Vietnam John Kerry vs Syria John Kerry "Criminal Hypocrisy"

42 years after Vietnam testimony, Kerry returns to Congress with Syria plea. In 1971, a young Naval lieutenant named John Kerry pleaded with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to stop a war. 

Four decades later, Kerry will return to that same committee table, this time as Secretary of State, to advocate for U.S. military action in Syria.

Top Officials Argued for Use of Force Against Syria. Sec. of Defense Hagel, Sec. of State Kerry and Joint Chiefs Chair Dempsey make the administration's case for the use of force against Syria at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Failed States Are A Western Myth

The Concept Of The Failed State Is Meaningless. It Was Invented As A Rationale To Impose US Interests On Less Powerful Nations

By Elliott Ross

In the same week that the investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill spoke of the need for the US to "take a humility pill", we've been subjected to precisely the opposite – yet another instalment of Foreign Policy magazine's annual Failed States Index, complete with accompanying "postcards from hell" purporting to show what it's like "living on the edge in the world's worst places".

Quibbling with the many bizarre claims of the index is tempting (Kenya is "less stable" than Syria, we learn), but in the end such gripes only give credibility to this tedious yearly exercise in faux-empirical cultural bigotry. For anyone interested in actually finding out about places such as Yemen or Uganda, the index is probably the last place you'd want to go. But what's more interesting, and more helpful in understanding what the index really does, is to grasp that the very concept of the "failed state" comes with its own story.

The organisation that produces the index, the Fund for Peace, is the kind of outfit John le Carré thinks we should all be having nightmares about. Its director, JJ Messner (who puts together the list), is a former lobbyist for the private military industry. None of the raw data behind the index is made public. So why on earth would an organisation like this want to keep the idea of the failed state prominent in public discourse?

The main reason is that the concept of the failed state has never existed outside a programme for western intervention. It has always been a way of constructing a rationale for imposing US interests on less powerful nations.

Luckily, we can pinpoint exactly where it all began – right down to the words on the page. The failed state was invented in late 1992 by Gerald Helman and Steven Ratner, two US state department employees, in an article in – you guessed it – Foreign Policy, suggestively entitled Saving failed states. With the end of the cold war, they argued, "a disturbing new phenomenon is emerging: the failed nation state, utterly incapable of sustaining itself as a member of the international community". And with that, the beast was born.

What followed in the essay was a grumpy version of the history of the "third world" after 1945, in which Helman and Ratner lamented that the claims of "self-determination" made by colonised peoples had ever been established as a major principle for organising international affairs. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Helman and Ratner argued, the time for fripperies such as state sovereignty for third world nations was over. What these failed states needed was the ever-benign "guardianship" of the western world. We westerners would keep hold of our sovereignty, of course; they would make do with something called "survivability" instead, and be grateful for it.

Helman and Ratner's piece elaborates on a well-known, but not much read, UN report by then general secretary Boutros Boutros-Ghali, which had come out a few months earlier. In his Agenda for Peace, Boutros-Ghali recommended an expanded role for the UN in resolving international crises, but insisted that state sovereignty remain an inviolable principle. This was pretty much the opposite of what Helman and Ratner wanted, but if they insisted that they were in full agreement with him, then who's to quarrel with that?

Back in the 90s, few political scientists showed any interest in the concept of failed states, and binned it on arrival. The problem was that it didn't offer any insight as a mode of analysis: a civil war is a civil war. A famine is a famine. A political crisis is a political crisis. A failed state is just rhetoric without a substantial theoretical or historical basis.

Rejected by scholars, the idea of the failed state has instead found a home within the noisy space of shallow political punditry that forms much of the national conversation. Foreign Policy offered it something of a second life by publishing its annual index from 2005 onwards, at a time when the unfolding disaster of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, both of which had been justified as "humanitarian interventions", was painfully clear.

Unsurprisingly, given that the term was custom made to advocate for precisely such interference by the US overseas, the term also made an appearance in the literature drafted between 2001 and 2005 that created the new international norm of the responsibility to protect (R2P), a doctrine whose application by the international community so far can best be described as highly selective.

There's nothing empirical or objective about the Failed States Index, however many "stability" metrics they try to squash together. It doesn't much matter where a particular country shows up in a given year. Putting history in a league table is plainly absurd, and – when it boils down to it – the index argues the same thing every year: that the US should be a kind of global regulator to which the rest of the world must submit.

It offers a version of the world to the American public that bears no relation to reality, but works very well as a way of rationalising overseas interventions past and present.

The War On Syria Planned 2 Years Before “The Arab Spring”

By Gearóid Ó Colmáin

In an interview with the French TV station LCP, former French minister for Foreign Affairs Roland Dumas said:

‘’ I’m going to tell you something. I was in England two years before the violence in Syria on other business. I met with top British officials, who confessed to me that they were preparing something in Syria.

This was in Britain not in America. Britain was organizing an invasion of rebels into Syria. They even asked me, although I was no longer minister for foreign affairs, if I would like to participate.

Naturally, I refused, I said I’m French, that doesn’t interest me.’’

Dumas went on give the audience a quick lesson on the real reason for the war that has now claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people.

‘’This operation goes way back. It was prepared, preconceived and planned… in the region it is important to know that this Syrian regime has a very anti-Israeli stance.

Consequently, everything that moves in the region- and I have this from the former Israeli prime minister who told me ‘we’ll try to get on with our neighbours but those who don’t agree with us will be destroyed.

It’s a type of politics, a view of history, why not after all. But one should know about it.’’

Dumas is a retired French foreign minister who is obliged to use discretion when revealing secrets which could affect French foreign policy. That is why he made the statement ‘I am French, that doesn’t interest me’.  He could not reveal France’s role in the British plan as he would be exposing himself to prosecution for revealing state secrets.

There have been many disinformation agents in the British and French press, many of them well known ‘leftist’ war correspondents and commentators, who have tried to pretend that Israel secretly supports Assad.  Those who make such arguments are either stupid, ignorant or deliberate disinformation agents of NATO and Israel.

Israel’s support for Al Qaeda militants in Syria has even been admitted by the mainstream press. For example, Germany’s Die Welt newspaper published a report on June 12th on Israel’s medical treatment of the Al Qaeda fighters.

Israel planned this war of annihilation years ago in accordance with the Yinon Plan, which advocates balkanization of all states that pose a threat to Israel. The Zionist entity is using Britain and France to goad the reluctant Obama administration into sending more American troops to their death in Syria on behalf of Tel Aviv.

