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NATO’s Dirty Little Secret Is Out

Posted by M. C. on December 5, 2019

The first question that U.S. leaders should ask about any alliance commitment is whether the ally is even worth risking a sacrifice of American treasure and lives. Does that country have great strategic or economic significance to the United States? Risking war to defend another country ought to be no casual matter.

NATO is a CIA “asset”. One of it’s tools. I don’t see US leaving it anytime soon.

Anyone powerful enough to get US out of NATO and is close to doing it may end up suicided.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/nato%E2%80%99s-dirty-little-secret-out-102017

by Ted Galen Carpenter

Pro-NATO politicians and pundits never tire of citing polls and studies showing that a majority of Americans continue to support the Alliance. Frequently, that argument is presented as part of the larger case that President Trump’s periodic expressions of skepticism about NATO’s relevance are out-of-touch with the views of the American public. However, the pro-NATO case is built on a fundamental deception.

Few (if any) surveys of U.S. public opinion about NATO even hint about the extent of the risks Americans incur because of Washington’s obligations under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which commits the signatories to consider an attack on any member as an attack on all. A typical poll question will ask respondents whether the United States should defend country X, if Russia attacks that country.  A more honest question would be whether the United States should defend country X from a Russian attack, even if doing so might result in a nuclear war with Russia that could kill millions of Americans.

Granted, such an outcome is a worst-case scenario, but Washington’s Article 5 obligations bring it into play. The escalation risk is especially relevant with respect to defending Estonia and the other Baltic republics. A 2016 RAND Corporation study concluded that it would be nearly impossible for NATO to defend its Baltic members against a full-scale Russian invasion for more than a few days without an extensive upgrade of the Alliance’s existing force deployment. Even after such an upgrade, the outcome of a struggle waged solely with conventional weapons would be uncertain. Escalation to the nuclear level would remain an ever-present danger…

In other words, even with wording designed to elicit positive responses—and no disclosure of a potentially dire nuclear risk arising from America’s military obligation to a NATO ally—the survey showed no clear public mandate for defending that ally. Hannah concludes: “It’s not just President Donald Trump who is skeptical of the North Atlantic alliance, in other words. It’s the American people. To the extent that U.S. citizens think about NATO at all, they disagree about whether honoring its commitments would be worth the sacrifice.” He’s correct, and if they were explicitly told about the nuclear risk, it is highly probable that anti-NATO sentiment would surge…

Estonia and the other NATO members added since the late 1990s don’t even come close to meeting that standard…

Washington’s implicit assumption is that Russia would not dare challenge the Article 5 commitment. Foreign policy should never be based on a bluff, yet for the United States, the obligation to regard an attack on any NATO member (no matter how insignificant) as an attack on America itself potentially puts the very existence of the republic at risk. Smart great powers don’t put themselves in such a position…

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The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity : The Secret War in Africa

Posted by M. C. on November 29, 2019

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2019/november/29/the-secret-war-in-africa/

Written by Steve Brown

The Warsaw Pact may no longer exist, but by contrast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is expanding its perceived role – the enforcement of western interest – especially in resource-rich Africa.  NATO’s expansion in Africa is intended to assert western corporate influence, where Macron’s France apparently wishes to usurp Germany as the major influential European power.

But corporate interest is not the only driver for NATO’s war in Africa since the Russian Federation has significant ambitions there too. Russian non-governmental private military contractors or ‘Chastnaya Voennaya Kompaniya’ include:

– Centre R-Redut
– Antiterror-Orel
– Shchit (Shield)
– PMC Wagner
– SlavCorps
– ATK Group
– Patriot
– MAR

Cossacks Group

…where PMC Wagner and Shield are particularly active in Africa.

The list above may seem impressive but does not compare with the list of western private military contractors operating in the Middle East and Afghanistan, which have existed far longer, are larger and better funded, and in many instances directly employed by the states they serve — including and especially the United States. By contrast, these Russian contractors operate on a small scale, are flexible, and employ a wide range of nationalities and skills.

Russian Chastnaya Voennaya Kompaniya (Private Military Contractors, or PMC) are correctly called ‘mercenaries’ because they may not, by law, act on behalf of the Russian Federation’s government. It is clear too that these PMC groups are mainly employed by corporate interests where those corporate interests may conflict with Western corporate interests. *

Regardless, the Neoliberal Clinton-backed magazine Foreign Policy has already pronounced the demise of PMC Wagner and related Russian military contractor groups in Hauer’s hit piece The Rise and Fall of a Russian Mercenary Army.

Foreign Policy’s article appeared on October 6th, 2019, precisely the same day that Mozambique announced Exxon’s success in obtaining a liquid natural gas contract in Cabo Del Gado province worth $30Bn USD. No doubt Foreign Policy’s inspiration to publish Hauer’s troubled view of private Russian military contractors was based on the outcome of Exxon’s battle with Russian gas giant Gazprom for the contract.

And trouble it is. Mozambique nearly crushed mining giant Rio Tinto with its Riversdale coal scandal when Mozambique refused to allow coal transport down the Zambezi. And Rio Tinto is not the only corporate giant to come to grief in Mozambique. Mozambique has a major IMF debt problem too with widespread poverty and insurrection in parts of the country, where one of the most troubled regions is Cabo del Gado — source of Mozambique’s liquified natural gas.

Back when Gazprom was still barely in the running for the Cabo del Gado liquid natural gas contract, Mozambique’s government decided that drug-fueled takfiri terrorists roaming the province needed to go, and opted for the lowest-bid security contractor to clean up there.

The Mozambique security service bid resulted in the hire of PMC Wagner which quickly found their police action mired in exceedingly difficult terrain, opposed by anarcho-psychotics far more dangerous and characteristic of drug-crazed homicidal maniacs than of ISIL Jihadi terrorists.

Then by November of this year Wagner’s Cabo del Gado contract turned to tragedy when the Moscow Times reported the death of seven Russian mercenaries there. According to one source PMC Wagner is no longer operating in the province.

Russian Chastnaya Voennaya Kompaniya contractors have been active in the Central African Republic (CAR) as well, alleged to be protecting diamond mines there while negotiating with rebels in control of the Ndassima gold fields.

