Egyptian Revolution Or American Creeping Coup?

Torture chief Vice President Omar Suleiman is no friend of democracy or people’s revolution, columnist says

[Global: Egypt]

As we see the dynamic of the popular masses of Egypt move against the Hosni Mubarak government, one has to put the recent events into historical context and oppose any enterprises and proposals by the American government to replace Mubarakwith a military-dominated “transition” government.

For this move is only about protecting the interests of American imperialism and the Egyptian ruling elite, and trying to call a halt the growing Egyptian revolution in power.  While we see and witness a whole host of loquacious and sentimental platitudes as explanations, one would think that Maya Angelou was a pontificating member and representative of The State Department given the colorful propaganda.

President Barack Obama during a joint press conference Friday with the visiting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, urged Mubarak to “make the right decision” to resolve the crisis in Egypt. Vice President Joseph Biden had called Egyptian Vice
President Omar Suleiman on the phone to discuss, according to the White House a “credible, inclusive negotiations”  to “begin immediately in order for Egypt to transition to a democratic government that addresses the aspirations of the Egyptian people.”

Suleiman is and was a long time person in charge of the Egyptian intelligence services who is now most preferred person by Washington. The Obama administration envisions a regime based on the military and headed by Suleiman, Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the defense minister, and of the top Mubarak aides, with the addition of representatives of the corrupt and money inspired Egyptian opposition—figures such as Mohammed ElBaradei, the former head of the UN nuclear weapons inspections program, Amr Moussa, secretary of the Arab League, and big business spokespersons like the Wafd Party.

The State Department spokesmen have also suggested a role for the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist bourgeois party that has long been outlawed in Egypt, but whose candidates have been running as independents, and won 20% of the seats in the 2005 legislative election. After years of singing the “threat” of the Islamic fundamentalist to justify support for the Mubarak dictatorship, Washington has decided to cultivated the Islamists as a bulwark against the main danger—of secular radical social revolution.

Back in November 2007, the New York Times had published an article and analysis of the coming manipulation of the succession to Mubarak. The article was to go and say that: “Mr. Mubarak has not always been the perfect ally, but American officials a say that he is invaluable for his historical perspective and the importance he places on the relationship with the United States and peace with Israel. An American official here said the hope was that Mr. Mubarak’s ultimate replacement would be someone who maintains the same historical appreciation for peace and relations with Washington.”

In other words, Mubarak’s successor must be, like Mubarak, an American puppet and lackey. The Suleiman government would have an out-and-out criminal at its head. The Egyptian vice president—appointed to that post only last week by Mubarak—is responsible for the torture of thousands of political prisoners, a role for which he was especially prized by the CIA,  which regularly shipped prisoners to Egypt for treatment that could not be treated in Guantanamo Bay or the CIA owns network of secret prisons.

The journalist Robert Fisk had described Suleiman bitingly and caustically as Mubarak’s “chief negotiator with Israel and his senior intelligence officer, a 75-year-old with years of visits to Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and four hearts attacks to his credit.” For it was under Suleiman direction that Gaza had become systematically blockaded and starved for the past four years, since the coming to power of Hamas in that territory. Suleiman is a confidante of the Israeli regime, the most highly regarded Egyptian in the eyes of Mossad and the Israeli military.

For it must be noted that Suleiman and the military would have a civilian fig leaf in the forms of individuals like ElBaradei, who are equally hostile to the revolutionary movement in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria and other cities. ElBaradei had argued for delaying elections further than the September date set by Mubarak. ElBaradei had proposed instead a three-member ruling council, presumably
himself, Suleiman and a top military officer, to hold power for a year while the electoral system was “reformed.”

The main job or undertaking of such a “transition” regime would be to mislead the popular movement against Mubarak with the illusions of reform, and then diffuse the mass protest rallies and marches, including the domination of all those who rightly refuse to accept such US-brokered transition as a genuine democratic development. In that context, Obama’s words Friday have a menacing ring. Obama had restated earlier statements that the US government opposes the use of violence either by the government or the protesters—as though there was an equivalence between the brutal military, which is armed to the teeth, and with a long record of
torture and murder, and the Egyptian masses, who successfully defended themselves in Tahrir Square with their bare hands and the sheer force of their numbers.

When Mubarak is replaced by a caretaker person based on the military, both the Obama administration and the American media will swing behind the new ruler in charge, vilifying all popular opposition as “terrorism” and endorsing the bloodiest measure of state of repression.

Far from representing a concession to the democratic demands of the masses, such a regime would represent a carefully constructed roadblock. It would cement the role of the Egyptian government as a servant of US imperialism, collaborator with Israel, and enemy of the Palestinian people and the oppressed masses of Egypt itself.

The Mubarak regime is not simply the product of a criminal dictator and his exclusive group of gangsters. It was, rather, the instrument of the ruling elite of Egypt and its imperialist clients. The history of this Egyptian regime has shown the fact that it is incapable of addressing the social needs of the people and carrying out the basic task of a democratic revolution. For it must be noted that this cannot be achieve through electoral formalities—which Egypt has in abundance—but semi-feudal landlords who still dominate the countryside.

The course of events in Egypt has shown a powerful justification for a qualitative change of actual power or revolution. As we see a century of bitter experiences of the role of the comprador leadership can play a healthy or progressive role in Egyptian society.

Class divisions in Egypt constitute the dominant reality of social life. Particularly over the last 20 years, a powerful, but brutally oppressed working poor has grown up in Egypt, taking on a series of militant and bloody clashes with the Egyptian police-state.