Of all the aggressor states against Syria, Israel has been the quietest from the start. That is because Laurent Fabius, Francois Holland, William Hague and David Cameron are doing their bidding by attempting to drag Israel’s American Leviathan into another ruinous war so that Israel can get control of the Middle East’s energy reserves, eventually replacing the United States as the ruling state in the world. It has also been necessary for Tel Aviv to remain silent so as not to expose their role in the ‘revolutions’, given the fact that the Jihadist fanatics don’t realize they are fighting for Israel.

This is the ideology of Zionism which cares no more for Jews than it does for its perceived enemies.   The Jewish colony is determined to become a ruling state in the Middle East in the insane delusion that this will enable it to replace the United States as a global hegemon, once the US collapses fighting Israel’s wars.

Israeli Prime Minister once told American talk show host Bill Maher that the reason why Israel always wins short conflicts, while the United States gets bogged down in endless wars. ‘’ The secret is that we have America’’, he said.

But Israel is itself slowly collapsing. If one excludes the enslaved Palestinian population, the Jewish state still has the highest level of poverty in the developed world with more and more Jews choosing to leave the ‘promised’ land, a garrison state led by mad men, an anti-Semitic entity threatening to engulf the world in war and destruction. Israel cares no more about its own working class Jews than any other ethnic community.

In fact, if the Likudnik crooks running the Israeli colony get their way, working class Israelis will be among the first to pay as they are conscripted to fight terrorists created by their own government. With orthodox Jews protesting in the streets of New York against Israel and Haredi Jewish minority opposing Israel’s rampant militarism, Zionism is coming under increased attack from Jewish religious authorities and non-Zionist Jews both inside and outside of the occupied territories.

This is not the first time that Roland Dumas has spoken out against wars of aggression waged by successive French regimes. In 2011 he revealed that he had been asked by the United States when he was foreign minister in the Mitterrand administration to organize the bombing of Libya. On that occasion the French refused to cooperate.  Dumas, a lawyer by profession, offered to defend Colonel Gaddafi, at the International Criminal Court in the event of his arrest by Nato.

Dumas was also vocal in condemning France’s brutal neo-colonial bombing of the Ivory Coast earlier in 2011, were death squads and terrorists similar to those later deployed in Libya and Syria were unleashed upon the Ivoirian population in order to install a IMF puppet dictator Alassane Quattara in power. Gbagbo was described as one of the greatest African leaders of the past 20 years by Jean Ziegler, sociologist and former member of the Advisory Committee of the UN Human Rights Council.

Gbagbo had plans to nationalize banks and wrest control of the country’s currency from the colonial finance institutions in Paris. He also wanted to roll back many of the worst effects of IMF restructuring by nationalizing industries and creating a functioning, universal free health service. All of this threatened the interests of French corporations in the former French colony. So, the Parisian oligarchy went to work to find a suitable replacement as caretaker of their Ivoirian colony.

They sent in armed terrorist gangs, or ‘rebel’s in the doublespeak of imperialism, who murdered all before them while the French media blamed president Gbagbo for the violence that ensued. Gbagbo and Gaddafi had opposed Africom, the Pentagon’s plan to recolonize Africa. That was another reason for the  2011 bombing of their two African countries.

The formula is always the same. Imperialism backs ‘rebels’, whenever its interests are threatened by regimes that love their country more than foreign corporations.  One should not forgot that during the Spanish Civil War of 1936, General Franco and his cronies were also ‘rebels’ and they, like their counterparts in Libya in 2011, were bombed to power by foreign powers, replacing a progressive, republican administration with fascism.

There are pro-Israeli fanatics in France who have used the analogy of the Spanish Civil War as justification for intervention in Libya and Syria. The pseudo-philosopher Henry Bernard Levy is one of them.  Of course, the ignoramus Levy doesn’t realize that the reason France, England and the USA did not officially intervene in the Spanish Civil War is because they were covertly helping the ‘rebels’ from the start. They enabled arms shipments to the Francoist ‘rebels’ while preventing arms deliveries to the Spanish government, who, like Syria today, were helped by Moscow. Anyone who has studied the Spanish Civil War knows that all the imperialist countries wanted Franco as a bulwark against communism.

There is nothing imperialism loves more than a rebel without a cause. What imperialism hates, however, are revolutionaries. That is why the ‘rebels’ which imperialism sends into other countries to colonize them on behalf of foreign banks and corporations, have to be marketed as ‘revolutionaries’ in order to assure the support of the Monty Python brigade of petty-bourgeois, ‘ leftist’ dupes such as Democracy Now! and their ilk.

Dumas is not the only top French official to denounce the New World Order.  Former French ambassador to Syria Michel Raimbaud wrote a book in 2012  entitled ‘Le Soudan dans tous les états’, where he revealed how Israel planned and instigated a civil war in South Sudan in order to balkanize a country led by a pro-Palestinian government. He also exposed the pro-Israeli media groups and ‘human rights’ NGOS who created the ‘humanitarian’ narrative calling for military intervention by the United States in the conflict.

The subject was covered extensively by African investigative journalist Charles Onana in his 2009 book, Al-Bashir & Darfour LA CONTRE ENQUÊTE.

There are many more retired French officials who are speaking out about the ruinous policies of this French government, including the former head of French domestic intelligence Yves Bonnet. There have also been reports of dissent in the French armed forces and intelligence apparatus.

After the assassination of Colonel Gaddafi in October 2011, the former French ambassador to Libya Christian Graeff told French radio station France Culture that it was responsible for the diffusion of lies and war propaganda on behalf of Nato throughout the war.  Graeff also warned the broadcasters that such disinformation could only work on the minds of serfs but not in a country of free minds.

The power of the Israeli lobby in France is a subject rarely discussed in polite circles. In France there is a law against questioning or denial of the holocaust. However, denial of the Korean holocaust, Guatemalan holocaust, Palestinian holocaust, Indonesian holocaust and the dozens of other US/Israeli supported genocides is not only perfectly legal but is the respectable norm.

The same lobby which introduced the Loi Gayssot in 1990, effectively ending freedom of expression in France, would also like to ban any independent investigations of genocides whose narratives they have written, such as the Rwanda genocide, where Israel played a key role in supporting the ‘rebels’ led by Paul Kagame, who invaded Rwanda from Uganda from 1991 to 1994, leading to the genocide of both Tutus and Tutsis. Many serious scholars have written about the Rwandan genocide, which the Israel lobby repeatedly uses as a case study to justify ‘humanitarian’ intervention by Western powers.  The Zionist thought police would like to see such authors prosecuted for ‘negating’ imperialism’s disgusting lies on African conflicts.

Now, the Israeli Lobby is forcing the (their) French government to prosecute twitter messages which the lobby deems ‘anti-Semitic’. This is one further step towards the creation of a totalitarian state where any criticism of imperialism, foreign wars, racism, oppression, perhaps eventually capitalism itself could fall under the rubric of ‘anti-Semitism’.