Three Russian filmmakers were tragically killed near there while investigating Wagner’s activities in the CAR at the time, provoking a western conspiracy theory that the reporters were killed based on their investigatory work. The truth however is far more mundane, that the reporters crossed a bridge too far in rebel territory without adequate armed protection.

One further but unconfirmed report claims that a Russian PMC contractor is missing in action in Somalia while two hundred PMC contractors have recently arrived in Libya. Meanwhile more than 1,100 Wagner Group contractors are operating in both Cyrenaica and Tripolitania.  That is pursuant to Wagner and related PMC groups expanding in Libya, Cameroon, Uganda, Angola, and the Sahel… all to the great consternation of the US military of course.

Whether or not the above reports are exaggerated is irrelevant. The overall picture is certain to be misunderstood in the west. Russia’s intent in Africa – whatever it may be – is certainly as misunderstood now as it was leading up to the Suez crisis of 1956. That crisis led to a dangerous and pre-emptive invasion and occupation of Nasser’s Egypt hatched in a crackpot conspiracy involving Israel, France, and Britain.

The potential parallel to Suez in 1956 re NATO versus Russia in Africa today is not altogether preposterous. Because there is another side to the coin in what appears to be a nascent Russian Federation attempt at taming Africa for its own — and perhaps China’s! — corporate interests, being the toxic effect of AFRICOM/ NATO and its abject mismanagement of resources and subversion of the African right to progressive state self-determination.

That’s because the United States and NATO operate the largest military infrastructure in Africa with thirty-four bases (some secret) and thirty new US military or NATO construction projects underway in Africa spanning four countries.

The US military has more sites in Niger – five, including Niamey, Ouallam, Arlit, Maradi, and a secret base in Dirkou – than all other countries combined in Western Africa.

Chebelley drone base in Djibouti is the largest drone base in the world where the US can strike any target in the Sahel or for that matter Iran. And AFRICOM is building a larger base, Niger Air Base 201 in Agadez, capable of striking Algeria or any location in the Sahel region while the US operates a secret drone base in Tunisia (Sidi Ahmed) now opposed by president Qays Sayed (Kais Saied).

There are five more bases in Somalia including secret bases supporting AFRICOM’s ‘Lightning Brigade’ also known as the Danab Advanced Infantry Brigade. Now guess who is training the Danab? Private US military contractors of course, Bancroft Global Development.

Kenya sports four more US military bases including Manda Bay and Mombasa, where the Manda bay base has consistently launched US drone strikes against Somalia, Yemen, and Iraq. There are three more secret US/NATO base locations located along the Libyan coast to carry out drone strikes as far-ranging as Pakistan.

Then there is Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti where approximately 4,000 US and NATO personnel are stationed. Camp Lemonnier is claimed to be the ‘only permanent US base in Africa’ – perhaps because so many new US/NATO bases are under construction while many of the rest are secret or simply addressed by some arcane acronym known only to the military.

Cameroon, Mali, and Chad also host what the US military calls ‘contingency locations’ no doubt leveraged by NATO in its rather lame attempt to control the Sahel. They include Garoua drone base, Douala, and Salak …  bases which train private military contractors and track US drone strikes versus the immortal and indestructible Boko Haram terrorists, of course.

Another secret US base in Chad is the historic site of Faya Largeau. The present operational status of Faya Largeau is of course officially unknown. Gabon’s Libreville location exists to allow US military or NATO quick access for a rapid influx of US forces analogous to the base in Dakar, Senegal, which serves the same strategic purpose.

The list of NATO and US bases in Africa (whether secret or not) might continue on, however hopefully the point has been made that the mighty US/NATO presence in Africa extends far beyond the imagination of even the most devoted follower of military affairs.

That such a behemoth of an operation as represented by the US/NATO military presence in Africa could be seriously undermined by an influx of a small number of lightly armed and under-resourced Russian military contractors is not only laughable, but patently absurd.

To the contrary, what every citizen of the world should truly be concerned about is the bloated, dangerous, deadly, expensive, and destructive influence of NATO and the US military and its Surveillance State in Africa. That’s because the US military is essentially fighting itself – like Shiva the destroyer – the creator of terror.

Algeria, now a progressive forward-looking democracy with a presidential election eminent coming December 12th, 2019, is certainly aware of that. Algeria has deep understanding of western Neo-colonialism and its rule, and has avoided the western-inspired morass of IMF debt.

Algeria presently exports more oil to the rest of the world than Iran. Algeria has a stable economy and low inflation compared to other African nation, and potentially faces a bright future devoid of western meddling. Hence Algeria’s concern that it is surrounded on all sides by the tools of the US hegemon and its interventionism.

In a sense, Algeria provides an example to the rest of Northern Africa where Algeria is pursuing its right to self-determination. Most other nations in Africa cannot because they have already been subverted by the wars-for-resources and profit so favoured by corporate Washington.

The counter to this is of course Russia regardless of how feeble its efforts may seem, and how misunderstood Russia’s goals in Africa may be. But the Russian counter to US/NATO destruction and corruption in Africa may not be as straightforward as the reader imagines.

That’s because our source informs us that Russia is paving the way for China in Africa – a supposition that makes perfect sense. China is not now and has never been a Neo-colonial power. China is only too aware of the destruction wrought by loss of the people’s right to self-determination when China itself was colonized by western interests.

That Russia and China should cooperate in Africa is just as inevitable as Washington’s inability to maintain its self-bloated and expanding militarist behemoth in Africa in perpetuity.

This is the realization to be proved by time and by Washington’s continuing failure to comprehend the grievous and tragic mistakes of its hegemonic past – mistakes that the US is now only building on, exemplified only in part by the rabid anti-Russia hysteria now consuming it. And for the future of Africa… we can only hope.

*The Battle for Conoco in Syria is one specific instance

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Is Macron Right? Is NATO, 70, Brain Dead? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on November 27, 2019

Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons?  Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?

Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations even closer to Russia.

NATO is a CIA tool. As long as that remains the case NATO is not going anywhere soon.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/11/patrick-j-buchanan/is-macron-right-is-nato-70-brain-dead/

By

A week from now, the 29 member states of “the most successful alliance in history” will meet to celebrate its 70th anniversary. Yet all is not well within NATO.

Instead of a “summit,” the gathering, on the outskirts of London, has been cut to two days. Why the shortened agenda?

