does not represent
unprovoked Iranian aggression on Israel’s northern border.
Instead,
it’s actually the blowback from the stubborn refusal of Israeli
governments—–especially the rightwing Likud governments of modern times—–to
deal constructively with the Palestinian question.
In
lieu of a two-state solution in the territory of Palestine,
therefore, Israeli policy has produced a chronic state of war with nearly
half the Lebanese population represented by Hezbollah.
The
latter is surely no agency of peaceful governance and has committed its share
of atrocities. But the point at hand is that given the last 35 years
of history and Israeli policy, Hezbollah would exist as a menacing
force on its northern border even if the theocracy didn't exist and the
Shah or his heir was still on the Peacock Throne.
In
short, there is no alliance of terrorism in the Shiite Crescent that threatens
American security. That proposition is simply one of the Big Lies that was
promulgated by the War Party after 1991; and which has
been happily embraced by Imperial Washington since then in order
to keep the military/industrial/security complex alive, and justify its
self-appointed role as policeman of the world.
Washington's Erroneous View That The Persian Gulf Should Be An
American Lake---------The Root Of Sunni Jihaddism
Likewise,
the terrorist threat that has arisen from the Sunni side of the Islamic divide
is largely of Washington's own making; and it is being nurtured by
endless US meddling in the region's politics and by the bombing
and droning campaigns against Washington's self-created enemies.
At
the root of Sunni based terrorism is the long-standing Washington
error that America’s security and economic well-being depends upon keeping an
armada in the Persian Gulf in order to protect the surrounding
oilfields and the flow of tankers through the straits of Hormuz.
That
doctrine has been wrong from the day it was officially enunciated by one of
America’s great economic ignoramuses, Henry Kissinger, at the time of the
original oil crisis in 1973. The 42 years since then have proven in spades
that its doesn’t matter who controls the oilfields, and that the only effective
cure for high oil prices is the free market.
Every
tin pot dictatorship from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to Hugo Chavez
in Venezuela to Saddam Hussein, to the bloody-minded chieftains of
Nigeria, to the purportedly medieval Mullahs and
fanatical Revolutionary Guards of Iran has produced oil—-and all they
could because they desperately needed the revenue.
For
crying out loud, even the barbaric thugs of ISIS milk every possible drop
of petroleum from the tiny, wheezing oilfields scattered around their
backwater domain. So there is no economic case whatsoever for
Imperial Washington’s massive military presence in the middle east, and most especially
for its long-time alliance with the despicable regime of Saudi Arabia.
The
truth is, there is no such thing as an OPEC cartel——virtually every member
produces all they can and cheats whenever possible. The only thing that
resembles production control in the global oil market is the fact that
the Saudi princes treat their oil reserves not much differently than
Exxon.
That
is, they attempt to maximize the present value of their 270 billion barrels of
reserves, but ultimately are no more clairvoyant at calibrating the best oil
price to accomplish that than are the economists at Exxon or the IEA.
The
Saudis over-estimated the staying power of China’s temporarily surging
call on global supply; and under-estimated how rapidly and extensively the $100
per barrel marker reached in early 2008 would trigger
a flow of investment, technology and cheap debt into the US shale patch,
the Canadian tar sands, the tired petroleum provinces of Russia, the deep
offshore of Brazil etc. And that’s to say nothing of solar, wind and all
the other government subsidized alternative source of BTUs.
Way
back when Jimmy Carter was telling us to turn down the thermostats and put on
our cardigan sweaters, those of us on the free market side of the so-called
energy shortage debate said the best cure for high oil prices is high prices.
Now we know.
So
the Fifth Fleet and its overt and covert auxiliaries should never
have been there—–going all the way back to the CIA’s coup against Iranian
democracy in 1953.
But
having turned Iran into an enemy, Imperial Washington was just getting started
when 1990 rolled around. Once again in the name of “oil security” it plunged
the American war machine into the politics and religious fissures of the
Persian Gulf; and did so on account of a local small potatoes
conflict that had no bearing whatsoever on the safety and security of
American citizens.