These people are sick, and those who cow down to them are sicker. Perhaps the etymology of sickness, a word cognate with the German Sicherheit (security) according to dictionary.com, is not a coincidence. For what is particularly sick about our society is the cult of security,  endless surveillance, ubiquitous cameras, the cult of the all seeing eye, the prurient gaze as part of the incessant discourse on terrorism by those who specialize in the training of the very terrorists they claim to be protecting us from.  Whether or not the words security and sickness are linguistically related, they are certainly cognate in a philosophical sense.

Roland Dumas and others like him should be highly commended for having to guts to say what so many others are too morally corrupt, too weak and cowardly to admit.

As the French government and its media agencies drum up hysteria for war on Syria, Roland Dumas, now in the twilight of his years, is warning people of the consequences of not understanding where Israel is leading  the world. Will enough people heed the warning?

The Plague Of Sectarianism

What Is Fueling The Sunni-Shia Divide In The Middle East?

Courtesy Of Al-Jazeera

Is the ongoing war in Syria fueling a sectarian conflict beyond its borders? As Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shia Muslim movement, fights to defend the Assad regime, Sunni clerics, in and outside the country, are calling on their followers to join the fight against it. Beyond Syria, sectarian tensions are rising in Lebanon and Egypt after a series of violent clashes and murders. We look at what’s driving sectarianism in the Middle East - politics or religion?

Syria’s 6 Simultaneous Conflicts

Rami G. Khouri writes:


The war in Syria is so enduring and vexing precisely because it is such a multilayered conflict, comprising at least six separate battles taking place at the same time:

First, it is a domestic citizen revolt against the Assad family regime that has ruled Syria for 43 years. This aspect of the conflict reflects a widespread spirit of citizen activism for freedom, rights and dignity that continues to define much of the Arab world today. After the nonviolent demonstrations that erupted across the country in spring 2011 elicited a violent military response from the regime, this political conflict quickly became a militarized war.

Second, the armed battle for control of Syria reignited the second layer of conflict, which has defined the region since the 1950s – the Arab cold war between assorted regional forces that keep shifting over time, but can most easily be described as conservative versus radical, or capitalist versus socialist, or royalist versus republican, or Islamo-monarchist versus Arab nationalist, or pro-Western versus anti-Western, though none of these simplistic black-and-white dichotomies is fully accurate. At its simplest, this Arab cold war for decades has been led on the one side by Saudi Arabia and its conservative allies, and on the other by governments such as those in Syria, Egypt or Iraq at various moments.

The third layer of conflict in Syria is the old Iranian-Arab rivalry, recently also often defined as a Shiite-Sunni rivalry. This is symbolized by the Iranian government’s alliance with Syria since 1979, and recently including the close structural ties between Iran and Hezbollah (or, more accurately, the ties between Hezbollah and the institution of the Wali al-Faqih, or the supreme leader, in Iran).

Iran’s strategic links with both Syria and Hezbollah have been among the few foreign policy achievements of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, so the Iranian, Syrian and Hezbollah leaderships will battle hard to maintain those mutual benefits that all of them derive from their relationships.

The fourth conflict taking place in Syria is the renewed but more limited version of the Cold War between the United States and Russia (with other players such as China and assorted European states hanging around to pick up energy contracts and other gains). At its most simple, this renewed Son of the Cold War sees Russia taking a determined stand in Syria to prevent the United States from unilaterally deciding which Arab leaders go and which ones stay, while also burnishing its renewed credentials as a global power. Almost a quarter of a century after the end of the original Cold War, Russia is trying to recalibrate global power relations, formally closing the “post-Cold War” era in which the U.S. was the world’s sole superpower in a unipolar world.

The fifth conflict in Syria – like the domestic citizen revolt against autocracy that reflects a regional trend – is the centurylong tension between the power of the centralized modern Arab developmental and security state and the forces of disintegration and fragmentation along ethnic, religious, sectarian, national and tribal lines. These subnational, ancient and primordial identities defined Arab societies long before the imposition of the modern Arab state, and are always there to reaffirm themselves when that state fails to function efficiently and meet citizen needs.

And the sixth and most recent strain of conflict in Syria is between the forces of Al-Qaeda-inspired Salafist fanatic militants, such as the Nusra Front, and mainstream opposition groups fighting to overthrow the Assad family regime, such as the Muslim Brotherhood or broader, more secular groups, such as the Syrian National Opposition Coalition. Hysteria has typically gripped some analysts in the region and in the West as they fret over the prospect of the Nusra Front and others like them taking control of all or parts of post-Assad Syria – an impossible prospect, in my view.

So what we are witnessing in and around Syria is a great deal more complicated than spillover into neighboring countries or a continuation of the Sunni-Shiite rivalry.

How The West Fueled The Ever-Growing Carnage In Syria

The U.S. Meant To Open The Gates Of Hell In Syria

Nicolas J.S. Davies writes in AlterNet that The actions of the United States and its allies in Syria have only led to escalating violence and chaos.

On Tuesday March 27th 2013, Kofi Annan gave  a speech at the Graduate Institute in Geneva.  In his usual careful and diplomatic tone, Annan spoke firmly against Western calls for more direct military intervention in Syria. 

"Further militarization of the conflict, I'm not sure that is the way to help the Syrian people," Annan said, "They are waiting for the killing to stop.  You find some people far away from Syria are the ones very keen for putting in weapons.  My own view is that as late as it is we have to find a way of pouring water on the fire rather than the other way around."

 

Like many who seek peace in Syria, Annan looks back on the "Action Group for Syria" agreement that he brokered in Geneva on June 30th 2012 as a foundation for peace that was promptly squandered by the United States and its allies.  In Geneva, all five Permanent Members of the UN Security Council signed on to a plan that would lead to free elections in Syria, with a transitional government of national unity including members of the existing government and the opposition.  The critical factor which made agreement possible was that the U.S. and its allies dropped their demand for the removal of President Assad as a precondition for the transition to begin.

 

As Annan wrote in a  Financial Times op-ed as he resigned his post as UN envoy a month later, "We left the meeting believing a Security Council resolution endorsing the group's decision was assured… Instead, there has been finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council."

 

A few days after the Geneva agreement,  Russia circulated a draft resolution in the Security Council as Annan expected.  But, instead of honoring the commitments they made in Geneva, the U.S., U.K. and France rejected it.   They drafted a rival resolution containing all the elements they had dropped in Geneva and which had previously prevented consensus: automatic triggers for sanctions; no commitment to pressure rebel militias to comply; and the invocation of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter as a pretext for future military action.

 

With the Security Council once again deadlocked, Saudi Arabia sponsored  a version of the West's resolution in the UN General Assembly, calling for Assad to step down and for sanctions if he did not.  The resolution seemed likely to fail, with Brazil, India, South Africa and much of the developing world lined up against it, but a watered down version was passed.