At this point an impassable social gulf separates the working poor and the impoverished fellahin from the privileged elite and its political representatives, from Mubarak and Suleiman to ElBaradei and the Muslim Brotherhood. For at this moment these divisions have already been manifested in the spontaneous formation of neighborhood committees—in the communities of the poor, to
ward off attacks by Mubarak thugs, which in the comprador bourgeois gated communities, to guard against so-called “mob rule.”

For at this point the burning questions that the Egyptian poor must face and tackle is the approach of self-organization of the working poor and workers in general, that is independent of all parties of the Egyptian elite. This means building up working and community councils to mobilize the immense social power of the Egyptian masses.

They need to develop a program of mass distribution of wealth for housing, education, health care, retirement, and whatever the contradictions that the Egyptians masses face after years of being put under the rule and exploitation of a comprador ruling elite that has used the wealth of the country for the West.

For the Egyptian people history may be on their side, but, not time.

“Speaking Truth To Empower.”

Egypt’s Revolution: Creative Destruction for a ’Greater Middle East’?

by F. William Engdahl* Controverting majority opinion, F. William Engdahl maintains there is nothing spontaneous about the mass protest movements in Arab countries and sees them as a replay of the US-orchestrated colour revolutions that triggered regime change in post-Soviet countries. The same script and cast of characters are at hand: local opposition leaders coached by the NED and other US-funded organizations in the art of staging “spontaneous” uprisings. The contours of a US covert strategy for the region have been clear for some time. The question is: will it work?

Game over?

Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as “creative destruction”.

The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the De Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US-backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear. Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.

No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. No one can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.

What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians [1]. He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder-sounding “New Middle East.”

As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days [2].

The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.

Egypt rising?

The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancient regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long-term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.

Washington ’soft’ revolutions

The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as “spontaneous” as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

Muslim Brotherhood logo

They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported [3].

At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and thefailed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009.

“January 25 Day of Anger” poster signed by April 6 movement.

The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.

April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.

According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, “Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process” [4].

Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood. Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood [5].

Former IAEA Director-General Mohammed ElBaradei taking center stage in opposition front to President Hosni Mubarak.

ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists [6]. Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days toCNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

Kefaya—Pentagon ’non-violent warfare’

Egyptian woman wearing sticker of the Kefaya (enough) Movement, the main force behind ElBaradei’s candidature.

Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to “enough!”

Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy(NED) [7] and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means “enough!”

Kmara (enough) in Georgia.

The Technique of a Coup d’État, by John Laughland, Voltaire Network, 5 January 2010.

Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as “non-violence as a method of warfare” [8].

The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills. The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood [9] . Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections [10].

RAND and Kefaya

No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was “sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community” [11].

A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.

In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:

“The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, ’As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export’ (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals. However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country“ [12].

RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name “swarming,” the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees [13].

Washington and the stable of “human rights” and “democracy” and “non-violence” NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated “spontaneous” nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:

“The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and non-profit institutions” [14].

The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other “reform” movements:

“The US government should encourage non-governmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even non-governmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically.

Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers” [15].

As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the “RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics”.

The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes “research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements” [16].

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks with “Egyptian activists promoting freedom and democracy”, prior to meetings at the State Department in Washington, DC, May 28, 2009.

In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices ofFreedom House, another “human rights” Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in US-sponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month “fellowship” organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program [17]

Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring “democracy” and “liberal free market” economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.

Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since the Tunisianand Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.

Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to “spontaneous” popular regime-change uprisings.

The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order [18].

As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA” [19].

The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998 [20].

The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.

NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.

The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,

“NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States“ [21].

Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED [22].

In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated “Islamic radicalism” with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term “broader Middle East” for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,

“The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end…We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow… “ [23].

The US Project for a ’Greater Middle East’

The spreading regime change operations from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.

The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.

That policy recommendation was titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm”. It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon [24]. Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky.

By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch-warhawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.

Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

In May 2009, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of “spreading democracy” to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant “the establishment of a US-Middle East free trade area within a decade” [25].

Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership”. Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for “an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe”.

The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, “a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each” [26].

The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.

The G8 Map of Washington’s Greater Middle East extends right to the borders of China and Russia and West to Morocco.

Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, “besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife” [27]. It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

Will it work?

At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a US-dominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, “The Israeli calculation today is that if ’Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ’If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region” [28].

The Washington strategy of “creative destruction” is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

F. William Engdahl A widely discussed U.S. analyst of current political and economic developments whose articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines and well-known international websites. F. William Engdahl’s numerous books include Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century and Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. ACentury of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order has just been reissued in a new edition. He may be contacted via his website.

Zionist Mother of Homegrown Terrorism Bill To Resign House Seat

[SEE: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 ]

Democrats leap at chance for Jane Harman’s House seat

The Venice Democrat says she will probably resign to head a Washington think tank. Councilwoman Janice Hahn says she will run for the post. Others are debating it.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) won reelection to her House seat in November, but says she’ll likely resign to run a Washington think tank. (Gary Friedman, Los Angeles Times / February 8, 2011)

By Jean Merl and Richard Simon, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Los Angeles and Washington —

Los Angeles-area Democrats scrambled for the chance to fill a rare open seat in Congress after veteran Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) announced Monday that she would probably resign to run a Washington think tank.

Within hours, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahnsaid she would be a candidate. California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, who represented much of the district in the Legislature, let it be known that she was “seriously considering” the idea. Activist Marcy Winograd, who mounted a strong but unsuccessful challenge to the moderate Harman from the left in last year’s primary, said she was “exploring the possibility.”

