DISHONEST BROKER IN THE MIDEAST

There is no more hypocrital government than the USA....despite all the 'peace summits' the US does not really want the Palestinian question resolved. Their purpose is to use Israel's occupation of Palestine as an excuse to be in the region - directly as in military bases in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, but also indirectly through the massive ($4 billion annual) 'aid' to Israel - to keep their rapacious hands on the Grand Prize - the oil in the region.

But a massive armed robbery of Arab and Iranian oil does not make for a good cover story - delivering the Jews their 'promised land' is a much better option, and one which sells easily to the Christian fundamentalists and Bible-thumpers in America, who nonetheless remain convinced that the ultimate destination of the Jews is an altogether different one from those few blood-stained miles in the desert..... Go figure....

Just how massive is the aid to Israel? As comparison, the US gives the entire continent of Africa - perhaps the poorest region in the world - $5 billion annually.

For a fully researched analysis with overwhelming proofs, check out Noam Chomsky's writings, particularly 'Fateful Triangle'. Despite capitulations on virtually every issue by the desperate Palestinians, the American-Israeli 'axis of evil' have defeated every attempt by them to achieve any state - even one that is 'tiny, disarmed, fragmented, and utterly dominated by Israel'.

By ruthlessly defeating the Palestinian moderates who want peace at almost any cost, the Americans and Israelis themselves have fostered and provoked radical reactions from the Palestinians. This has in turn allowed them to retaliate in incomparably worse fashion, while continuing to delude the world that Palestinian 'terrorism' and suicide-bombings are the reason there is no settlement in the region.

Iran is the bad guy because it defies this deceitful American-Israeli policy.....like Saddam Hussein did.

FOOLS IN HIGH PLACES - A LETTER TO THE STAR

Will be ever be rid of foolishness in high places? Not too long ago, an Ivy-league 'star' professor boldly proclaimed 'the end of history', leaving one to wonder if he even understood history. Then Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Bob Woodward admitted on Larry King's show, after the American force occupying Iraq found no WMD whatsoever, that he had truly believed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq were threats to America. Like most of the leading lights of the North American media and academia, he had been apparently unaware that Iraq had been bombed 'back to the stone-age' ín 1991, then kept on its knees (if not its back) with economic sanctions, harassed incessantly with UN arms inspections, and tortured with ad-hoc bombings by the US and UK air-forces whenever the leaders of those countries needed a boost in their domestic political ratings.

Still... foolishness is more benign than the thinly disguised lies of leading historians like Niall Ferguson who write about 'Armageddon' if Iran acquires nuclear energy which even environmentalists around the world are now touting as the preferred solution to global warming and the crisis caused by the limits to supply of fossil fuels. Apparently the Oxford-educated and Harvard-employed Dr. Ferguson is unaware that Iran doesn't even have an army or navy of any significance, let along nuclear weapons, whereas the supposed target of Iran's hostility - Israel, has every type of conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear weapon in abundance, and is a partner with the US in cutting edge 'research' to maintain an invincible superiority over its Islamic neighbours.

(What the erudite Oxonian-at-Harvard does know beyond any doubt however, is that Iran is EVIL, while the US, UK, and Israel are not...The learned Professor holds these truths to be self-evident...no proof necessary.... No surprise then, that he is adviser to John McCain..)

I eagerly launched into the half-page the Star generously gave Professor Laxer on Wednesday June 4, expecting to learn something, what will all the photos of international leaders and the sexy title - 'Etiquette of Empire', only to discover it was largely hot air. What is Dr. Laxer's point - that American Presidents have traditionally found time for leaders that matter, while snubbing those that don't? This is information? Such behavior by US presidents has been no different from that of any gangster, bully, social matron, queen-bee, or what-have-you. It is to be found everywhere- in the petty politics and back-stabbing of workplaces, social and sports clubs, even occasionally in families. It's called human nature, I think, or at least the unsavoury part of it.

So in his ode to pomposity, did Dr. Laxer have a point? Apparently yes - he wanted to signal to Barack Obama that he must learn quickly the so-called 'etiquette of empire', The Professor is wrong, dead wrong. We don't need more American bullying and war-crimes, euphemistically called unilateral action. We need a new approach. If Mr. Obama does become President, and follows through on his stated intent to meet (without pre-conditions) with leaders of nations called the axis of evil by a man 80% of Europeans consider the world's biggest terrorist and threat to peace, this would be a major step to reducing international tension, conflict and tragedy.

Unfortunately, Mr. Obama has already begun to back-track, as evidenced by his pledge to Florida's Jewish voters to maintain America's one-sided support for Israel. Political realities may allow one the audacity of hope, but not apparently the audacity to act on that hope.