Among the reasons, apprehension that President Donald Trump might use the occasion to disrupt alliance comity by again berating the Europeans for freeloading on the U.S. defense budget.

French President Emanuel Macron, on the 100th anniversary of the World War I Armistice, described NATO as having suffered “brain death.” Macron now openly questions the U.S. commitment to fight for Europe and is talking about a “true European Army” with France’s nuclear deterrent able to “defend Europe alone.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose nation spends 1.4% of GDP on defense and has relied on the U.S. and NATO to keep Russia at bay since the Cold War began, is said to be enraged at the “disruptive politics” of the French president.

Also, early in December, Britain holds national elections. While the Labour Party remains committed to NATO, its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is no Clement Attlee, who took Britain into NATO at its birth in 1949.

Corbyn has questioned NATO’s continued relevance in the post-Cold War era. A potential backer of a new Labour government, Nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish National Party, is demanding the closing of Britain’s Trident submarine base in Scotland as a precondition of her party’s support for Labour in Parliament.

Also present in London will be NATO ally Turkey’s President Recep Erdogan.

Following the 2016 coup attempt, Erdogan has purged scores of thousands from his army and regime, jailed more journalists than any other authoritarian, purchased Vladimir Putin’s S-400 missile system as Turkey’s air defense, and ordered the U.S. forces out of his way as he invaded northern Syria, killing Kurdish fighters who did the bleeding and dying in the U.S.-led campaign to crush the ISIS caliphate.

During the Cold War, NATO enjoyed the widespread support of Americans and Europeans, and understandably so. The USSR had 20 divisions in Germany, surrounded West Berlin, and occupied the east bank of the Elbe, within striking distance of the Rhine.

But that Cold War is long over. Berlin is the united free capital of Germany. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved. Its member states have all joined NATO. The Soviet Union split apart into 15 nations. Communist Yugoslavia splintered into seven nations.

As a fighting faith, communism is dead in Europe. Why then are we Americans still over there?

Since the Cold War, we have doubled the size of NATO. We have brought in the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania but not Finland or Sweden. We have committed ourselves to fight for Slovenia, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro but not Serbia, Bosnia or North Macedonia.

Romania and Bulgaria are NATO allies but not Moldova or Belarus.

George W. Bush kept us out of the 2008 Russia-Georgia clash over South Ossetia and Abkhazia. And Barack Obama refused to send lethal aid to help Ukraine retrieve Crimea, Luhansk or Donetsk, though Sen. John McCain wanted the United States to jump into both fights.

In the House Intel Committee’s impeachment hearings, foreign service officers spoke of “Russian aggression” against our Ukrainian “ally” and our “national security” being in peril in this fight.

But when did Ukraine become an ally of the United States whose territorial wars we must sustain with military aid if not military intervention?

When did Kyiv’s control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?

Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the Cold War.

And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.

Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons?

Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?

In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on Germany. Would Justin Trudeau’s Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin’s Russia — for Estonia or Latvia?

Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations even closer to Russia.

One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.

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When Did Ukraine Become a ‘Critical Ally’? – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on November 15, 2019

“One would think, listening to this,” writes Barbara Boland, the American Conservative columnist, “that the U.S. had always provided arms to Ukraine, and that Ukraine has relied on this aid for years. But this is untrue and the Washington blob knows this.”

Indeed, Ukraine has never been a NATO ally or a “critical ally.”

https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2019/11/14/when-did-ukraine-become-a-critical-ally/

by

On hearing the State Department’s George Kent and William Taylor describe President Donald Trump’s withholding of military aid to Ukraine, The New York Times summarized and solemnly endorsed their testimony:

“What clearly concerned both witnesses wasn’t simply the abuse of power by the President, but the harm it inflicted on Ukraine, a critical ally, under constant assault by Russian forces.”

“’Even as we sit here today, the Russians are attacking Ukrainian soldiers in their own country, and have been for four years,’ Taylor said. ‘I saw this on the front line last week; the day I was there a Ukrainian soldier was killed and four more wounded.’”

Kent compared Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s intervention on the side of the Donbass secessionists to “our own Minutemen in 1776.”

“More than 13,000 Ukrainians have died on Ukrainian soil defending their territorial integrity and sovereignty from Russian aggression. … American support in Ukraine’s own de facto war of independence has been critical.”

Kent went on:

“The American colonies may not have prevailed against British imperial might without help from transatlantic friends after 1776. In an echo of Lafayette’s organized assistance to General George Washington’s army and Admiral John Paul Jones’ navy, Congress has generously appropriated over $1.5 billion over the past five years in desperately needed train and equip security assistance to Ukraine…”

“Similar to von Steuben training colonials at Valley Forge, U.S. and NATO allied trainers develop the skills of Ukrainian units at Yavoriv near the Polish border, and elsewhere. They help rewrite military education for Ukraine’s next generation, as von Steuben did for America’s first.”

“One would think, listening to this,” writes Barbara Boland, the American Conservative columnist, “that the U.S. had always provided arms to Ukraine, and that Ukraine has relied on this aid for years. But this is untrue and the Washington blob knows this.”

Indeed, Ukraine has never been a NATO ally or a “critical ally.”

Three decades ago, George H.W. Bush implored Ukraine not to set out on a course of “suicidal nationalism” by declaring independence from the Russian Federation. Despite constant pressure from Sen. John McCain and our neocons to bring Ukraine into NATO, wiser heads on both sides of the Atlantic rejected the idea.

Why? Because the “territorial integrity and sovereignty” of Ukraine is not now and has never been a vital interest of ours that would justify a U.S. war with a nuclear-armed Russia…

Civil war broke out. We backed the new regime. Russia backed the rebels. And five years later, the war goes on. Why is this our fight?

During the Obama years, major lethal aid was denied to Ukraine.

The White House reasoned that arming Ukraine would lead to an escalation of the war in the east, greater Russian intervention, defeat for Kyiv, and calls for the U.S. to intervene militarily, risking a war with Russia.

Not until Trump became president did lethal aid begin flowing to Ukraine, including Javelin anti-tank missiles.

So where are we?