And Republican Mattie Fein, who lost to Harman in November, 60% to 35%, said she might run again.

“There will be a lot of people who will be quite interested in this congressional seat,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Beverly Hills).

Harman’s announcement came three months after her reelection. She told constituents in an e-mail that she had been in discussions to become president and chief executive of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the center’s decision was imminent. An official announcement was expected Tuesday.

“I have always believed that the best solutions to tough problems require a bipartisan approach, and bipartisanship is the center’s ‘brand,’ ” she said in the e-mail.

If she got the job, she said, she would stay in Congress “for some weeks” to ensure an orderly transition.

Once the seat becomes vacant, Gov. Jerry Brown will have 14 days to call a special election. It is likely to be held in June, when Brown also hopes to ask voters to renew $9 billion in higher sales, income and vehicle taxes.

The race to replace Harman, 65, will be among the first tests of California’s new election system, which voters approved in June. If no candidate receives a majority, the top two vote-getters meet in a runoff — even if they are members of the same party.

“This is the first road test for an election system that could dramatically change the way candidates are selected,” said Dan Schnur, director of USC’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics.

Given the Democratic leanings of Harman’s district — registered Democrats outnumber Republicans45% to 28%, and Barack Obama carried it by 30 percentage points in the 2008 presidential election— the seat is likely to remain in Democratic hands.

“If there is going to be a battle, it will be a battle between two top-flight Democrats,” said Eric Bauman, chairman of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party.

But the race could become a “battle for the soul” of the party between the “progressive left and more conventional liberal Democrats,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a former GOP consultant and publisher of the Target Book, which handicaps legislative races.

Harman is a member of the “blue dogs,” a group of moderate and conservative Democrats whose diminished ranks in the Republican-controlled House have pushed the Democratic caucus further to the left. The Almanac of American Politics calls Harman the most conservative Democrat from Los Angeles.

USC political scientist Sherry Bebitch Jeffe noted that Harman has long been attacked from the left. “But one of the reasons she has held onto the seat is that she is a moderate Democrat,” Jeffe said.

Harman’s 36th Congressional District hugs much of the Los Angeles County coast, beginning with the Harbor-area communities of San Pedro and Wilmington and moving north and west through part of Carson, Lomita, Torrance and the coastal cities of Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach and El Segundo. It includes Marina del Rey and Harman’s home, Venice, as well as Mar Vista and Palms.

UC Berkeley political scientist Bruce Cain said Harman’s departure could foreshadow more retirements by veteran California House Democrats frustrated by life in the minority and anxious about the uncertainty over new district boundaries, which will be drawn by a citizens’ panel using2010 census data.

Jeffe said the redistricting process could limit interest in the race, especially for politicians not facing term limits in the near future. “Whoever wins and runs [in the special election] doesn’t know what the district will be under the new lines. That’s a risk some people won’t want to take,” she said.

Harman, the former top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, gained national attention as a leading voice on national security issues. She is married to Sidney Harman, the stereo industry magnate who recently bought Newsweek.

After her party won a majority in 2006, she was passed over for the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee because of her strained relationship with Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco). In addition, some members of her party considered her too moderate.

She first won election to the House in 1992 but gave up her seat to run for governor in 1998, losing toGray Davis in the Democratic primary. She reclaimed the House seat in 2000.

Harman’s announcement took constituents and officials by surprise. Bauman said he was “pretty shocked.”

“I’m sure a special election is going to cost a lot of money,” said Marilyn Green, 80, a Democrat from Manhattan Beach. “I’m sort of disappointed.”

David Hadley, 46, also of Manhattan Beach, a Republican who has voted for Harman — but not last fall — said, “The worst thing, if you look at the turnout in special elections, is then their successors will be chosen by a small fraction of the voters.”

Winograd, who won 41% of the vote in last year’s primary, said Harman’s decision to resign so soon after the election was disappointing. “It would have been more respectful of the district and her constituents to have bowed out earlier,” she said.

Winograd now lives in Santa Monica, which is outside the district. There is no district residency requirement to run for Congress.

Bowen’s campaign consultant, Steve Barkan, said the secretary of state was “seriously considering running.”

And Hahn, who lost the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor last year, said in a statement, “I plan to work hard to win this seat.”

jean.merl@latimes.com

richard.simon@latimes.com

US intrusions failed democracy

Asif Haroon Raja

Pakistan which was made a frontline State on terror war by US and NATO was repeatedly convinced that terrorism was an existential threat to its security and hence must be fought relentlessly. Coalition partners too were continuously persuaded that it was in their interest to eliminate terrorism from the face of the earth. In order to present terrorism as something most horrendous, variety of scenarios were circulated. These revolved around untraceable ghost of Osama, al-Qaeda a global threat, good and bad Taliban, safe havens in Pak-Afghan border belt, FATA the most dangerous place on earth, North Waziristan the hub centre of terrorism, al-Qaeda leadership based in FATA, Mullah Omar led Shura located in Quetta, Pakistan’s linkage with militants, Pak nukes going into the hands of extremists etc.

All these made-up stories were circulated to prolong war on terror and to justify continued stay of a large US-NATO force in two far apart theatres of war. Likewise, fictitious tale of Mumbai style group attacks in western countries was played up. Purpose behind frequent security alarms and fabricated stories was to keep the public of America and the west terrified. Most terrorist attacks in Pakistan, western countries and even in Afghanistan and Iraq are the handiwork of CIA, Mossad, RAW and Blackwater agents. Terrorist groups like Tehrik-e-Pakistan Taliban (TTP), Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi (TNSM) in Swat, Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and Baloch Republican Army in Balochistan (BRA) are entirely funded, equipped and trained by these agencies.