 

The CIA has since stepped up its support to the rebels, providing satellite intelligence on Syrian military deployments and managing  arms shipments from the Persian Gulf and Croatia via Turkey and Jordan.  Predictably, the bloodshed has only increased on both sides.  March was probably the deadliest month since the war began.  In his speech in Geneva, Kofi Annan called the current UN estimate of 70,000 Syrians killed "a gross under-estimation."  

 

In the early days of the conflict, UN casualty figures reflected  unsubstantiated and probably exaggerated reports from the Syrian opposition and their allies in the Western media.  Since then, the UN has held down its estimates as the killing has escalated and the real slaughter has almost certainly now surpassed the rebel propaganda, with the rebels themselves committing their fair share of it.

 

Norwegian General Robert Mood echoed Kofi Annan's analysis in  a recent interview with the BBC World Service'sHardtalk program.  Mood led the 300-member military observer mission that went into Syria in April 2012 to monitor the ceasefire that was the first step in Annan's six-point peace plan.  

 

Mood prematurely suspended that mission in June 2012 because the ceasefire had failed to take hold and his unarmed observer teams were being fired on and threatened by hostile crowds.  He said that the operation could only resume if all parties to the conflict were committed to the safety and freedom of movement of the observers.  "The government has expressed that very clearly in the last couple of days," Mood said. "I have not seen the same clear statement from the opposition yet."

 

Reflecting on his mission 9 months later, General Mood told Hardtalk's Steven Sackur, "There was an opening, but that opening was not used, because… the kind of international leadership that we would need was not there.  That leadership could have been Russia, China, the U.S. coming together and at least agreeing on a joint message so that the government in Damascus and the key people in the Free Syrian Army and the opposition groups were given the same message.  That message could have been one option to both of them that we will push forward with a plan for bringing Syria out of this terrible violence and onto a political track - a strong message to both the government and the opposition that we will accept nothing else.  If such a message had come both from all of them in the P5 and the Security Council together and united, I do believe still today that it would have had a strong impact."

 

Sackur asked Mood about the differences between the West and Russia and China over President Assad's role during a political transition.  Mood explained, "This is how small and how big the differences between the parties were.  In my mind at that time, it would have been possible to lead Syria through a transition supported by a united Security Council with Assad as part of the transition.  I believe there was an opening for that and I believe there was a willingness to do that.  The insistence on the removal of President Assad as a start of the process led them into a corner where the strategic picture gave them no way out whatsoever…"

 

The more one studies the actions of the United States and its allies throughout this crisis, the more they seem to have been designed only to lead to ever-escalating violence.  This raises the inescapable question whether, in fact, the slaughter and chaos taking place in Syria are in fact the intended result of U.S. policy rather than the tragic but unintended result of its failure, as Western propaganda would have us believe.

 

In stark contrast to cautious statements by U.S. officials, their actual policy appears to have consistently fostered the militarization and escalation of the crisis and to have undermined every peace initiative.  In fact, their public statements may be only a smokescreen for a darker, more cynical policy:

 

- As the Arab League tried to broker a ceasefire in December 2011,  ex-CIA officer Philip Giraldi reported that unmarked NATO planes were flying fighters and weapons from Libya to a "Free Syrian Army" base in Turkey; British and French special forces were training Syrian fighters; and the CIA was providing communications equipment and intelligence.  Giraldi wrote, "Syrian government claims that it is being assaulted by rebels who are armed, trained and financed by foreign governments are more true than false."  

 

- As Kofi Annan launched his peace plan in April 2012, the U.S. joined France and other allies at a  series of so-called "Friends of Syria" summits, where they promised unconditional political support, weapons and money to their Syrian proxies, making sure that they would not comply with the ceasefire that was the first step in the Annan peace plan.

 

- After finally dropping the precondition of Assad's departure and agreeing publicly to Annan's "Action Group for Syria" proposal at the end of June 2012, the Western powers returned to the UN Security Council and reasserted all their preconditions, killing the plan before it could get off the ground.

 

- The supply of weapons and fighters to the rebels has increased steadily since then.  Saudi judges have sent  Arab Spring protesters to fight and die in Syria instead of to prison.  Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Libya and other Arab monarchies send weapons, money and fighters.  The Saudis fund shipments of European weapons from Croatia to Jordan to skirt the EU arms embargo.  And the  CIA provides military training to Syrian and foreign fighters in Jordan. 

 

- Now, as if the U.S. has not been covertly fueling the conflict all along, the U.S. government is debating more open military support to the rebels. 

 

To paraphrase an old riddle: "Are we governed by clever people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it?"  In this case, did the United States mean to open the gates of Hell in Syria, or did it just blunder into this mess?

 

Unfortunately U.S. policymakers have a dismal record of combining the worst elements of both.  As the U.S. Congress debated war in Iraq in 2002, there were clever people in Washington who knew that  chemical and biological weapons do not remain potent for more than ten years and that there was no evidence that Iraq had revived the banned weapons programs it dismantled in 1991.  Senator Bob Graham, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, voted against the war authorization and begged his colleagues to read the classified National Intelligence Estimate, instead of the fake summary of it that they were given "to strengthen the case for going to war", as one of its authors, the CIA's Paul Pillar, has since admitted.  There were other "clever" people in Washington who knew as much as Senator Graham but voted for war anyway: "clever people putting us on."

 

But the "clever people putting us on" were really as deluded as the "imbeciles who really meant it".  They saw the WMD fairy tale for what it was, but they failed to see the inevitable consequences of their own actions - not just for the people of Iraq, who they were quite prepared to sacrifice, but for the U.S. interests they hoped to advance.

 

As General Mood told Hardtalk, "It is fairly easy to use the military tool, because, when you launch the military tool in classical interventions, something will happen and there will be results.  The problem is that the results are almost all the time different than the political results you were aiming for when you decided to launch it.  So the other position, arguing that it is not the role of the international community, neither coalitions of the willing nor the UN Security Council for that matter, to change governments inside a country, is also a position that should be respected…"

 

As Mood said, "there will be results."  The use of military force, overt or covert, will kill and injure a lot of people, because that is what modern weapons are designed to do.  And sufficient violence covertly unleashed within a society will break down law and order and turn groups of people against each other.  U.S. military leaders understand this perfectly well based on decades of experience.

 

But, despite catastrophic failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the "NATO rebellion" in Libya provided the U.S. and its allies with a new model for "regime change."  NATO, Qatar and Saudi Arabia unleashed  a war that killed at least 25,000 people and plunged the  most highly developed country in Africa into an orgy of ethnic cleansing and unending chaos.  They succeeded in butchering Colonel Gaddafi and installing a comprador regime to govern Libya's oil industry, but NATO-trained militias are still fighting each other for control of many parts of the country and have exported violence and militia rule to neighboring countries, including Mali, as well as to Syria.