Despite dramatic depictions of Ukraine as our embattled ally, Ukraine has never been an ally. We are not now nor have we ever been obligated to fight for its sovereignty or territorial integrity. Efforts to bring Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia into NATO have been repeatedly rebuffed in the United States and by our European NATO allies.

Kent and Taylor are honorable men. But they are career diplomats of the Department of State and veteran advocates of a foreign policy that sees Russia as an enduring aggressor and Ukraine as a fighting ally entitled to U.S. military assistance.

They have, in the old phrase, gone native. They champion the policies of yesterday and the embattled countries to which they are accredited and to whose causes they have become converted.

But Trump was elected to overturn the interventionist policies America has pursued since the century began. He was elected to end Cold War II with Russia, to reach a modus vivendi as Reagan did, and to extricate us from the endless wars into which Presidents Bush and Obama plunged the nation.

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Mike Mazurski – Ukrainian contribution to American cinema

 

 

 

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RAY McGOVERN: Ukraine For Dummies – Consortiumnews

Posted by M. C. on November 15, 2019

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/14/ray-mcgovern-ukraine-for-dummies/

By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News

At Wednesday’s debut of the impeachment hearings there was one issue upon which both sides of the aisle seemed to agree, and it was a comic-book caricature of reality.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff led off the proceedings with this: “In 2014, Russia invaded a United States ally, Ukraine, to reverse that nation’s embrace of the West, and to fulfill Vladimir Putin’s desire to rebuild a Russian empire…”

Five years ago, when Ukraine first came into the news, those Americans who thought Ukraine was an island in the Pacific can perhaps be forgiven. That members of the House Intelligence Committee don’t know — or pretend not to know — more accurate information about Ukraine is a scandal, and a consequential one.

As Professor Stephen Cohen has warned, if the impeachment process does not deal in objective fact, already high tensions with Russia are likely to become even more dangerous.

So here is a kind of primer for those who might be interested in some Ukraine history:

  • Late 1700s: Catherine the Great consolidated her rule; established Russia’s first and only warm-water naval base in Crimea.
  • In 1919, after the Bolshevik Revolution, Moscow defeated resistance in Ukraine and the country becomes one of 15 Republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
  • In 1954, after Stalin’s death the year before, Nikita Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, assumed power. Pandering to Ukrainian supporters, he unilaterally decreed that henceforth Crimea would be part of the Ukrainian SSR, not the Russian SSR. Since all 15 Republics of the USSR were under tight rule from Moscow, the switch was a distinction without much of a difference — until later, when the USSR fell apart..
  • Nov. 1989: Berlin wall down.
  • Dec. 2-3, 1989: President George H. W. Bush invites Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to summit talks in Malta; reassures him “the U.S. will not take advantage” of Soviet troubles in Eastern Europe. Bush had already been pushing the idea of a Europe whole and free, from Portugal to Vladivostok.

A Consequential Quid Pro Quo

  • Feb. 7-10, 1990: Secretary of State James Baker negotiates a quid pro quo; Soviet acceptance of the bitter pill of a reunited Germany (inside NATO), in return for an oral U.S. promise not to enlarge NATO “one inch more” to the East.
  • Dec. 1991: the USSR falls apart. Suddenly it does matter that Khrushchev gave Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR; Moscow and Kyiv work out long-term arrangements for the Soviet navy to use the naval base at Sevastopol.
  • The quid pro quo began to unravel in October 1996 during the last weeks of President Bill Clinton’s campaign when he said he would welcome Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into NATO — the earlier promise to Moscow notwithstanding. Former U.S. Ambassador to the USSR Jack Matlock, who took part in both the Bush-Gorbachev early-December 1989 summit in Malta and the Baker-Gorbachev discussions in early February 1990, has said, “The language used was absolute, including no ‘taking advantage’ by the U.S. … I don’t see how anybody could view the subsequent expansion of NATO as anything but ‘taking advantage,’ particularly since, by then, Russia was hardly a credible threat.” (From 16 members in 1990, NATO has grown to 29 member states — the additional 13 all lie east of Germany.)
  • Feb. 1, 2008: Amid rumors of NATO planning to offer membership to Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warns U.S. Ambassador William Burns that “Nyet Means Nyet.” Russia will react strongly to any move to bring Ukraine or Georgia into NATO. Thanks to WikiLeaks, we have Burns’s original cable from embassy in Moscow.
  • April 3, 2008: Included in Final Declaration from NATO summit in Bucharest: “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”
  • Early September 2013: Putin helps Obama resist neocon demands to do “shock and awe” on Syria; Russians persuade President Bashar al-Assad to give up Syrian army chemical weapons for destruction on a U.S. ship outfitted for chemical weapons destruction. Neocons are outraged over failing to mousetrap Obama into attacking Syria.

Meanwhile in Ukraine

  • Dec. 2013: In a speech to the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland says: “The United States has supported Ukraine’s European aspirations. … We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.”
  • Feb. 4, 2014: Amid rioting on the Maidan in Kiev, YouTube carries Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland’s last minute instructions to U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt regarding the U.S. pick for new Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (aka “Yats”) and other plans for the imminent coup d’etat in Kiev. When Pyatt expresses concern about EU misgivings about mounting a coup, Nuland says “Fuck the EU.” She then apologizes to the EU a day or two later — for the profanity, not for the coup. She also says that Vice President Joe Biden will help “glue this thing together”, meaning the coup.
  • Feb. 22, 2014: Coup d’etat in Kyiv; appropriately labeled “the most blatant coup in history” by George Friedman, then President of the widely respected think-tank STRATFOR.
  • Feb. 23, 2014: The date that NATO, Western diplomats, and the corporate media have chosen – disingenuously – as the beginning of recent European history, with silence about the coup orchestrated in Kyiv the day before. President Vladimir Putin returns to Moscow from the winter olympics in Sochi; confers with advisers about Crimea, deciding — unlike Khrushchev in 1954 — to arrange a plebiscite to let the people of Crimea, most of whom strongly opposed the coup regime, decide their own future.
  • March 16, 2014: The official result from the voters in Crimea voted overwhelmingly for independence from Ukraine and to join Russia. Following the referendum, Crimea declared independence from Ukraine and asked to join the Russian Federation. On March 18, the Russian Federal Assembly ratified the incorporation of Crimea into Russia.
  • In the following days, Putin made it immediately (and publicly) clear that Yatsenyuk’s early statement about Ukraine joining NATO and – even more important – the U.S./NATO plans to deploy ABM systems around Russia’s western periphery and in the Black Sea, were the prime motivating forces behind the post-referendum re-incorporation of Crimea into Russia.
  • No one with rudimentary knowledge of Russian history should have been surprised that Moscow would take no chances of letting NATO grab Crimea and Russia’s only warm-water naval base. The Nuland neocons seized on the opportunity to accuse Russia of aggression and told obedient European governments to follow suit. Washington could not persuade its European allies to impose stringent sanctions on Russia, though, until the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17 over Ukraine.