India and Israel have played a key role in destabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan and in preventing the flames of war from getting extinguished. Since the mercantile objectives and denuclearization and secularization of Pakistan have not been achieved, the evil players playing the macabre game are least interested in restoring peace in the two affected countries. They have extended the date of withdrawal from Afghanistan to 2014 but want to stay beyond that date. Modernization of Kandahar, Kabul, Mazar-e-Saharif and Shindad where their military bases are located is continuing.

Threat to US homeland at the hands of al-Qaeda is the biggest joke played by US leaders upon their people. They are befooling them and keeping them in dark about the hidden objectives as well as ground situation. Homeland threat had been conceived by Bush Administration to justify colossal expenditure on war on terror as well as on homeland security. Obama led Democrats are also doing the same and taking their public for a ride. As a consequence the game of bloodletting is being ruthlessly played unabatedly without any remorse. It is most pathetic that governments of Afghanistan and Iraq have joined hands with alien forces occupying their lands and happily killing their own people. The US handpicked Karzai and Maliki are convinced that whatever the US is saying is correct and in their interest. It was immoral on part of Gen Musharraf to betray a Muslim neighbor to provide assistance to aggressors for destruction of Afghanistan. Nature is punishing Pakistan and its people for the follies of their leaders and now human blood flows into its streets freely.

If today Pakistan is being viewed as the hub centre of terrorism and the most dangerous place on earth, a dispassionate study should be carried out as to how it has reached such a stage. In my humble view, India’s aggressive posturing and its refusal to address Kashmir dispute as well as to reconcile with existence of Pakistan had a lot to do with growth of religious extremism in Pakistan. Right from the day one, India has striven to impede Pakistan’s economic growth. Pakistan instead of concentrating on economic uplift had to perforce divert huge resources towards its defence. As a consequence, poverty kept increasing and the class of have-nots became over populated. It was from within the deprived class which gave birth to criminals, Jihadis and suicide bombers.

Besides India, the US injustices, discriminations and intrusiveness in Pakistan’s internal affairs and use of drones has also contributed towards anti-Americanism and bringing Pakistan to this impasse. The US has a lot to do with keeping Pakistan’s political and economic conditions wobbly by preferring military dictators or corrupt and inept political leaders over people friendly and popular leaders. It has kept the country in the grip of IMF and World Bank to keep Pakistan perpetually dependent upon USA. By making the leaders addicted to aid and burdening the country with huge debt, it has further compromised its sovereignty.

The US has preferred repressive regimes in Pakistan as a result of which democracy in real sense never struck roots. Varieties of systems were experimented but none worked mainly because of US intrusions. The corrupt and unpopular rulers dancing to the tunes of their masters got out of sync with the people. Extremism is a reaction to the immorality and insensitivity of the political class towards have-nots. Since the leaders and the led were always on different frequencies, political stability and integration of the nation could never be achieved. Consequently, economy never took off and remained in doldrums. Since our politicians propped up by USA get readily enslaved by their patrons, they feel no remorse in compromising sovereignty of the country and the liberty of the people merely to earn the goodwill of their patrons. Servility of our current leaders to Washington has touched new heights. Case of Raymond Davis with shady background involved in murder of two Pakistanis will be another litmus test to gauge the worth of our leaders.

—The writer is a retired Brig and a security analyst.

Karzai Admits That US Plans Permanent Presence In Afghanistan

Karzai confirms US seeking permanent bases in Afghanistan

Kabul – Afghan President Hamid Karzai confirmed Tuesday that the United States are seeking to establish permanent bases in Afghanistan to target al-Qaeda and Taliban hideouts in the region.

Addressing a press conference in his fortified presidential palace, Karzai said that his government was negotiating with US officials over the legal and strategic details of the agreement.

‘We believe that a long-term relationship with the United States is in the interest of Afghanistan,’ Karzai said. He said he hoped for a relationship ‘that brings security to Afghanistan, that brings economic prosperity to Afghanistan and an end to violence.’

He did not give a date for finalizing the deal, but said any long-term partnership would need to be approved by the parliament and the Loya Jirga, the traditional assembly of tribal leaders.

He also stressed that any long-term US bases would not be ‘used as base against other countries and that Afghanistan is not a place from where our neighbours could be threatened.’

Last month, US Senator Lindsey Graham in an interview to NBC news said he wanted President Barack Obama’s administration to consider such permanent bases after NATO-led troops hand over security responsibility to Afghan forces, which is planned for late 2014.

The Republican senator said that the bases ‘would be a signal to Pakistan that the Taliban are never going to come back in Afghanistan,’ which ‘could change their behavior.’

Concerns are rising that the Afghanistan will not be ready to handle its own security by the handover date.

Recognizing the Language of Tyranny

AP

By Chris Hedges

Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.

This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed anddemocracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.

The tactic of speaking in two languages is as old as empire itself. The ancient Greeks and the Romans did it. So did the Spanish conquistadors, the Ottomans, the French and later the British. Those who inhabit exploited zones on the peripheries of empire see and hear the truth. But the cries of those who are exploited are ignored or demonized. The rage they express does not resonate with those trapped in self-delusion, those who continue to trust in the ultimate goodness of empire. This is the truth articulated in Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” and E.M. Forster’s “A Passage to India.” These writers understood that empire is about violence and theft. And the longer the theft continues, the more brutal empire becomes. The tyranny empire imposes on others it finally imposes on itself. The predatory forces unleashed by empire consume the host. Look around you.