 

Syria is a more densely populated, more complex country than Libya, with powerful military forces and a relatively popular government with decades of experience in managing the diverse elements that make up Syrian society.  In December 2011, as NATO flew in fighters and weapons from Libya, 55% of the population told pollsters  they still supported the government.  That has surely eroded as the Syrian military has shelled and bombed its people, but that does not mean that people now support the foreign-backed rebels.  What most Syrians want is exactly what Kofi Annan, General Mood and the current UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi have been trying to bring them: a peaceful political transition.  But U.S., British, French, Saudi, Qatari and Turkish officials could not resist the temptation to adapt the Libyan "regime change" model to Syria, knowing full well all along that this would unleash an even bloodier and more destructive conflict.  There seems to be no limit to the horror that our leaders will inflict on the people of Syria to get rid of President Assad.

 

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has committed serial aggression, isolating, demonizing, dividing and destroying Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and now Syria.  In each case, it has cited higher motives and good intentions, even as it concealed its own covert role in igniting, fueling and militarizing internal conflicts.   As Harold Pinter said, "It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good.  It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis."

 

If post-war conditions permit, countries destroyed by U.S. aggression and covert war are recruited to join their more submissive neighbors as entry-level members of the U.S.-led capitalist world.  Some American politicians appear to genuinely believe that this justifies the violence and slaughter that makes it possible, even though, as General Mood said, "the results are almost all the time different than the political results you were aiming for."

 

The folly and savagery of destroying country after country like this stems from a fundamental misperception of the post-Cold War world that is rooted in fantasies like  Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History" theory.  U.S. leaders imagined that, with the demise of the U.S.S.R., they stood at the threshold of a world made in America's image.  Politics and history had passed away, to be supplanted by management, marketing and finance.  They would run the world as a giant business enterprise, of which they would be the executives and majority shareholders.

 

But this new global dictatorship, like all dictatorships, faced the problem of what to do with dissidents who still resisted integration into America's informal global empire.  By 1991, this seemed to have been reduced to a tantalizingly finite number of countries that the new American "superpower" could surely marginalize and, if necessary, destroy: Albania; Angola; Burma; Cambodia; Cuba; Iran; Iraq; Laos; Libya; North Korea; Palestine; Somalia; Syria; Vietnam; Yugoslavia; and, last but not least, China.

 

Twenty years later, many of those resistant regimes have been dealt with.  But the United States is no closer to its cherished vision of a unipolar world.  Their places on America's global "kill list" have been taken by newly independent governments even more solidly committed to resisting American imperialism, including popular democratic regimes in Latin America, which the U.S. has "plagued with misery in the name of liberty" for almost two centuries, as Simon Bolivar predicted: Argentina; Bolivia; Ecuador; El Salvador; Nepal; Nicaragua; Pakistan; Russia; Sudan; Venezuela.  Popular resistance movements to global capitalism keep emerging in countries around the world, from Maoists in India to Islamist groups in the Muslim world; and much of the economically resurgent global South now has closer ties to China than to the U.S.

 

After killing millions and squandering trillions in its futile quest for dominance, the U.S. confronts a world it has even less power to control.  But the mindset of America's leaders seems set in stone.  Its rapacious machinery of covert war has only expanded under President Obama.  As in the 1950s, 1970s & 1980s, the CIA has exploited America's military failures to carve out a larger role for itself, and Obama has been seduced as easily as Eisenhower, Carter and Reagan into becoming its commander, its patron and its puppet.  The U.S. political system is not designed to produce new leaders who say, "No, thank you, I don't need a secret private army."  True to form, Obama asked only, "What else can I do with it?"

 

The secrecy that makes the CIA and its JSOC foot-soldiers such attractive "tools" to President Obama is the very thing that makes them so dangerous to the rest of us, as we really should know by now.  A hidden benefit of secret U.S. military operations has always been that the deferential U.S. media will report only the cover stories, turning the press into powerful co-conspirators in these operations.  Secrecy and propaganda are mutually reinforcing.

 

For a consummate media manipulator like Obama, who was named  "Marketer of the Year" for 2008 by the American advertising industry, hiding a policy of covert war and assassination behind a dovish public image was an irresistibly "witty" global masquerade.  His smiling face still beams out from Shepard Fairey's iconic campaign posters as his assassins ply their trade on  a dozen manhunts each night.

 

In their 2006 book  The Foreign Policy Disconnect, Benjamin Page and Marshall Bouton demonstrated that most of the crises in post-1945 U.S. foreign policy could have ben avoided if U.S. leaders had paid more attention to the views of the public.  But how can the public have any influence on secret policy-making?  U.S. leaders have responded to public alarm at their aggressive and illegal use of military force, not by restoring law and order to U.S. policy, but by moving it farther into the shadows to protect it from public scrutiny and interference.

 

But the more this policy succeeds in its goal of secrecy and deception, the more it fails in the real world.  Whether Presidents Bush or Obama are ever held to account for the death and destruction they have unleashed on other countries, our children and grandchildren will pay for our complicity in their crimes, as they struggle to invest what is left of our country's resources in a belated effort to repair the damage of war, shattered international relations, looted natural resources, gutted public services and climate chaos.

 

China is already overtaking the United States as the  world's largest economy, and may  overtake the U.S. in military spending by about 2030.  When will our leaders stop trying to bully a world in which they are no longer the biggest kid on the block?  And where and when will they begin the vital transition to the peaceful, cooperative world order that is essential to our children's future?

 

Syria would be a good place to start, and now would be a good time to do it. 

Syria, Libya, and Beyond

Globalists Prepare For Second Phase

By Tony Cartalucci


While the "easier" nations of Tunisia and Egypt were picked apart by foreign-funded color revolutions, the global corporate-financier oligarchs knew well in advance nations like Libya, Syria, and Iran would be fundamentally different. Nations including Belarus, Pakistan, Myanmar, and Thailand, come next, posing similar hurdles, and of course Russia and China remain at the end of the road and will require the most vigorous of all campaigns to effect regime change and assimilate them into the Wall Street/London corporate-financier dominated "international community."

For all intents and purposes this is the final battle between nation-states and this abhorrent, illegitimate "international community." The battle is building up to what many geopolitical analysts call World War III, but with an insidious twist. It is a battle where festering imperial networks operating under the guise of "civil society" and "NGOs" are turning populations against their governments and serving as impetus to usher in stooge replacements. National institutions will be supplanted by this global "civil society" network, which in turn will interface with contrived international institutions like the parasitic IMF, the World Bank, and the increasingly farcical United Nations.