Still, it would be nice if people from academia and the media gave good counsel, instead of foolish ones. They need to remember Julius Streicher. It is not just those who kill that are criminal, but also those who provide the intellectual justification for the killing.

MCCAIN ATTEMPTS TO 'CHANGE HIS SPOTS'

As reported in this blog a few months earlier, McCain is a meaner, badder version of Bush Jr.... and a bigger threat to international peace.

It would appear his gunslinger image however, is beginning to hurt McCain's Presidential hopes, or so he now thinks. So he has now begun to back away from his earlier statements to stay in Iraq for 'a hundred years'...

A couple of weeks ago, he talked about a US pullout of Iraq within 15 years.....a few days ago, in what was reported as McCain's attempt to distance himself from the despised Bush Administration, he publicly ruminated about how the American people were 'sick and tired of the war in Iraq'.

But can he be trusted....is this a genuine about-face of someone who has realized he has been wrong, or simply a political reversal which no reasonable person should trust.

Somehow I think this guy has war-mongering, US bullying, and war-criminality in his DNA.....three decades after Vietnam, he had no shame about the US's role in it and the murder of 4 million South East Asians.....

Can his new views on Iraq be trusted...? I think not.

HILARY CLINTON SOILS HERSELF

Just before the Pennsylvania primary, Hilary decided to up the ante against Barack Obama. In tactics used successfully by Bush Jr. in 2004, she played the 'fear' card, and publicly threatened to 'obliterate' Iran with nuclear weapons, if Iran ever attacked Israel with them. The statement was accompanied by TV ads showing images of 911, Pearl Harbour and so on.

Hilary's tactic worked - she won Pennsylvania. But her statement showed what a contemptible and dangerous proceeding the US Presidential elections have become. Promising to commit war-crimes in the name of 'security' has apparently become essential to winning the White House.

So far Obama has resisted such loathsome tactics....but for how long will he be able to? The American people's ignorance of history (complete absence of memory) has already been noted by writers such as Gore Vidal. Both Pearl Harbour and 911 were avenged a thousand times over by incomparably worse crimes by the US....and both were provoked by American policies as well...but such subtleties are irrelevant to an ignorant people dulled by incessant propaganda, alcohol, sports and sitcoms, Bible-thumping, and the arrogance of being the world's most powerful and murderous nation. They ought to reflect on the promise that those who exalt themselves will be humbled...but then America is a nation of liars who imagine themselves Christian while pursuing Mammon at all costs including the murder of millions of foreigners...

Hilary soiled herself with her threat against Iran.....and was obliged to modify her statement after Iran rightly complained to the UN....and of course, Hilary declined to mention, as do none of the US luminaries of the media and academia, that Iran has yet to build a bomb, whereas Israel already has a couple of hundred BOMBS which can easily vaporize Iran....

Once a champion of universal medicare, Mrs. Clinton has descended to the slimy and criminal tactics of the incumbent of the White House....power corrupts, and so does the lust for it...

INDIA TELLS THE US TO BACK OFF....

A few days ago, just before Iranian President Ahmadinejad was due to visit India, the US instructed India to remind Ahmadinejad of the Security Council's concerns about Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions. The Indian reaction was swift and blunt.

India told the US it did not 'need guidance' from the US on matters of foreign policy, and that it pursued its own foreign policy. Some of this was driven by internal politics of course - the Indian government is a coalition including the leftist CPM party, which (justifiably) despises the US's actions in Iraq and other places.

But the sharp rejoinder should inform the US that it cannot dictate to the rest of the world - even if it succeeded in setting up Saddam Hussein in 1991, then used his resulting 'pariah' status to criminally invade and occupy Iraq in 2003. Its policies are hated in many parts of the world, and its ability to 'bribe and bully' nations into toeing its nakedly imperialist neo-colonial and neo-liberal line is limited to tiny nations, excepting similarly crooked ones like the UK.

Other factors are at work as well of course. The US's hatred of Iran flows principally from Iran's rejection of US intimidation, and also Iran's preference to sell its oil for euros, not the declining US dollars. India also is negotiating an oil pipeline with Iran, to pass through Pakistan and Afghanistan....even the tiny island of Sri Lanka, which has much to fear from the US, has maintained its relations with Iran, because of the oil connection...

Inside the bizarre bubble of the North American media of course, the US is the world's cradle of 'democracy'. They rightly criticise China for its occupation of Tibet, but cannot bring themselves to slam the US and UK for the similarly criminal occupation of Iraq, nor condemn equally criminal plans against Iran.