The narratives we hear are those fabricated for us by the state, Hollywood and the press. These narratives are taught in our schools, preached in our pulpits and celebrated in war documentaries such as “Restrepo.” These narratives humanize and ennoble the enforcers of empire. The government, the military, the police and our intelligence agents are lionized. These control groups, we are assured, are the guardians of our virtues and our protectors. They produce our heroes. And those who challenge this narrative—who denounce the lies—become the enemy.

Those who administer empire—elected officials, corporate managers, generals and the celebrity courtiers who disseminate the propaganda—become very wealthy. They make immense fortunes whether they deliver the nightly news, sit on the boards of corporations, or rise, lavished with corporate endorsements, within the vast industry of spectacle and entertainment. They all pay homage, even in moments defined as criticism, to the essential goodness of corporate power. They shut out all real debate. They ignore flagrant injustices and abuse. They peddle the illusions that keep us passive and amused. But as our society is reconfigured into an oligarchic system, with a permanent and vast underclass, along with a shrinking and unstable middle class, these illusions lose their power. The language of pleasant deception must be replaced with the overt language of force. It is hard to continue to live in a state of self-delusion once unemployment benefits run out, once the only job available comes without benefits or a living wage, once the future no longer conforms to the happy talk that saturates our airwaves. At this point rage becomes the engine of response, and whoever can channel that rage inherits power. The manipulation of that rage has become the newest task of the corporate propagandists, and the failure of the liberal class to defend core liberal values has left its members with nothing to contribute to the debate.

The Belgian King Leopold, promising to abolish slavery and usher the Congolese into the “modern” era, was permitted by his European allies to form the Congo Free State in 1885. It was touted as a humanitarian gesture, as was the Spanish conquest of the Americas, as was our own occupation of Iraq. Leopold organized a ruthless force of native and foreign overseers—not unlike our own mercenary armies—to loot the Congo of ivory and rubber. By the time the Belgian monarch was done, some 5 million to 8 million Congolese had been slaughtered. It was the largest act of genocide in the modern era until the Nazi Holocaust. Leopold, even in the midst of his rampage, was lionized in Europe for his virtue. He was loathed in the periphery—as we are in Iraq and Afghanistan—where the Congolese and others understood what he was about. But these voices, like the voices of those we oppress, were almost never heard.

The Nazis, for whom the Holocaust was as much a campaign of plunder as it was a campaign to rid Europe of Jews, had two methods for greeting arrivals at their four extermination camps. If the transports came from Western Europe, the savage Ukrainian and Lithuanian guards, with their whips, dogs and clubs, were kept out of sight. The wealthier European Jews were politely ushered into an elaborate ruse, including fake railway stations complete with flower beds, until once stripped naked they became incapable of resistance and could be herded in rows of five under whips into the gas chambers. The Nazis knew that those who had not been broken, those who possessed a belief in their own personal empowerment, would fight back. When the transports came from the east, where Jews had long lived in fear, tremendous poverty and terror, there was no need for such theatrics. Mothers, fathers, the elderly and children, accustomed to overt repression and the language of command and retribution, were brutally driven from the transports by sadistic guards. The object was to create mass hysteria. The fate of the two groups was the same. It was the tactic that differed.

All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished, once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world of masters and serfs. It speaks to those who remain in a state of self-delusion in the comforting and familiar language of liberty, freedom, prosperity and electoral democracy. It speaks to the poor and the oppressed in the language of naked coercion. But, here too, all will end up in the same place.

Those trapped in the blighted inner cities that are our internal colonies or brutalized in our prison system, especially African-Americans, see what awaits us all. So do the inhabitants in southern West Virginia, where coal companies have turned hundreds of thousands of acres into uninhabitable and poisoned wastelands. Poverty, repression and despair in these peripheral parts of empire are as common as drug addiction and cancer. Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis and Palestinians can also tell us who we are. They know that once self-delusion no longer works it is the iron fist that speaks. The solitary and courageous voices that rise up from these internal and external colonies of devastation are silenced or discredited by the courtiers who serve corporate power. And even those who do hear these voices of dissent often cannot handle the truth. They prefer the Potemkin facade. They recoil at the “negativity.” Reality, especially when you grasp what corporations are doing in the name of profit to the planet’s ecosystem, is terrifying.

All tyrannies come endowed with their own peculiarities. This makes it hard to say one form of totalitarianism is like another. There are always enough differences to make us unsure that history is repeating itself. The corporate state does not have a Politburo. It does not dress its Homeland Security agents in jackboots. There is no raving dictator. American democracy—like the garishly painted train station at the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka—looks real even as the levers of power are in the hands of corporations. But there is one aspect the corporate state shares with despotic regimes and the collapsed empires that have plagued human history. It too communicates in two distinct languages, that is until it does not have to, at which point it will be too late.

Chris Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute and a weekly columnist for Truthdig. His latest book is “Death of the Liberal Class.”

Pox Americana

By Tom Engelhardt

TomDispatch.com

Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them. Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people. When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the U.S. should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a “tightrope” the Obama administration was walking. While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should “take sides” (as though we hadn’t done so decisively over the last decades).

With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping through the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s now-infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight. In its brief and disastrous life, it was used as a battering ram for regimes Washington loathed and offered as a soft pillow of future possibility to those it loved.