Airplane Downed; 298 Killed

  • July 17, 2014: MH 17 shot down
  • July 20, 2014: Secretary of State John Kerry told NBC’s David Gregory, “We picked up the imagery of this launch. We know the trajectory. We know where it came from. We know the timing. And it was exactly at the time that this aircraft disappeared from the radar.” The U.S., however, has not shared any evidence of this.
  • Given the way U.S. intelligence collectors had been focused, laser-like, on that part of the Ukrainian-Russian border at that time, it is a near certainty that the U.S. has highly relevant intelligence regarding what actually happened and who was most likely responsible. If that intelligence supported the accusations made by Kerry, it would almost certainly have been publicized.
  • Less than two weeks after the shoot-down, the Europeans were persuaded to impose sanctions that hurt their own businesses and economies about as much as they hurt Russia’s – and far more than they hurt the U.S. There is no sign that, in succumbing to U.S. pressure, the Europeans mustered the courage to ask for a peek at the “intelligence” Kerry bragged about on NBC TV.
  • Oct. 27, 2016: Putin speaks at the Valdai International Discussion Club.

How did the “growing trust” that Russian President Putin wrote about in his September 11, 2013 New York Times op-ed evaporate?

How did what Putin called his close “working and personal relationship with President Obama” change into today’s deep distrust and saber-rattling? A short three years later after the close collaboration to resolve the Syrian problem peacefully, Putin spoke of the “feverish” state of international relations and lamented: “My personal agreements with the President of the United States have not produced results.” And things have gone downhill from there.

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David Stockman on How the Deep State Really Works

Posted by M. C. on November 8, 2019

It’s not even mentioned because, as I say, the Warfare State machinery essentially squelches any kind of debate, suffocates any kind of thought that at all deviates from the status quo.

The big issue in the world today is war and peace, and we’re facing a campaign in 2020 where it won’t even be mentioned.

https://internationalman.com/articles/david-stockman-on-how-the-deep-state-really-works/

by David Stockman

International Man: Last year, President Trump took the unusual step of bypassing his advisors to announce his intention to withdraw all US troops from Syria quickly. The decision rattled Washington and the mainstream media. It caused former Defense Secretary Mattis to resign. Almost a year later, the US has withdrawn only a token number of soldiers. It still has thousands of troops occupying the part of the country where oil fields are located. What is going on here?

David Stockman: Well, that’s the Deep State at work.

Donald Trump is all by his lonesome. He’s home alone in the Oval Office. Now, half of it, he can blame himself. If he hires someone, a known idiot like John Bolton, what does he expect is going to happen except that everything he wanted to do is going to be undermined.

Nevertheless, he can’t seem to find anybody who can articulate on a day-to-day basis a pathway to the more restrained America First posture that he had in mind.

He’s surrounded by people who constantly countermand his orders. You have James Jeffery, the US Ambassador and special envoy to Syria saying, “Well, Trump didn’t mean that when he said he wanted the troops out of Syria.”

We have the same thing with North Korea. Trump finally said, here we are, 66 years after the armistice and we still don’t have a peace treaty, and we’re still occupying the Korean peninsula, which is of no interest to our national security one way or the other.

You have to do what I would call “contrafactual history.” In other words, if you understand what could have happened the other way, then maybe you’re not going to be so impressed with all this threat inflation.

I go back to why the Korean War happened, because I think it’s important to this whole thing going on now, with Trump trying to make a deal with Kim Jong-un.

In the late ’40s, Washington officials said that Korea is outside our sphere of influence, the line between North and South hastily drawn at the Potsdam war conference in July 1945. Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state in the late 1940s, said it was a mere surveyor’s line; it’s of no strategic influence. What if common sense had prevailed, instead of the hot-headed advice that President Truman got?

What if Truman had said, “Okay, we’re vacating this damn peninsula”? Well, it would have become a quasi-province of China, just like all the rest of them.

They’d probably be making all kinds of stuff, sending it to Walmart today, and nobody would know the difference.

Instead, we had a war. If I remember right, 54,000 servicemen were killed. The whole peninsula was pummeled, carpet bombed, and literally destroyed. It was like a wasteland in the north. There are reasons why the Kim family has survived all these years, because they hate us for what happened. People remember. It was really scorched earth. I mean, it was in some sense genocide, even then.

So, all of that happened, and Eisenhower comes in and is astute enough to say that we don’t really have national security on the line. He negotiated an armistice, and yet the War Party kept tension on the DMZ for all those years because it had to be in the playbook of threats.

I remember well when I was fighting the big Reagan defense build-up, back when I was budget director. It was always, we need all these different new tanks and attack aircraft and resupply logistics capabilities, because we have to have the ability to fight two and a half wars.

Well, where was the half war? I knew where the other ones were. The half war was in Korea. Well, why did we have to have a half war in Korea? But nevertheless, that was part of the rationalization—justification—for this massive military force that really is a tool of empire and not a tool of homeland defense.

Today, we have Trump finally saying, let’s let the Koreans decide how to run the future of Korea—and back off this long-running, 65-year confrontation.

And yet as courageous in some ways as he has been, he’s constantly being undermined by his own people, who as soon as he’s not looking send real nasty messages to the North Koreans—that will only set Kim back on his heels—and therefore nothing gets done. Even though it could very easily be done…

International Man: What kind of role do you see foreign policy playing in the 2020 election?

David Stockman: It won’t be the normal sense of debating policy—where there’s usually the bipartisan duopoly, with nuanced shades of difference that they like to debate and pretend are meaningful.

That isn’t even going to happen this time. Foreign policy has been totally taken over by the Democratic paranoia about Russia and Putin and meddling in our elections.