As
US ambassador Glaspie rightly told Saddam Hussein on the eve of his Kuwait
invasion, America had no dog in that hunt.
Kuwait
wasn’t even a country; it was a bank account sitting on a swath of oilfields
surrounding an ancient trading city that had been abandoned by Ibn Saud in
the early 20th century.
That’s
because he didn’t know what oil was or that it was there; and,
in any event, it had been made a separate protectorate by the British in
1913 for reasons that are lost in the fog of diplomatic history.
Likewise,
Iraq’s contentious dispute with Kuwait had been over its claim
that the Emir of Kuwait was “slant drilling” across his
border into Iraq’s Rumaila field. Yet it was a
wholly elastic boundary of no significance whatsoever.
In
fact, the dispute over the Rumaila field started in 1960 when an Arab
League declaration arbitrarily marked the Iraq–Kuwait border two
miles north of the southernmost tip of the Rumaila field.
And that
newly defined boundary, in turn, had come only 44 years after a
pair of English and French diplomats had carved up their
winnings from the Ottoman Empire’s demise by laying a straight
edged ruler on the map. So doing, they thereby confected the
artificial country of Iraq from the historically independent and hostile
Mesopotamian provinces of the Shiite in the south, the Sunni in the west
and the Kurds in the north.
In
short, it did not matter who controlled the southern tip of the Rumaila
field—–the brutal dictator of Baghdad or the opulent Emir of Kuwait. Not
the price of oil, nor the peace of America nor the security of Europe nor the
future of Asia depended upon it.
The First Gulf War-------A Catastrophic Error
But
once again Bush the Elder got persuaded to take the path of war. This
time it was by Henry
Kissinger’s economically illiterate protégés at the
national security council and his Texas oilman Secretary of State.
They falsely claimed that the will-o-wisp of “oil security” was
at stake, and that 500,000 American troops needed to be planted in the
sands of Arabia.
That was a catastrophic error, and not only because the presence
of crusader boots on the purportedly sacred soil of Arabia offended
the CIA-trained Mujahedeen of Afghanistan, who had become unemployed when
the Soviet Union collapsed.
The 1991 CNN glorified war games in the
Gulf also further empowered another group of unemployed
crusaders. Namely, the neocon national security fanatics who had mislead Ronald
Reagan into a massive military build-up to thwart what they claimed to be an
ascendant Soviet Union bent on nuclear war winning capabilities and global
conquest.
All
things being equal, the sight of Boris Yeltsin, Vodka flask in hand, facing
down the Red Army a few months later should have sent them into the
permanent repudiation and obscurity they so richly deserved. But Dick Cheney
and Paul Wolfowitz managed to extract from Washington’s pyric victory in Kuwait
a whole new lease on life for Imperial Washington.
Right
then and there came the second erroneous predicate. To wit, that “regime
change” among the assorted tyrannies of the middle east was in America’s
national interest.
More
fatally, the neocons now insisted that the Gulf War proved it
could be achieved through a sweeping interventionist menu of
coalition diplomacy, security assistance, arms shipments, covert
action and open military attack and occupation.
What
the neocon doctrine of regime change actually did, of course, was to foster the
Frankenstein that utlimately became ISIS. In fact, the only real
terrorists in the world which threaten normal civilian life in the West are the
rogue offspring of Imperial Washington’s post-1990 machinations in the
middle east.
The
CIA trained and armed Mujahedeen mutated into al-Qaeda not because Bin Laden
suddenly had a religious epiphany that his Washington benefactors were actually
the Great Satan owing to America’s freedom and liberty.
His
murderous crusade was inspired by the Wahhabi fundamentalism loose in
Saudi Arabia. This benighted religious fanaticism became agitated to
a fever pitch by Imperial Washington’s violent plunge
into Persian Gulf political and religious quarrels, the stationing of
troops in Saudi Arabia, and the decade long barrage of sanctions,
embargoes, no fly zones, covert actions and open hostility against the
Sunni regime in Bagdad after 1991.