Still, make no mistake, there’s a story in a Washington stunned and “blindsided,” in an administration visibly toothless and in disarray as well as dismayed over the potential loss of its Egyptian ally, “the keystone of its Middle Eastern policy,” that’s so big it should knock your socks off. And make no mistake: part of the spectacle of the moment lies in watching that other great power of the Cold War era finally head ever so slowly and reluctantly for the exits. You know the one I’m talking about. In 1991, when the Soviet Union disappeared and the United States found itself the last superpower standing, Washington mistook that for a victory most rare. In the years that followed, in a paroxysm of self-satisfaction and amid clouds of self-congratulation, its leaders would attempt nothing less than to establish a global Pax Americana. Their breathtaking ambitions would leave hubris in the shade.

The results, it’s now clear, were no less breathtaking, even if disastrously so. Almost 20 years after the lesser superpower of the Cold War left the world stage, the “victor” is now lurching down the declinist slope, this time as the other defeated power of the Cold War era.

So don’t mark the end of the Cold War in 1991 as our conventional histories do. Mark it in the early days of 2011, and consider the events of this moment a symbolic goodbye-to-all-that for the planet’s “sole superpower.”

Abroads, Near and Far

The proximate cause of Washington’s defeat is a threatened collapse of its imperial position in a region that, ever since President Jimmy Carter proclaimed his Carter Doctrine in 1980, has been considered the crucible of global power, the place where, above all, the Great Game must be played out. Today, “people power” is shaking the “pillars” of the American position in the Middle East, while — despite the staggering levels of military might the Pentagon still has embedded in the area — the Obama administration has found itself standing by helplessly in grim confusion.

As a spectacle of imperial power on the decline, we haven’t seen anything like it since 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. Then, too, people power stunned the world. It swept like lightning across the satellite states of Eastern Europe, those “pillars” of the old Soviet empire, most of which had (as in the Middle East today) seemed quiescent for years.

It was an invigorating time. After all, such moments often don’t come once in a life, no less twice in 20 years. If you don’t happen to be in Washington, the present moment is proving no less remarkable, unpredictable, and earthshaking than its predecessor.

Make no mistake, either (though you wouldn’t guess it from recent reportage): these two moments of people power are inextricably linked. Think of it this way: as we witness the true denouement of the Cold War, it’s already clear that the “victor” in that titanic struggle, like the Soviet Union before it, mined its own positions and then was forced to watch with shock, awe, and dismay as those mines went off.

Among the most admirable aspects of the Soviet collapse was the decision of its remarkable leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, not to call the Red Army out of its barracks, as previous Soviet leaders had done in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, and Prague in 1968. Gorbachev’s conscious (and courageous) choice to let the empire collapse rather than employ violence to try to halt the course of events remains historically little short of unique.

Today, after almost two decades of exuberant imperial impunity, Washington finds itself in an uncomfortably unraveling situation. Think of it as a kind of slo-mo Gorbachev moment — without a Gorbachev in sight.

What we’re dealing with here is, in a sense, the story of two “abroads.” In 1990, in the wake of a disastrous war in Afghanistan, in the midst of a people’s revolt, the Russians lost what they came to call their “near abroad,” the lands from Eastern Europe to Central Asia that had made up the Soviet Empire. The U.S., being the wealthier and stronger of the two Cold War superpowers, had something the Soviets never possessed. Call it a “far abroad.” Now, in the midst of another draining, disastrous Afghan war, in the face of another people’s revolt, a critical part of its far abroad is being shaken to its roots.

In the Middle East, the two pillars of American imperial power and control have long been Egypt and Saudi Arabia — along, of course, with obdurate Israel and little Jordan. In previous eras, the chosen bulwarks of “stability” and “moderation,” terms much favored in Washington, had been the Shah of Iran in the 1960s and 1970s (and you remember his fate), and Saddam Hussein in the 1980s (and you remember his fate, too). In the larger region the Bush administration liked to call “the Greater Middle East” or “the arc of instability,” another key pillar has been Pakistan, a country now in destabilization mode under the pressure of a disastrous American war in Afghanistan.

And yet, without a Gorbachevian bone in its body, the Obama administration has still been hamstrung. While negotiating madly behind the scenes to retain power and influence in Egypt, it is not likely to call the troops out of the barracks. American military intervention remains essentially inconceivable. Don’t wait for Washington to send paratroopers to the Suez Canal as those fading imperial powers France and England tried to do in 1956. It won’t happen. Washington is too drained by years of war and economic bad times for that.

Facing genuine shock and awe (the people’s version), the Obama administration has been shaken. It has shown itself to be weak, visibly fearful, at a loss for what to do, and always several steps behind developing events. Count on one thing: its officials are already undoubtedly worried about a domestic political future in which the question (never good for Democrats) could be: Who lost the Middle East? In the meantime, their oh-so-solemn, carefully calibrated statements, still in command mode, couched in imperial-speak, and focused on what client states in the Middle East must do, might as well be spoken to the wind. Like the Cheshire Cat’s grin, only the rhetoric of the last decades seems to be left.

The question is: How did this happen? And the answer, in part, is: blame it on the way the Cold War officially ended, the mood of unparalleled hubris in which the United States emerged from it, and the unilaterialist path its leaders chose in its wake.

Let’s do a little reviewing.

Second-Wave Unilateralism

When the Soviet Union dissolved, Washington was stunned — the collapse was unexpected despite all the signs that something monumental was afoot — and then thrilled. The Cold War was over and we had won. Our mighty adversary had disappeared from the face of the Earth.