The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt were meant to serve as the moral and rhetorical backdrop for successive and increasingly more violent and costly campaigns against Libya, Syria, and Iran. In Libya's case, nearly 30 years of on-and-off armed insurrection, fully backed by the US, UK, and America's Arabic foreign legion of Al Qaeda have defined the campaign against Qaddafi. When the call was made on February 17, for a "Day of Rage" by Libyan leaders exiled in London, war was already a foregone, fully provisioned conclusion. So too are operations against Syria and Iran. These are admitted facts articulated clearly within the global elite's own think-tanks and parroted verbatim by the feckless puppets that constitute the governments of the West.

Laying to rest any doubt regarding the global elite's designs toward the remaining sovereign nation-states of the world, is the Brookings Institution's "Which Path to Persia?" report. Previously covered, the report has more meaning now than ever, defining verbatim the approach, the tactics and the outcomes expected in this next, decidedly more violent phase of geopolitical reordering worldwide. We can see the stratagems and methodology defined within this report have played out not only in Iran, but in Libya and Syria as well, with preparations and posturing being made in regards to targets further along China's "String of Pearls" and along Russia's vast borders.

As we reexamine this treacherous plot, funded by some of the largest corporations and banking interests on earth, we can see the playbook the global elite have been clearly using, starting in Iran, and creeping its way toward Moscow and Beijing. Understanding this report, disseminating it to both the people beneath the governments criminally pursuing it and those desperately defending against it, may balk what is perhaps the greatest attempted geopolitical reordering in human history.

Which Path To Persia?

Virtually a handbook for overthrowing nations, the 156 page report focuses on effecting regime change within Iran. However, it is quite clear it draws on a body of knowledge derived from the Anglo-American empire's long history of fomenting unrest, division, insurgencies, coups, and regime change around the world. It is irrefutable proof that the global elite, not our legislators, are the arbiters of Western foreign policy.

....

It is also irrefutable proof that indeed the global elite are capable and willing to foment popular street protests, use murderous terrorism against sovereign nation-states, buy off treasonous legions within a foreign military to effect coups, and use violence of their own creation as a pretext to intervene with full military force.

Sanctions

Sanctions, page 39 (page 52 of PDF): "For those who favor regime change or a military attack on Iran (either by the United States or Israel), there is a strong argument to be made for trying this option first. inciting regime change in Iran would be greatly assisted by convincing the Iranian people that their government is so ideologically blinkered that it refuses to do what is best for the people and instead clings to a policy that could only bring ruin on the country. The ideal scenario in this case would be that the United States and the international community present a package of positive inducements so enticing that the Iranian citizenry would support the deal, only to have the regime reject it.

In a similar vein, any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context—both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it. The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down. Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal."

Regime change and perhaps even military operations against Iran are talked about as a foregone conclusion, with Brookings using the pretext of sanctions as merely a means of incremental escalation to tip-toe the world into backing regime change, including war with the nation if need be. This is exactly what has been done in regards to Libya, with disingenuous humanitarian concerns translated into a no-fly zone, which incrementally transitioned into attacks on Qaddafi's ground forces, targeted assassinations against Qaddafi himself, and now talk of destroying civilian infrastructure and a full-out ground invasion.

A repeat scenario is playing out in Syria where foreign-fueled violence is being used as a means to engage in broader intervention. While Western governments feigns inaction and hesitation in the face of a bloodbath they themselves instigated, in reality they are creating the same sense of "bringing it upon themselves" for Syria as Brookings talks about in regards to Iran.

Invasion

Justifying Invasion, page 65 (page 78 of the PDF): "If the United States were to decide that to garner greater international support, galvanize U.S. domestic support, and/or provide a legal justification for an invasion, it would be best to wait for an Iranian provocation, then the time frame for an invasion might stretch out indefinitely. With only one real exception, since the 1978 revolution, the Islamic Republic has never willingly provoked an American military response, although it certainly has taken actions that could have done so if Washington had been looking for a fight.

Thus it is not impossible that Tehran might take some action that would justify an American invasion and it is certainly the case that if Washington sought such a provocation, it could take actions that might make it more likely that Tehran would do so (although being too obvious about this could nullify the provocation). However, since it would be up to Iran to make the provocative move, which Iran has been wary of doing most times in the past, the United States would never know for sure when it would get the requisite Iranian provocation. In fact, it might never come at all."

This is nothing less than US policy makers openly talking about purposefully provoking a nation in order to justify a full-scale invasion that would otherwise be untenable. If such treachery at the cost of thousands of American lives and perhaps millions of Iranian lives is openly talked about within the halls of these corporate-funded think-tanks, what do they talk about that isn't on record? For those who reject out-of-hand the notion that 9/11 was an inside job, on grounds that Western policy makers are not capable of such a horrific calculus, the evidence is here, starring back from pages of this Brookings Institution report for all to see and to come to grips with.

In Libya, provocations for NATO bombardment were a rash of entirely unverified reports coming from the rebels themselves and verified lies about aircraft strafing unarmed protesters. With the targeted assassination of Qaddafi resulting in the death of his son and three of his grandchildren, NATO appears to have taken "actions that might make it more likely" for Qaddafi to be provoked into justifying some sort of wider NATO ground invasion. If the litany of lies that set the groundwork for the current NATO campaign is any indication, even if Qaddafi does nothing, a provocation will be manufactured for him. With the operations against Syria still in their opening phases, we can be sure as military options are brought to the table, so will appropriate provocations, induced or manufactured.

United Front Against Iran

An Iranian Sponsored 9/11 and a change of leadership throughout the Middle East, page 66 (page 79 of the PDF): "Most European, Asian, and Middle Eastern publics are dead set against any American military action against Iran derived from the current differences between Iran and the international community—let alone Iran and the United States. Other than a Tehran-sponsored 9/11, it is hard to imagine what would change their minds. For many democracies and some fragile autocracies to which Washington would be looking for support, this public antipathy is likely to prove decisive. For instance, Saudi Arabia is positively apoplectic about the Iranians’ nuclear program, as well as about their mischief making in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. Yet, so far, Riyadh has made clear that it will not support military operations of any kind against Iran. Certainly that could change, but it is hard to imagine what it would take.
Given that this situation has not been enough to push the GCC to support military operations against Iran, what would? Certainly Iran testing a nuclear device might, but at that point, it almost certainly would be too late: if the United States is going to invade Iran, it will want to do so before Iran has developed actual nuclear weapons, not after. It is hard to know what else Iran could do that would change GCC attitudes about the use of force unless new leaders took power in the Gulf who were far more determined to stop Iran than the current leadership is."