Yes, Bin
Laden would have amputated Saddam’s secularist head if Washington
hadn’t done it first, but that’s just the point. The attempt at regime change
in March 2003 was one of the most foolish acts of state in American history.
The
younger Bush’s neocon advisers had no clue about the sectarian animosities and
historical grievances that Hussein had bottled-up by parsing the oil loot
and wielding the sword under the banner of Baathist nationalism. But Shock and
Awe blew the lid and the de-baathification campaign unleashed the furies.
Indeed,
no sooner had George Bush pranced around on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln
declaring “mission accomplished” than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a CIA recruit to
the Afghan war a decade earlier and small-time specialist in hostage-taking and
poisons, fled his no count redoubt in Kurdistan to emerge as a flamboyant
agitator in the now disposed Sunni heartland.
The
founder of ISIS succeeded in Fallujah and
Anbar province just like the long list
of other terrorist leaders Washington claims to have
exterminated. That is, Zarqawi gained his following and notoriety
among the region’s population of deprived, brutalized and humiliated
young men by dint of being more brutal than their occupiers.
Indeed,
even as Washington was crowing about the demise of Zarqawi, the remnants of the
Baathist regime and the hundreds of thousands of demobilized Republican Guards
were coalescing into al-Qaeda in Iraq, and their future leaders were
being incubated in a monstrous nearby detention center called Camp
Bucca that contained more than 26,000 prisoners.
As one
former US Army officer, Mitchell Gray, later described it,
You never see hatred like you saw on the faces of these
detainees,” Gray remembers of his 2008 tour. “When I say they hated us, I mean
they looked like they would have killed us in a heartbeat if given the chance.
I turned to the warrant officer I was with and I said, ‘If they could, they
would rip our heads off and drink our blood.’ ”
What Gray didn’t know — but might have expected — was that he
was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future
ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense
records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS,
including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.
And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists,
it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation
into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.
Early in Bucca’s existence, the most extreme inmates were
congregated in Compound 6. There were not enough Americans guards to safely
enter the compound — and, in any event, the guards didn’t speak Arabic. So the
detainees were left alone to preach to one another and share deadly vocational
advice.
…….Bucca also housed Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam
Hussein’s air-defense force. Bakr was no religious zealot. He was just a guy
who lost his job when the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi
military and instituted de-Baathification, a policy of banning Saddam’s past
supporters from government work.
According to documents recently obtained by German newspaper Der
Spiegel, Bakr was the real mastermind behind ISIS’s organizational structure
and also mapped out the strategies that fueled its early successes. Bakr, who
died in fighting in 2014, was incarcerated at Bucca from 2006-’08, along with a
dozen or more of ISIS’s top lieutenants.
The
point is, regime change and nation building can never be
accomplished by the lethal violence of 21st century armed forces; and
they were an especially preposterous assignment in the context of
a land rent with 13 century-old religious fissures and animosities.
In
fact, the wobbly, synthetic state of Iraq was doomed the minute Cheney and
his bloody gang decided to liberate it from the brutal, but serviceable
and secular tyranny of Saddam’s Baathist regime. That’s because the process of
elections and majority rule necessarily imposed by Washington was guaranteed to
elect a government beholden to the Shiite majority.
After decades
of mistreatment and Saddam’s brutal suppression of their 1991 uprising,
did the latter have revenge on their minds and in their communal
DNA? Did the Kurds have dreams of an independent Kurdistan that had
been denied their 30 million strong tribe way back at Versailles and
ever since?
Yes, they did. So the $25 billion spent on training and
equipping the putative armed forces of post-liberation Iraq was bound to
end up in the hands of sectarian militias, not a national army.
In
fact, when the Shiite commanders fled Sunni-dominated Mosul in June 2014
they transformed the ISIS uprising against the government in
Baghdad into a vicious fledgling state in one fell swoop. It
wasn’t by beheadings and fiery jihadist sermons that it
quickly enslaved dozens of towns and several million people in
western Iraq and the Euphrates Valley of Syria.