It didn’t take long for terms like “sole superpower” and “hyperpower” to crop up, or for dreams of a global Pax Americana to take shape amid talk about how our power and glory would outshine even the Roman and British empires. The conclusion that victory — as in World War II — would have its benefits, that the world was now our oyster, led to two waves of American “unilateralism” or go-it-alone-ism that essentially drove the car of state directly toward the nearest cliff and helped prepare the way for the sudden eruption of people power in the Middle East.

The second of those waves began with the fateful post-9/11 decision of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and company to “drain the global swamp” (as they put it within days of the attacks in New York and Washington). They would, that is, pursue al-Qaeda (and whomever else they decided to label an enemy) by full military means. That included the invasion of Afghanistan and the issuing of a with-us-or-against-us diktat to Pakistan, which reportedly included the threat to bomb that country “back to the Stone Age.” It also involved a full-scale militarization, Pentagonization, and privatization of American foreign policy, and above all else, the crushing of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the occupation of his country. All that and more came to be associated with the term “unilateralism,” with the idea that U.S. military power was so overwhelming Washington could simply go it alone in the world with any “coalition of the billing” it might muster and still get exactly what it wanted.

That second wave of unilateralism, now largely relegated to the memory hole of history by the mainstream media, helped pave the way for the upheavals in Tunisia, Egypt, and possibly elsewhere. As a start, from Pakistan to North Africa, the Bush administration’s Global War on Terror, along with its support for thuggish rule in the name of fighting al-Qaeda, helped radicalize the region. (Remember, for instance, that while Washington was pouring billions of dollars into the American-equipped Egyptian Army and the American-trained Egyptian officer corps, Bush administration officials were delighted to enlist the Mubarak regime as War on Terror warriors, using Egypt’s jails as places to torture terror suspects rendered off any streets anywhere.)

In the process, by sweeping an area from North Africa to the Chinese border that it dubbed the Greater Middle East into that War on Terror, the Bush administration undoubtedly gave the region a new-found sense of unity, a feeling that the fate of its disparate parts was somehow bound together.

In addition, Bush’s top officials, fundamentalists all when it came to U.S. military might and delusional fantasists when it came to what that military could accomplish, had immense power at its command: the power to destroy. They gave that power the snappy label “shock and awe,” and then used it to blow a hole in the heart of the Middle East by invading Iraq. In the process, they put that land, already on the ropes, onto life support.

It’s never really come off. In the wars, civil and guerrilla, set off by the American invasion and occupation, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis undoubtedly died and millions were sent into exile abroad or in their own land. Today, Iraq remains a barely breathing carcass of a nation, unable to deliver something as simple as electricity to its restive people or pump enough oil to pay for the disaster.

At the same time, the Bush administration sat on its hands while Israel had its way, taking Palestinian lands via its settlement policies and blowing its own hole in southern Lebanon with American backing (and weaponry) in the summer of 2006, and a smaller hole of utter devastation through Gaza in 2009. In other words, from Lebanon to Pakistan, the Greater Middle East was destabilized and radicalized.

The acts of Bush’s officials couldn’t have been rasher, or more destructive. They managed, for instance, to turn Afghanistan into the globe’s foremost narco-state, even as they gave new life to the Taliban — no small miracle for a movement that, in 2001, had lost any vestige of popularity. Most crucial of all, they and the Obama adminsitration after them spread the war irrevocably to populous, nuclear-armed Pakistan.

To their mad plans and projects, you can trace, at least in part, the rise to power of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza (the only significant result of Bush’s “democracy agenda,” since Iraq’s elections arrived, despite Bush administration opposition, due to the prestige of Ayatollah Ali Sistani). You can credit them with an Iran-allied Shiite government in Iraq and a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as the growth of a version of the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal borderlands. You can also credit them with the disorganization and impoverishment of the region. In summary, when the Bush unilateralists took control of the car of state, they souped it up, armed it to the teeth, and sent it careening off to catastrophe.

How hollow the neocon quip of 2003 now rings: “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.” But remember as well that, however much the Bush administration accomplished (in a manner of speaking), there was a wave of unilateralism, no less significant, that preceded it.

Our Financial Jihadis

Though we all know this first wave well, we don’t usually think of it as “unilateralist,” or in terms of the Middle East at all, or speak about it in the same breath with the Bush administration and its neocon supporters. I’m talking about the globalists, sometimes called the neoliberals, who were let loose to do their damnedest in the good times of the post-Cold-War Clinton years. They, too, were dreamy about organizing the planet and about another kind of American power that was never going to end: economic power. (And, of course, they would be called back to power in Washington in the Obama years to run the U.S. economy into the ground yet again.) They believed deeply that we were the economic superpower of the ages, and they were eager to create their own version of a Pax Americana. Intent on homogenizing the world by bringing American economic power to bear on it, their version of shock-and-awe tactics involved calling in institutions like the International Monetary Fund to discipline developing countries into a profitable kind of poverty and misery.

In the end, as they gleefully sliced and diced subprime mortgages, they drove a different kind of hole through the world. They were financial jihadis with their own style of shock-and-awe tactics and they, too, proved deeply destructive, even if in a different way. The irony was that, in the economic meltdown of 2008, they finally took down the global economy they had helped “unify.” And that occured just as the second wave of unilateralists were facing the endgame of their dreams of global domination. In the process, for instance, Egypt, the most populous of Arab countries, was economically neoliberalized and — except for a small elite who made out like the bandits they were — impoverished.