Quite obviously, "new leaders" are taking power throughout the Gulf now via the US-created "Arab Spring," with Saudi Arabia being tacitly threatened with destabilization in Bahrain and Yemen, while Iran's axis of influence through Syria and into Lebanon is being destabilized. Egypt and Northern Africa are being thrown into precarious political chaos as well, with globalist puppets poised to take over and eagerly pursue any dictate coming from Washington. This confirms the worst fears of geopolitical analysts like Dr. Webster Tarpley who predicted as far back as mid-February 2011 that the US-created "Arab Spring" was an attempt at reordering the Middle East against Iran and eventually against China and Russia.

Manufacturing Provocations

Goading Provocations for an Air Strike, page 84-85 (page 97-98 of the PDF): "...it would be far more preferable if the United States could cite an Iranian provocation as justification for the airstrikes before launching them. Clearly, the more outrageous, the more deadly, and the more unprovoked the Iranian action, the better off the United States would be. Of course, it would be very difficult for the United States to goad Iran into such a provocation without the rest of the world recognizing this game, which would then undermine it. (One method that would have some possibility of success would be to ratchet up covert regime change efforts in the hope that Tehran would retaliate overtly, or even semi-overtly, which could then be portrayed as an unprovoked act of Iranian aggression.)

This suggests that this option might benefit from being held in abeyance until such time as the Iranians made an appropriately provocative move, as they do from time to time. In that case, it would be less a determined policy to employ airstrikes and instead more of an opportunistic hope that Iran would provide the United States with the kind of provocation that would justify airstrikes. However, that would mean that the use of airstrikes could not be the primary U.S. policy toward Iran (even if it were Washington’s fervent preference), but merely an ancillary contingency to another option that would be the primary policy unless and until Iran provided the necessary pretext."

Here we see again, the plotting of a deceitful gambit to goad a sovereign nation into war, a nation Brookings notes time and time again has no interest in armed conflict with the United States. Also notice the first mention of "covert regime change efforts" used as a means to apply sufficient pressure to exact a particular reaction used for further political escalation and subsequent military intervention.

Such a gambit has been recently used in Libya and now in Syria where foreign-support created violence, to which regimes were forced to react to - the subsequent violence then serving as an impetus for expanded US intervention. Brookings notes that such goading must be done in such a way so as to not raise suspicions of the "game" throughout the world. Hopefully, as people read this written and signed confession of criminal conspiracy, they will never fall for this "game" again.

Foreign-Funded Color Revolution

Finding and Building up Dupes for a Color Revolution, page 105 (page 118 of the PDF): "The United States could play multiple roles in facilitating a revolution. By funding and helping organize domestic rivals of the regime, the United States could create an alternative leadership to seize power. As Raymond Tanter of the Iran Policy Committee argues, students and other groups “need covert backing for their demonstrations. They need fax machines. They need internet access, funds to duplicate materials, and funds to keep vigilantes from beating them up.”

Beyond this, U.S.-backed media outlets could highlight regime short comings and make otherwise obscure critics more prominent. The United States already supports Persian-language satellite television (Voice of America Persian) and radio (Radio Farda) that bring unfiltered news to Iranians (in recent years, these have taken the lion’s share of overt U.S. funding for promoting democracy in Iran). U.S. economic pressure (and perhaps military pressure as well) can discredit the regime, making the population hungry for a rival leadership."

Here Brookings makes outright calls to create the conditions within Iran, or any target nation for that matter, that are more likely to create unrest. They then call for funding and organizing that unrest and using domestic, and quite obviously foreign media to manipulate public perception and perpetuate US-backed propaganda. We see this in nearly every country targeted for destabilization, generally funded by organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), so-called "independent media" organizations and human rights NGOs that "make otherwise obscure critics more prominent."

The NED-funded Project on Middle East Democracy is one such propaganda outlet operating throughout the Middle East, propagating the official US narrative in regards to unrest fomented from Egypt to Syria. Voice of America is openly mentioned by Brookings within this report, while examples in Eastern Europe include Radio Free Europe, a subsidary with VOA under the Broadcasting Board of Governors upon which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sits as a member. Also note worthy is Southeast Asia's NED-funded Prachatai of Thailand.

Together this nefarious global network feeds the mainstream, corporate-owned media their talking points which are then repeated verbatim or cited outright as reputable sources. It should be remembered though, that within the 156 pages of the "Which Path to Persia?" report it is explicitly and often stated that these gambits are to protect and expand US interests throughout the region while diminishing Iran's ability to challenge said interests in any shape, form, or manner - not promote democracy, protect freedom, or even protect America from a genuine security threat.

Using Military Force to Assist Popular Revolutions, page 109-110 (page 122-123 of the PDF): "Consequently, if the United States ever succeeds in sparking a revolt against the clerical regime, Washington may have to consider whether to provide it with some form of military support to prevent Tehran from crushing it." "This requirement means that a popular revolution in Iran does not seem to fit the model of the “velvet revolutions” that occurred elsewhere. The point is that the Iranian regime may not be willing to go gently into that good night; instead, and unlike so many Eastern European regimes, it may choose to fight to the death. In those circumstances, if there is not external military assistance to the revolutionaries, they might not just fail but be massacred.

Consequently, if the United States is to pursue this policy, Washington must take this possibility into consideration. It adds some very important requirements to the list: either the policy must include ways to weaken the Iranian military or weaken the willingness of the regime’s leaders to call on the military, or else the United States must be ready to intervene to defeat it."

Quite clearly, after previously conspiring to implement foreign-funded unrest, the predictable crackdown by Iranian security forces to restore order "requires" some form of deterrent or military support to be employed to prevent the movement from being crushed. We see that this exact scenario has played out verbatim in Libya, where "protesters" were in fact armed rebels from the very beginning, the recipients of decades of US and UK support, and shortly after their rebellion began, NATO forces were brought in via a clumsy series of staged pretenses to prevent the armed uprising from being crushed by Qaddafi's forces.

A lead-up to the exact same scenario is playing out in Syria, where US and UK puppet politicians are menacing the Syrian government with threats of military intervention under the "Libyan Precedence." We see in reality, this "precedence" had been clearly articulated in this 2009 report, and is based on a familiar "problem, reaction, solution" methodology used by imperialists throughout human history.

In both Libya, Syria, and Yemen, and in other immovable targeted nations like Thailand, armed militants are brought in by opposition groups to augment street protests. Often these armed elements are brought in without the knowledge of the protesters themselves, and in some cases, especially in Syria and Yemen, it appears armed groups of "mystery gunmen" are clashing with both security forces and protesters in order to escalate violence and unrest further. Should the escalating violence fail to tip the balance in the protesters' favor, the violence itself will become the pretext for the next level of more overt US intervention.