ISIS Is Washington's Frankenstein
Its
instruments of terror and occupation were the best weapons that the American
taxpayers could buy. That included 2,300 Humvees and tens of thousands of
automatic weapons, as well as vast stores of ammunition, trucks, rockets,
artillery pieces and even tanks and helicopters.
And
that wasn’t the half of it. The newly proclaimed Islamic State also filled the
power vacuum in Syria created by its so-called civil war. But in
truth that was another exercise in Washington inspired and financed regime
change undertaken in connivance with Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
The
latter were surely not interested in expelling the tyranny next
door; they are the living embodiment of it.
Instead, the rebellion was about removing Iran’s Alawite/Shiite
ally from power in Damascus and laying gas pipelines to Europe across the
upper Euphrates Valley.
In
any event, ISIS soon had troves of additional American weapons. Some of them
were supplied to Sunni radicals by way of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. More came up
the so-called “ratline” from Gaddafi’s former arsenals in Benghazi
through Turkey. And still more came through Jordan from the “moderate” opposition
trained there by the CIA, which more often than not sold them or defected to
the other side.
So
that the Islamic State was Washington’s Frankenstein
monster became evident from the moment it rushed upon the scene 18
months ago. But even then the Washington war party could not resist adding fuel
to the fire, whooping up another round of Islamophobia among the American
public and forcing the Obama White House into a futile bombing campaign for the
third time in a quarter century.
But if bombing
really worked, the Islamic State would be sand and gravel by now. Indeed, as
shown by the map below, it is really not much more than that anyway.
The
dusty, broken, impoverished towns and villages along the margins of the
Euphrates River and in the bombed out precincts of Anbar province do not
attract thousands of wannabe jihadists from the failed states of the middle
east and the alienated Muslim townships of Europe because the caliphate
offers prosperity, salvation or any future at all.
What recruits
them is outrage at the bombs and drones being dropped on Sunni communities
by the US air force; and by the cruise missiles launched from the bowels
of the Mediterranean which rip apart homes, shops, offices and mosques
containing as many innocent civilians as ISIS terrorists.
The
truth is, the Islamic State was destined for a short half-life anyway. It was
contained by the Kurds in the north and east and by Turkey with NATO’s
second largest army and air force in the northwest. And it was surrounded by
the Shiite crescent in the populated, economically viable regions of lower
Syria and Iraq.
So
absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and
demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been
nowhere for the murderous fanatics who pitched a makeshift capital in
Raqqa to go. They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and
public acquiesce in their horrific rule in due course.
But
with the US Air Force functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s
anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy
in Syria, the gates of hell have been opened wide. What has been puked out is
not an organized war on Western civilization as Hollande so hysterically
proclaimed in response to the mayhem in Paris.
It was just blowback carried out by
that infinitesimally small salient of mentally deformed young men who
can be persuaded to strap on a suicide belt.
Needless
to say, bombing wont stop them; it will just make more of them.
Ironically,
what can stop them is the Assad government and the ground forces of
its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. Its time to
let them settle an ancient quarrel that has never been any of America’s
business anyway.
But
Imperial Washington is so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity
that it can not see the obvious.
And
that is why a quarter century after the cold war ended peace
still hasn’t been given a chance and the reason that horrific events like
November's barbarism in Paris still keep happening.
Even
the so-called "inspired" terrorists like the pair who attacked San
Bernardino emerge episodically because the terror that the American
military visits upon Muslim lands is actually what inspires
them. After all, whatever the Koran has to say about purging the infidel,
it inspired no attacks on American soil until Imperial Washington went
into the regime change and military intervention business in the middle
east.
Another False Demon-----Putin's Russia
At
the end of the day there now exists a huge irony. The only force that
can effectively contain and eventually eliminate the Islamic State is the
so-called Shiite Crescent-----------the alliance of Iran, Baghdad, Assad and
Hezbollah. But since they are allied with Putin's Russia, still another
unnecessary barrier to peace on earth comes into play.