Now it’s extended to the whole impeachment inquiry and Ukraine-gate. That’s what the whole debate is going to be about. The debate is going to be about a sideshow.

The underlying issues are why we are constantly steaming warships into the Black Sea. That’s like the Gulf of Mexico to Russia.

Why are we sending warships into the Baltic?

Why are we constantly doing big maneuvers in Poland and in the Baltic states, right on Russia’s doorsteps with these tens of thousands of forces going through these maneuvers and exercises? What the hell are we doing all this for?

Those are the issues. But they’re not even going to get debated.

One last point: Trump had raised the question, isn’t NATO obsolete? The Soviet Union is gone. The 50,000 tanks allegedly on the central front facing western Europe have been melted down for scrap. And yet, he can’t even do anything about NATO.

He’s had to double-talk his way into saying, “Well, the other countries are going to commit some more money they don’t have. They’re going to waste more money on defense.” That’s all that’s come of it.

The point is we ought to be debating what the hell are we doing with NATO 25 years after the Soviet Union disappeared from the face of the earth?

Why isn’t Washington and the president leading the world with this disarmament conference so that we can begin to reduce this massive expenditure for weapons that nobody can afford?…

Be seeing you

https://www.rt.com/usa/465597-navy-carrier-ford-cant-launch/

The US Navy’s new $13 billion aircraft carrier was delivered with only two of its 11 elevators –vital to get munitions to its deck– operational. For the Navy, it’s the latest in a series of costly embarrassments.

 

 

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Telling the Truth Has Become an Anti-American Act – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on October 31, 2019

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/30/telling-the-truth-has-become-an-anti-american-act/

Paul Craig Roberts

Stephen Cohen and I emphasize that the state of tension today between the United States and Russia is more dangerous than during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. For calling needed attention to the risk of nuclear war heightened by the current state of tension, both Cohen and I have been called “Russian dupes/agents” by PropOrNot, a website suspected of being funded by an element of the US military/security complex.

Cohen and I emphasize that during the Cold War both sides were working to reduce tensions and to build trust. President John F. Kennedy worked with Khruschev to defuse the dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. President Richard Nixon made arms control agreements with the Soviet leaders, as did President Jimmy Carter. President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev worked together to end the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush’s administration gave assurances to Gorbachev that if the Soviets agreed to the renunification of Germany, the US would not move NATO one inch to the East.

These accomplishments were all destroyed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama neoconized regimes. President Donald Trump’s intention to normalize US/Russian relations has been blocked by the US military/security complex, presstitute media, and Democratic Party.
The Russiagate hoax and currently the illegitimate impeachment process have succeeded in preventing any reduction in the dangerous state of tensions between the two nuclear powers.

Those of us who lived and fought the Cold War are acutely aware of the numerous occasions when false warnings of incoming ICBMs and other moments of high tension could have resulted in nuclear Armageddon.

Former CIA official Ray McGovern reminds us that on October 27, 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a single Soviet Navy submarine captain, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, prevented the outbreak of nuclear war. Arkhipov was one of two captains on Soviet submarine B-59. After hours of B-59 being battered by depth charges from US warships, the other captain, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky readied a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon capable of wiping out the entire USS Randolph carrier task force, to be readied for launch. It didn’t happen only because Arkhipov was present and countermanded the order and brought the Soviet submarine to the surface. Ray McGovern tells the story here: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/most-dangerous-moment-human-history and you can read it in Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine. The really scary part of the story is that US intelligence was so incompetent that Washington had no idea that Soviet nuclear weapons were in the combat area on a submarine undergoing debt-charging by the US Navy. The brass thought they could teach the Soviets a lesson by sinking a submarine and came close to getting the United States destroyed.

Another Soviet hero who prevented nuclear war was Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov who disobeyed Soviet military protocol and did not pass on reports of incoming US ICBMs. He did not believe that there was a military/political basis for such an attack and concluded it was a malfunction of the Soviet satellite warning system, which it was.

Many times both Americans and Soviets overrode warnings on the basis of judgment. My colleague, Zbigniew Brezezinski told me the story of being awakened at 2AM with reports of incoming Soviet ICBMs. It turned out that a simulation of an attack had in some way gotten into the warning system and was reported as real. It was a very close call. Someone doubted it enough to detect the error before Brezezinski woke the president.

Today with tensions so high and neither side trusting the other, the probability of human judgment prevailing over official warning systems is much lower.

Over the years I have tried to correct the widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of President Reagan’s military buildup/starwars hype and hostility toward Marxist, or perhaps merely leftwing reform movements, in Granada and Nicaragua. With his economic program in place and stagflation on the way out, Reagan’s plan was to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table by threatening their broke economy with the expense of an arms race. The plan also depended on preventing any Marxist advances in Central America or offshore islands. The Soviets had to see that there were no prospects for communist expansion and that they needed to get down to peace in order to free resources for their broken economy.

Reading Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and The Traitor, the story of KBG colonel Oleg Gordievsky, an asset of Britain’s MI6, made me aware for the first time how dangerous Reagan’s plan was. American intelligence was so far off-track that Washington did not realize that a plan designed to scare the Soviets into peace was instead convincing them that the US was readying an all-out nuclear attack.

At the time the Soviet leader was the former KGB chief, Yuri Andropov. The ABLE ARCHER NATO war game during the first part of November 1983 simulated an escalating conflict culminating in a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Soviets did not see it as a war game and regarded it as American preparation for a real attack. What prevented Soviet preemptive action was Gordievsky’s report to MI6 that the Americans were raising Soviet anxiety to the breaking point. This woke up Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the threat they were creating with their bellicose words and deeds. The CIA later confessed: “Gordievsky’s information was an epiphany for President Reagan . . . only Gordievsky’s timely warning to Washington via MI6 kept things from going too far.”

In my seasoned opinion and in that of Stephen Cohen, with Hillary almost elected president branding the president of Russia as “the New Hitler,” with constant provocations and demonizations of Russia and her leaders, with the accumulation of nuclear-capable missiles on Russia’s borders, with an orchestrated Russiagate by US security agencies blocking President Trump from normalizing relations, things have already gone too far. The kinds of false alarms and miscalculations described above are more likely to have deadly consequences than ever before.