US Sponsored Terrorism and Armed Insurrection

Arming, Funding, and Using Terrorist Organizations, page 113 (page 126 of the PDF): "The United States could work with groups like the Iraq-based National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) and its military wing, the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), helping the thousands of its members who, under Saddam Husayn’s regime, were armed and had conducted guerrilla and terrorist operations against the clerical regime. Although the NCRI is supposedly disarmed today, that could quickly be changed."

"Potential Ethnic Proxies," page 117-118 (page 130-131 of the PDF): "Perhaps the most prominent (and certainly the most controversial) opposition group that has attracted attention as a potential U.S. proxy is the NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran), the political movement established by the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq). Critics believe the group to be undemocratic and unpopular, and indeed anti-American.

In contrast, the group’s champions contend that the movement’s long-standing opposition to the Iranian regime and record of successful attacks on and intelligence-gathering operations against the regime make it worthy of U.S. support. They also argue that the group is no longer anti-American and question the merit of earlier accusations. Raymond Tanter, one of the group’s supporters in the United States, contends that the MEK and the NCRI are allies for regime change in Tehran and also act as a useful proxy for gathering intelligence. The MEK’s greatest intelligence coup was the provision of intelligence in 2002 that led to the discovery of a secret site in Iran for enriching uranium.

Despite its defenders’ claims, the MEK remains on the U.S. government list of foreign terrorist organizations. In the 1970s, the group killed three U.S. officers and three civilian contractors in Iran. During the 1979-1980 hostage crisis, the group praised the decision to take America hostages and Elaine Sciolino reported that while group leaders publicly condemned the 9/11 attacks, within the group celebrations were widespread.

Undeniably, the group has conducted terrorist attacks—often excused by the MEK’s advocates because they are directed against the Iranian government. For example, in 1981, the group bombed the headquarters of the Islamic Republic Party, which was then the clerical leadership’s main political organization, killing an estimated 70 senior officials. More recently, the group has claimed credit for over a dozen mortar attacks, assassinations, and other assaults on Iranian civilian and military targets between 1998 and 2001. At the very least, to work more closely with the group (at least in an overt manner), Washington would need to remove it from the list of foreign terrorist organizations."

Certainly if the United States went through with arming and funding MEK (and they apparently did), they themselves would become "state sponsors of terrorism" - even as they fight amidst a decade long war against supposedly just that. MEK is unequivocally a terrorist organization that murders and maims civilians indiscriminately along with their political opponents. MEK is even on-record having targeted and murdered Americans. Yet for some reason, they are considered a potential proxy, and considerations for their removal from the apparently meaningless "foreign terrorist organizations" list, is based solely on their utility toward advancing US foreign policy.

With this we are given full insight into the unfathomable depths of depravity from which the global elite operate from. It turns out that the degenerates behind "Which Path to Persia?" including Kenneth Pollack, Daniel Byman, Martin Indyk, Susanne Maloney, Michael O'Hanlon, and Bruce Riedel, most of whom are regular contributors to the US's largest newspapers, would see their plans brought to life. According to Seymour Hersh's New Yorker article "Preparing the Battlefield," MEK had already been receiving weapons and funding as of 2008 for the purposes described within the Brookings report that would come out a year later.

It would seem even as "Which Path to Persia?" was being compiled many of the options on the table had already gone operational. Baluchi rebels residing in eastern Iran and western Pakistan were also mentioned in both the Brookings report and Hersh's article. US support for this group is quite ambitious. In addition to using them in terrorist operations against Tehran, they are also being built up and directed toward destabilizing and Balkanizing Pakistan.

Fomenting A Military Coup

Staging a Coup, page 123-124 (page 136-137 of the PDF): "Mounting a coup is hard work, especially in a state as paranoid about foreign influence and meddling as Iran is. The United States would first have to make contact with members of Iran’s military (and likely its security services as well). This by itself is very difficult. Because of Iranian hypersensitivity to Americans, the United States would likely have to rely on “cutouts”—third party nationals working on behalf of the United States—which invariably introduces considerable complexity. Then the United States would have to use those contacts to try to identify Iranian military personnel who were both willing and able to stage a coup, which would be more difficult still; it would be hard enough for Americans to make contact with Iranian military officers, let alone make contact with those specific individuals willing to risk their lives and their families in a coup attempt.

Of course, it is possible that if Washington makes very clear that it is trying to support a coup in Iran, the coup plotters will reach out to the United States. But this is very rare: history shows that coup plotters willing to expose themselves to another national government are usually discovered and killed; furthermore, most of those coming to the United States to ask for help overthrowing this or that government tend to be poseurs or even counterintelligence agents of the targeted government."

If readers are wondering whether or not there is a historical precedence of the United States "mounting a coup," the Brookings report itself provides Operation Ajax as notable example:

"Although many coups are homegrown, one obvious historic model of a foreign-assisted coup in Iran is Operation Ajax, the 1953 coup d’état that overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq and reinstated the rule of Shah Reza Pahlavi. To carry out the coup, the CIA and British intelligence supported General Fazlollah Zahedi, providing him and his followers with money and propaganda, as well as helping organize their activities."

The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were apparently assisted by members of the military, with similar defections being sought out in Libya and Syria to help along the collapse of the embattled regimes. Nations of Western interest might want to take time to reevaluate military officers who have had historically close ties to the United States or who have reason or possible motivations for turning on their nation during a spate of foreign-engineered upheaval.

It should be noted that the Brookings report suggests that all of these options - popular revolution, insurgency, and coup - be used concurrently in the hopes that at least one may succeed. It also suggests that "helpful synergies" might be created among them to further mire the targeted regime. (page 150, page 163 of the PDF.)

Conclusion

It is inconceivable that one could read the pages of "Which Path to Persia?" and not understand the current "international community" as anything less than absolutely illegitimate. They contrive a myriad of laws with which to restrain and eliminate their competition with while they remain entirely uninhibited themselves in their own overt criminality. We also understand that the United States is not engaged in diplomatic relations with the world's nations as envisioned by America's Founding Fathers, but rather engaged in extorting and coercing the world to conform to it's "interests."

This report represents a full array of options not only for use in Iran, but throughout the world. In hindsight of the US-funded "Arab Spring" it is quite obvious that the methodology laid out in the report has been drawn on to destabilize and depose regimes as well as instigate wars of aggression. Upon studying this report, its implications for Iran and the surrounding region, we can understand better conflicts yet to unfold beyond North Africa and the Gulf. It is essential that reports like this are made public, their methodology exposed, and the true architects behind Western foreign policy revealed. As the report itself states numerous times, the vast majority of their gambits require secrecy, "plausible deniability," and that their dark deeds be done "without the rest of the world recognizing this game."

The world must realize who the true brokers of power are, and that by understanding their agenda, we can wholly reject it and pursue instead one of our own, locally, self-sufficiently, independently, and in true freedom.