The
fact is, there is no basis whatsoever for Imperial Washington's relentless
campaign against Putin, and Washington-NATO's blatant intervention in
Ukraine.
Contrary
to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington
and the mainstream media, America has no interest in the current spat
between Putin and the coup that unconstitutionally took over Kiev in
February 2014.
For
several centuries the Crimea has been Russian; for even longer, the Ukraine has
been a cauldron of ethnic and tribal conflict, rarely an organized, independent
state, and always a meandering set of borders looking for a redrawn map.
Like
everything reviewed above, the source of the current calamity-howling
about Russia is the Warfare State–that is, the existence of vast machinery of
military, diplomatic and economic maneuver that is ever on the prowl for
missions and mandates and that can mobilize a massive propaganda campaign on
the slightest excitement.
The
post-1991 absurdity of bolstering NATO and extending it into eastern Europe, rather
than liquidating it after attaining “mission accomplished”, is just another
manifestation of its baleful impact. In truth, the expansion of NATO is one of
the underlying causes of America’s needless tension with Russia and Putin’s
paranoia about his borders and neighbors. Indeed, what juvenile minds actually
determined that America needs a military alliance with Slovenia, Slovakia,
Bulgaria and Romania, and now Montenegro!
So
the resounding clatter for action against Russia emanating from Washington and
its house-trained media is not even a semi-rational response to the facts at
hand; its just another destructive spasm of the nation’s Warfare State
and its beltway machinery of diplomatic meddling, economic warfare
and military intervention.
Memo
To Obama: It’s Their Red Line
Not
only does Washington’s relentless meddling in the current Russian-
Ukrainian food fight have nothing to do with the safety and security of the
American people, it also betrays woeful disregard for the elementary facts
of that region’s turbulent and often bloody history.
In
fact, the allegedly “occupied” territory of Crimea was actually annexed by
Catherine the Great in 1783, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of
the Russian Czars for a warm-water port. Over the ages Sevastopol
then emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean
peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the Czars
and then the commissars.
For
the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia—a span that exceeds
the 166 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar
thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing,
incidentally, the United States Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego.
While
no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most
definitely not Ukrainian and Polish rifles, artillery and blood which famously
annihilated The Charge Of The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in
1854; they were Russians defending the homeland from Turks, Europeans and
Brits.
And
the portrait of the Russian “hero” hanging in Putin’s office is
that of Czar Nicholas I—whose brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian
Empire to its historical zenith, and who was revered in Russian
hagiography as the defender of Crimea, even as he lost the 1850s war to the
Ottomans and Europeans.
At
the end of the day, it’s their Red Line. When the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt
made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945 he did at least know
that he was in Soviet Russia.
Maneuvering
to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for
succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev
allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in
Kiev in honor of the decision by their ancestors 300 years earlier to accept
the inevitable and become a vassal of Russia.
Self-evidently,
during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the
“captive nation” of the Ukraine—with or without the Crimean appendage
bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990’s when
a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic
redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.
In
short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848 and in the 166-year
interval since then, our national security has depended not one wit
on the status of the Russian-speaking Crimea.
That the
local population has now chosen fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over
the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev is their business, not ours.
The
real threat to peace is not Putin, but the screeching sanctimony and
mindless meddling of Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Obama should have
sent them back to geography class long ago-------and before they
could draw anymore new Red Lines.
The
one in the Ukraine has been morphing for centuries among
the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates, Patriarchs and pretenders
of a small region that is none of our damn business.
The
current Ukrainian policy farce emanating from Washington is not only
a reminder that the military-industrial-beltway complex is
still alive and well, but also demonstrates why the forces of crony
capitalism and money politics which sustain it are so lamentable. The fact is,
the modern Warfare State has been the incubator of American imperialism
since the Cold War, and is now proving itself utterly invulnerable to fiscal
containment, even in the face of a $19 trillion national debt.
So
101 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is
still no peace on earth. And the long suffering American taxpayers, who foot
the massive bills generated by the War Party's demented and destructive
policies, have no clue that Imperial Washington is the principal reason.