AN IMPORTANT ARTICLE ABOUT FUTURE US-CHINA RIVALRY

Some two hundred + years ago the biggest economies in the world were China and India. That was before the discovery of coal, and mechanized weapons and navies gave the US and the UK and some other European nations the power to colonize or otherwise dominate the Asian giants of the time, as well as the reclusive Japan.

Japan was given the choice of 'trade' or war by the US (in short, let us into your markets and resources, or we will kill you..).

And the UK terrorized a China bleeding from internal chaos, famine and rebellions into consuming opium it produced in India. When the Chinese threw a shipment of British opium into the sea, 'Great Britain' extorted massive 'reparations' including territories such as Hong Kong...and turned millions of Chinese citizens into opium addicts while fattening British coffers.

Most people are now aware that economic power is returning to Asia, with China expected to equal the US in GNP by 2050 (Wall Street estimates) and India sometime thereafter.

This article propounds that China will also flex military muscle in the Pacific and areas of the world where the US is less present. The so-called 'unipolar' world after the collapse of the Soviet Union will remain so only for a short time......and America's current 'hyper-power' status will soon be challenged. If the US attacks Iran, its inevitable decline will accelerate.

China Rising
Kevin Libin, National Post
Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

China Daily, Reuters
The Teatro Speakers Series is a modern-day salon: an informal gathering where Calgary business leaders and scholars gather to discuss the pressing issues of our time with renowned thinkers. The 2007-08 Teatro Speakers Series, for which the National Post acts as official media sponsor, focuses on the U.S. occupation of Iraq and its implications for both the U.S. presidential race and the future of the Middle East. Last week author Robert D. Kaplan spoke on shifting world power in the wake of the Iraq invasion and sat down for an interview with National Post writer Kevin Libin.

---

CALGARY -It goes without saying that 2001 signalled a dramatic realignment in the global military landscape, but perhaps not entirely for reasons that come naturally to mind. Events in autumn of that year -- the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, then the first of this century's Arab wars -- made a convincing case that the future of combat would be on the sands of the Middle East. And yet, what happened in April that year may have been just as, maybe more, portentous. That was when Chinese jet fighters intercepted, collided with and forced the landing on Hainan Island of a U.S. Navy EP-3 surveillance plane. For 11 days, the Beijing government held the 24 American crew-members as virtual captives. Chinese intelligence officers inspected the plane rivet by rivet, then cut it into pieces before it was sent back to the U.S., two months later.

The incident was an embarrassing one for the normally unflappable U.S. military --almost surely the effect the Chinese had planned, suggests Robert D. Kaplan, who was in Calgary last week for the National Post-sponsored Teatro Speakers Series. Mr. Kaplan is a contributing editor to The Atlantic Monthly magazine and an author of several books on the military and geopolitics, including his latest two: Imperial Grunts and Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts (his 1993 Balkan Ghosts heavily influenced the Clinton administration's policies in Bosnia). But such a description falls miles short of explaining what Mr. Kaplan is, and does, which is traveling the world, from the Horn of Africa to El Salvador to the Arctic, to live amongst American troops for months at a time, in their barracks, their Blackhawks, their Humvees, their destroyers and their submarines. That, and his immersion in military history -- he easily drops references to Thucydides and Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich in our conversation -- has given Mr. Kaplan such instinctive understanding of the way militaries think and work that he would surely be as comfortable working at the Pentagon as he is at a monthly mainstream magazine (as a matter of fact, he has been made National Security Chair of the U.S. Naval Academy's political science department). And what top militaries around the world are thinking most deeply about right now, he says, is not Afghanistan or Iraq. Not even Iran. But the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and what he predicts will be a new Cold War between Beijing and Washington, part of the imminent and vast reorganization of world power.

"While we're all focused on the Middle East, in a dirty counter-insurgency war, the world is changing," Mr. Kaplan says. "Military power as well as economic power is moving from Europe to Asia. You're seeing the Indian navy go from the fifth-to third-largest navy in the world. You're seeing an expansion in Russia's Far Eastern fleet. You're seeing the Japanese navy that is soon going to be four times as large as the British Royal Navy."

All of it preparation for the transformation of the post-Soviet unipolar world to a multipolarity, dominated by a remarkably muscular China, one that will increasingly demand more control over the ocean routes of cargo ships and oil tankers to secure supply for the appetites of its burgeoning middle class. It's happened before:

"When did the United States become a great world power?" Mr. Kaplan asks. It was between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the First World War that "the U.S. economy was growing at about 10% a year for several decades straight ... And as we grew economically in a very dynamic way, we developed interests around the world that we never had before, because we were trading in those areas." Washington began adventures to secure influence and real estate in South America, Alaska, Hawaii and a network of Pacific Islands -- Guam, the Marianas, the colonized Philippines -- which opportunely, more than a century later, will count as the U.S. Pacific Command's most strategic lines.