Indeed, this seems to be the intention. Why else are people such as Stephen Cohen and myself branded “Russian agents” for telling the truth and giving accurate heartfelt warnings about the danger of such high tensions when neither side trusts the other?

It is reckless and irresponsible to demonize people of integrity such as Stephen Cohen and myself as “Russian agents.” When telling the truth becomes the mark of being a disloyal American, what hope is there?

Be seeing you

truth

 

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DC’s Atlantic Council raked in funding from Hunter Biden’s corruption-stained employer while courting his VP father | The Grayzone

Posted by M. C. on October 17, 2019

Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..”  

That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/10/13/dcs-atlantic-council-raked-in-funding-from-hunter-bidens-corruption-stained-employer-while-courting-his-vp-father/

By Max Blumenthal

With its relentless focus on corruption in Russia and Ukraine, the Atlantic Council has distinguished itself from other top-flight think tanks in Washington. Over the past several years, it has held innumerable conferences and panel discussions, issued a string of reports, and published literally hundreds of essays on Russia’s “kleptocracy” and the scourge of Kremlin disinformation.

At the same time, this institution has posed as a faithful partner to Ukraine’s imperiled democracy, organizing countless programs on the urgency of economic reforms to tamp down on corruption in the country.

But behind the curtain, the Atlantic Council has initiated a lucrative relationship with a corruption-tainted Ukrainian gas company, the Burisma Group, that is worth as much as $250,000 a year. The partnership has paid for lavish conferences in Monaco and helped bring Burisma’s oligarchic founder out of the cold.

This alliance has remained stable even as official Washington goes to war over allegations by President Donald Trump and his allies that former Vice President Joseph Biden fired a Ukrainian prosecutor to defend his son’s handsomely compensated position on Burisma’s board.

As Biden parries Trump’s accusations, some of the former vice president’s most ardent defenders are emerging from the halls of the Atlantic Council, which featured Biden as a star speaker at its awards ceremonies over the years. These advocates include Michael Carpenter, Biden’s longtime foreign policy advisor and specialist on Ukraine, who has taken to the national media to support his embattled boss.

Even as Burisma’s trail of influence-buying finds its way into front page headlines, the Atlantic Council’s partnership with the company is scarcely mentioned…

NATO’s think tank in Washington

The Atlantic Council functions as the semi-official think tank of NATO in Washington. As such, it cultivates relationships with well-established policymakers who take a hard line against Russia and support the treaty organization’s perpetual expansion.

Biden has been among the think tank’s most enthusiastic and well-placed allies.

In 2011, then-Vice President Biden delivered the keynote address at the Atlantic Council’s distinguished leadership awards. He returned to the think tank again in 2014 for another keynote at its “Toward A Europe Whole and Free” conference, which was dedicated to expanding NATO’s influence and countering “Russian aggression.” Throughout the event, speakers like Zbigniew Brzezinski sniped at Obama for his insufficiently bellicose posture toward Russia, while former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright fretted over polls showing low public support for US interventionism overseas.

In his own comments, Biden emphasized the need to power Europe with non-Russian sources of natural gas. This provided a prime opportunity to Ukrainian suppliers like Burisma and US energy titans. Many of these energy companies, from Chevron to Noble Energy, also happen to be top donors to the Atlantic Council.

“This would be a game-changer for Europe, in my view, and we’re ready to do everything in our power to help it happen,” Biden promised his audience.

At the time, the Atlantic Council was pushing to ramp up the proxy war against pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. In 2015, for instance, the think tank helped prepare a proposal for arming the Ukrainian military with offensive weaponry like Javelin anti-tank missiles.

Given that the Atlantic Council has been funded by the two manufacturers of the Javelin system, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, this created at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. In fact, the think tank presented its Distinguished Business Leadership Award to Lockheed CEO Marillyn Hewson that same year.

Dubious arrangements like these are not limited to arms manufacturers. Anders Aslund, a neoliberal economist who helps oversee the Atlantic Council’s programming on Russia and Eastern Europe, was quietly paid by a consortium of Latvian banks to write an October 2017 paper highlighting the supposed progress they had made in battling corruption…

Biden made his first visit to the post-Maidan government of Ukraine in April 2014, just as Kiev was launching its so-called “anti-terrorist operation” against separatists who broke off from the new, NATO-oriented Ukraine and its nationalist government and formed so-called people’s republics in the Russophone Donbass region. The fragmentation of the country and its grinding proxy war flowed directly from the regime-change operation that Biden helped oversee.

Addressing the parliament in Kiev, Biden declared that “corruption can have no place in the new Ukraine,” stating that the “United States has also been a driving force behind the IMF, working to provide a multi-billion package to help Ukraine..”

That same month, Hunter Biden was appointed to the board of Burisma.

Be seeing you

Helterskelter to World War Three

 

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Is the Interventionists’ Era Over for Good? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on October 15, 2019

Today, the Middle East and world have been awakened to the reality that when Trump said he was ending everlasting commitments and bringing U.S. troops home from “endless wars,” he was not bluffing.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2019/10/patrick-j-buchanan/is-the-interventionists-era-over-for-good/

By

President Donald Trump could have been more deft and diplomatic in how he engineered that immediate pullout from northeastern Syria.

Yet that withdrawal was as inevitable as were its consequences.

A thousand U.S. troops and their Kurdish allies were not going to dominate indefinitely the entire northeast quadrant of a country the size of Syria against the will of the Damascus regime and army.

Had the U.S. refused to vacate Syrian lands on Turkey’s demand, a fight would be inevitable, whether with Turkey, Damascus or both. And this nation would neither support nor sustain a new war with Turks or Syrians.

And whenever the Americans did leave, the Kurds, facing a far more powerful Turkey, were going to have to negotiate the best deal they could with Syria’s Bashar Assad.

Nor was President Recep Erdogan of Turkey going to allow Syrian Kurds to roost indefinitely just across his southern border, cheek by jowl with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK that Erdogan regards as a terrorist threat to the unity and survival of his country.

It was Russia that stepped in to broker the deal whereby the Kurds stood down and let the Syrian army take over their positions and defend Syria’s border regions against the Turks.

Some ISIS prisoners under Kurdish control have escaped.

But if the Syrian army takes custody of these prisoners from their Kurdish guards, those ISIS fighters and their families will suffer fates that these terrorists have invited.