Talk about “creative destruction”! The two waves of American unilateralists nearly took down the planet. They let loose demons of every sort, even as they ensured that the world’s first experience of a sole superpower would prove short indeed. Heap onto the rubble they left behind the global disaster of rising prices for the basics — food and fuel — and you have a situation so combustible that no one should have been surprised when a Tunisian match lit it aflame.

That this moment began in the Greater Middle East should be no surprise either. That it might not end there should not be ruled out. This looks like, but may not be, an “Islamic” moment. If the second wave of American unilateralists ensured that this would start as a Middle Eastern phenomenon, conditions for people’s-power movements exist elsewhere as well.

The Gates of Hell

Nobody today remembers how, in September 2004, Amr Musa, the head of the Arab League, described the post-invasion Iraqi situation. “The gates of hell,” he said, “are open in Iraq.” This was not the sort of language we were used to hearing in the U.S., no matter what you felt about the war. It read — and probably still reads — like an over-the-top metaphor, but it could as easily be taken as a realistic depiction of what happened not just in Iraq, but in the Greater Middle East and, to some extent, in the world.

Our unilateralists twice drove blithely through those gates, imagining that they were the gates to paradise. The results are now clear for all to see.

And don’t forget, the gates of hell remain open. Keep your eyes on at least two places, starting with Saudi Arabia, about which practically no one is yet writing, though one of these days its situation could turn out to be shakier than now imagined. Certainly, whoever controls the Saudi stock market thought so, because as the situation grew more tumultuous in Egypt, Saudi stocks took a nosedive. With Saudi Arabia, you couldn’t get more basic when it comes to U.S. policy or the fate of the planet, given the amount of oil still under its desert sands. And then don’t forget the potentially most frightening country of all, Pakistan, where the final gasp of America’s military unilateralists is still playing itself out as if on a reel of film that just won’t end.

Yes, the Obama administration may squeeze by in the region for a while. Perhaps the Egyptian high command — half of which seems to have been in Washington at the moment the you-know-what hit the fan in their own country — will take over and perhaps they will suppress people power again for a period. Who knows?

One thing is clear inside the gates of hell: whatever wild flowers or weeds turn out to be capable of growing in the soil tilled so assiduously by the victors of 1991, Pax Americana proved to be a Pox Americana for the region and the world.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com.

“I am Sorry but I Have Kids to Feed”

something that we are certain to see much more of in the near future

“I am Sorry but I Have Kids to Feed”, posted with vodpod

Two dead Pakistani were intelligence operatives: Report

The controversy over the killing of two Pakistanis by a US consulate employee in Lahore took a new turn with a media report stating that the dead men were believed to be “intelligence operatives”.The men shot and killed by US official Raymond Davis in Lahore on January 27 “belonged to the security establishment” and “found the activities of the American official detrimental to our national security”, an unnamed security official told The Express Tribune newspaper. 

The government’s “tough stance” on the issue was also a “reaction to the attempts by certain elements in Washington to implicate the country’s top spy agency, the ISI, in the November 2008 Mumbai attacks”, the official was quoted as saying.

“The government is very angry with the decision of an American court to summon top ISI officials in connections with the Mumbai attacks,” the official said.

Inter-Services Intelligence agency chief Lt Gen Ahmed Shuja Pasha and Jamaat-ud-Dawah chief Hafiz Muhammad Saeed have been issued notices by the court in Brooklyn after relatives of two Jewish victims of the Mumbai attacks filed a lawsuit last year.

Davis had told investigators that he acted in self-defence after the two armed men tried to rob him.

Police officials in Lahore had earlier said evidence gathered by them suggested the dead men were robbers.

A case has also been filed for a robbery allegedly committed by the two men shortly before they were killed.

The security official, who asked not to be identified as he was not authorised to speak to the media, said the President, the Prime Minister and army chief discussed the issue of Davis in a meeting last week.

The three leaders “thought it was advisable to resist the US pressure on the Raymond Davis issue and believed the detained American national should not be released at this stage”, the official was quoted as saying.

Officials in the Foreign Office confirmed the government’s position on the Davis issue but said he would eventually be released once there is a “firm assurance from the US that such incidents would not recur”, the report said.

The government is contemplating to ask the US to waive Davis’s immunity and try him in an American court, the officials said.

A US Embassy official told the daily the American government had “no plans yet to agree on such a step”.

In a related development, the Pakistan government has barred three more US nationals from travelling out of the country following allegations that they were in the vehicle that crushed a man to death in Lahore immediately after Davis shot and killed the two men.

The Punjab government has sought assistance from the federal government in securing the custody of the three American men accused of killing the third Pakistan while they were rushing to help Davis.

“We have sought access to get custody of these accused because they are wanted by the Punjab police in connection to the Raymond Davis case,” said Pervez Rashid, spokesman for the Punjab Chief Minister.

“The interior ministry has placed the names of the three Americans, including the driver of the US consulate in Lahore, on the Exit Control List,¿ an Interior Ministry official was quoted as saying by The Express Tribune.

The Exit Control List empowers the government to prevent any person from leaving Pakistan.

The Interior Ministry, through the Foreign Office, has written to the US consulate, asking for the three Americans to be handed over to Punjab Police, the Interior Ministry official said.

He declined to name the three Americans, saying it might compromise the investigation. The US Embassy said it was not aware of these developments.

“We have not received any such information on the ssue as yet,” said Courtney Beale, acting spokesperson for the Embassy.

Davis is currently in police custody in Lahore and Pakistani leaders have rejected US demands for him to be released on the ground that he enjoys diplomatic immunity.