"For half a century after the Second World War, the U.S. owned the Pacific Ocean," Mr. Kaplan says. "It was our own private lake. The U.S. Navy could go anywhere it wanted, anytime it wanted." That is about to change. Spending by some estimates 4.5% of its GDP on defence (Washington spends 3.9%, though America's GDP is six times larger than the People's Republic of China's) "the Chinese will field more warships around the world than the U.S. in a few years," he says. China covets, and will likely eventually attain, either direct or indirect control of areas outside the U.S. sphere of influence, places like Pyonyang, Moscow and Tehran. Wherever America's influence is weak or absent, Beijing will seek to assert its own. And in some areas where Washington's hand is now strong, the long-term may favour the Middle Kingdom:Mr. Kaplan fully expects the PRC to eventually absorb Taiwan -- which the politburo desires less for ethnic affinities than as "an unsinkable aircraft carrier," key to projecting power into the Pacific -- despite America's determination to prevent exactly that.

Beijing may not truly challenge the overwhelming power and strength of America's total military force anytime soon. But it doesn't have to. The Communist government will focus on three key strategic strengths, Mr. Kaplan predicts: submarine power, to secure coastal shelves and infest blue waters, ballistic missiles and weapons in space. When China surprised the world last year, shooting down one of its own satellites, it "ended the debate about the militarization of space," Mr. Kaplan says. "Of course space is going to be militarized -- just like the oceans were militarized by the Portuguese in the 16th century. It's a new sphere of human activity, so it's going to be militarized."

That shot-down satellite -- a first for any country -- was yet another move to humble Washington, and the sort of stunt we can anticipate plenty more of, he expects. Unable to compete with the U.S. across the board, the PRC is "looking for a very subtle asymmetrical capability, not to beat us in battle, but to embarrass us in incidents in confrontations," he says. "The Chinese are going to show Americans the high-tech, subtle end of asymmetry the same way that insurgents in Iraq have shown the Americans the low-tech, brutal end of asymmetry." Think: mischievous demonstrations of cyberattacks, or the sudden surfacing of a Chinese submarine adjacent a U.S. Navy destroyer, merely to show it can be done.

Of course, changes in where we fight will necessarily change how we fight. "While we're all focused on land wars ... the future may be a lot more friendly to air forces and navies, so we don't get bogged down as much," Mr. Kaplan says. And a rearrangement of alliances will naturally follow. NATO, as borne out in the alliance's unevenness in Afghanistan, is effectively "obsolete," Mr. Kaplan argues, and the U.S. is now "looking beyond NATO" to more effective alliances, with willing partners -- certain to include the British, the Australians, the Dutch and potentially Canada, if its recently renewed military vigour in Afghanistan proves sustainable. After its unpleasant experience with fair-weather allies unwilling to bear risk in Afghanistan-- such as Germany and Italy -- Washington, however, is bound to utilize a basic calculus to determine its partnerships, Mr. Kaplan believes: "The more you deploy, the more influence you have." And as navies and marine forces again become the spear-tip of the world's dominant militaries, Ottawa's ability and its willingness, in the years and decades to come, to add strength to the Western side of this growing pan-Pacific rivalry, will ultimately determine Canada's place in the new global arrangement.

klibin@nationalpost.com

Bush Jr. on steroids - the new threat from McCain

One shameful, despicable war-criminal responsible for some three-quarters of a million civilian deaths in Iraq - George Bush Jr., current occupant of the White House - could be replaced with a bigger, badder, more dangerous version - John McCain.

It is shocking that the vast majority of American voters are somnolescent and oblivious to this danger. That leading Republican figures like California governor Schwarzenegger and former NYC mayor Giuliani have thrown their weight behind this unabashed war-mongerer, who openly declares that he will stay the course in Iraq, keep American troops there for a "hundred years", and attack Iran....

This man has no shame either for the massive American crimes against Vietnam (some 3 million casualties), openly declaring during a recent debate that it was the American people that prevented victory....apparently he does not believe that it is civilians who are the ultimate boss...will such an odious figure become the next American president?
Under Bush the US has openly practised torture......under McCain, a torture victim, may we expect torture to become official policy?

As Kubrick put it in Full Metal Jacket, 'we live in a world of shit'....