Denunciation of Erdogan for invading Syria is almost universal. Congress is clamoring for sanctions. NATO allies are cutting off weapons sales. But before we act, some history should be revisited.

Turkey has been a NATO ally, a treaty ally, for almost seven decades. The Kurds are not. Turkish troops fought alongside us in Korea. Turkey hosted Jupiter missiles targeted on Russia in the Cold War, nuclear missiles we withdrew as our concession in the secret JFK-Khrushchev deal that ended the Cuban missile crisis.

The Turks accepted the U.S. weapons, and then accepted their removal.

The Turks have the second-largest army in NATO. They are a nation of 80 million, a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. They dominate the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, the entrance to and exit from the Black Sea for all U.S. and Russian warships.

U.S. warplanes are based at Turkey’s Incirlik air base, as are 50 U.S. nuclear weapons. And Turkey harbors millions of refugees from the Syrian civil war, whom Erdogan keeps from crossing into Europe.

Moreover, Erdogan’s concern over the Syrian Kurdish combat veterans on his border should be understood by us. When Pancho Villa launched his murderous 1916 raid into Columbus, New Mexico, we sent General “Black Jack” Pershing with an army deep into Mexico to run him down.

With no allies left fighting on our side in Syria, the small U.S. military force there is likely to be withdrawn swiftly and fully…

Hence, it was stunning that the administration, at the end of last week, under fire from both parties in the House and Senate for “abandoning” the Kurds, announced the deployment of 1,500 to 3,000 troops to Saudi Arabia to bolster the kingdom’s defense against missile attacks.

The only explanation for the contradiction is Sen. Henry Ashurst’s maxim: “The clammy hand of consistency should never rest for long upon the shoulder of a statesman.”

Yet, this latest U.S. deployment notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia has got the message: Trump will sell them all the weapons they can buy, but no Saudi purchase ensures that the Yanks will come and fight their wars…

Undeniably, the decisions — not to retaliate against Iran for the attack on Riyadh’s oil facilities, and the decision to terminate abruptly the alliance with Syria’s Kurds — sent shock waves to the world.

Where the Americans spent much of the Cold War ruminating about an “agonizing reappraisal” of commitments to malingering allies, this time the Yanks may be deadly serious.

This time, the Americans may really be going home.

Every nation that today believes it has an implied or a treaty guarantee that the U.S. will fight on its behalf should probably recheck its hole card.

Be seeing you

NATO

 

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The Plague of Western Adventurism in Syria

Posted by M. C. on October 12, 2019

https://theduran.com/the-plague-of-western-adventurism-in-syria/

by

The Russian and Turkish leadership attended a summit in Ankara on September 16th, 2019, where the two leaders agreed to cooperate in Syria. Besides such cooperation, Mr Erdogan and Mr Putin also committed to the future of the Turkstream pipeline. And at the MAKs air show, Mr Erdogan expressed his great interest in the potential purchase of SU-35 fighter jets, and perhaps the SU-57 when it becomes operational. Consider too, the additional element of NATO member Turkey’s S400 defensive missile purchase from Russia, despite warnings sanctions imposed by the United States.

In light of the above, a picture emerges where this important NATO member has either defacto withdrawn from NATO, or is threatening to do so. So what is any US leader to do? The answer is that the US must initiate new cooperation with Turkey, and respect Turkey’s security concerns as a NATO ally.

Turkey’s security concern relates to forty years of operation by the PKK inside the country. Even the United States – supposedly an ally of the Kurds – has listed the PKK as a terror group. While such labels are largely meaningless, that designation by the US of the PKK highlights the great element of hypocrisy present in US foreign relations, and its alliances.

Thus Trump has made his move, removing US troops from Manbij, to allow Turkey to subdue the PKK/YPG in northeastern Syria. Simply put, Trump is attempting to appease Turkey and bring Turkey back into the NATO fold, while Erdogan plays both sides. It’s called geo-politics. Simple. And unreported by the major media.

Also unreported by the major media is the US destabilization of Syria since 2011. US State provided the funding and backing for that insurgency. And US State provided the weaponry. Now Neocons and Neoliberals cry about the tragedy in Syria, a debacle that the US created beginning in 2011.

The United States has no right to be in Syria. The United States was, and still is in Syria illegally, according to international law. Obama relied on the unconstitutional AUMF to destabilize Syria in 2011, and then to invade and occupy Manbij and al Tanf, where the US still protects terrorists today. The AUMF is also illegal under international law, and even according to the US Constitution.

Likewise, Russia does not welcome the US withdrawal, since Turkey’s attempt to establish a 20 km ‘safe zone’ along the northeast border may potentially destabilize much of the northeast, and could place Russian forces in harm’s way. But the greater point is that the legitimate government of Syria has objected to all forms of international adventurism there since 2011, as it attempts to craft a new Constitution that will likely favour Kurdish measures for autonomy….

If Turkey were to attack the SDF to the north while the Syrian SNA attacks from the west, Kurdish forces would be hard pressed to defend the oil fields, thus depriving the PKK/YPG of much needed resources. Complicating this however, is Iran’s interest in pushing the US out of eastern Syria, where the US still has an air base in al Tanf.

In the end, it will be necessary for the Kurds to strike some sort of agreement with Turkey, Iran, and Syria, to provide the northeast region some form of autonomy and security, without the participation of the United States or Israel.

Speaking their own language and a proud and resourceful people, the Kurds may find that their best interests are served now by a political realignment, refraining from their association with Israel and the United States in an ever-changing geopolitical climate. Such a development will represent a major shift in Western Hegemony, highlighted by the fact that the former United States and Israel are incapable of granting the Kurds their own state.

To paraphrase (with great license) Mr Trump:

“The US was supposed to be in Syria for thirty days, that was in 2011 when the Clinton’s and Victoria Kagan-Nuland controlled US State. The United States stayed in Syria and got deeper and deeper into battle with no true goal in sight. The Kurds cooperated with the US, but were paid massive amounts of money and given billions in US military equipment to do so. They have been fighting vs Turkey decades. It is time for the United States to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal.”

Be seeing you

Kurds in Toronto are protesting Turkey's attack on the Syrian Defence Force

Kurds in Toronto

 

 

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