America's Chemically Modified 21st Century Soldiers

Armed With Potent Drugs and New Technology, A Dangerous Breed Of Soldiers Are Being Trained To Fight America's Future Wars.

By Clayton Dach,
Adbusters.
Posted May 3, 2008.
Courtesy Of Alter Net

Amphetamines and the military first met somewhere in the fog of WWII, when axis and allied forces alike were issued speed tablets to head off fatigue on the battlefield.

More than 60 years later, the U.S. Air Force still doles out dextro-amphetamine to pilots whose duties do not afford them the luxury of sleep.

Through it all, it seems, the human body and its fleshy weaknesses keep getting in the way of warfare. Just as in the health clinics of the nation, the first waypoint in the military effort to redress these foibles is a pharmaceutical one. The catch is, we're really not that great at it. In the case of speed, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency itself notes a few unwanted snags like addiction, anxiety, aggression, paranoia and hallucinations. For side-effects like insomnia, the Air Force issues "no-go" pills like temazepam alongside its "go" pills. Psychosis, though, is a wee bit trickier.

Far from getting discouraged, the working consensus appears to be that we just haven't gotten the drugs right yet. In recent years, the U.S., the UK and France -- among others -- have reportedly been funding investigations into a new line-up of military performance enhancers. The bulk of these drugs are already familiar to us from the lists of substances banned by international sporting bodies, including the stimulant ephedrine, non-stimulant "wakefulness promoting agents" like modafinil (aka Provigil) and erythropoietin, used to improve endurance by boosting the production of red blood cells.

As the chemical interventions grow bolder and more sophisticated, we should not be surprised that some are beginning to cast their eyes beyond droopy eyelids and sore muscles. Chief among the new horizons is the alluring notion of psychological prophylactics: drugs used to pre-empt the often nasty effects of combat stress on soldiers, particularly that perennial veteran's bugaboo known as post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. In the U.S., where roughly two-fifths of troops returning from combat deployments are presenting serious mental health problems, PTSD has gone political in form of the Psychological Kevlar Act, which would direct the Secretary of Defense to implement "preventive and early-intervention measures" to protect troops against "stress-related psychopathologies."

Proponents of the "Psychological Kevlar" approach to PTSD may have found a silver bullet in the form of propranolol, a 50-year-old beta-blocker used on-label to treat high blood pressure, and off-label as a stress-buster for performers and exam-takers. Ongoing psychiatric research has intriguingly suggested that a dose of propranolol, taken soon after a harrowing event, can suppress the victim's stress response and effectively block the physiological process that makes certain memories intense and intrusive. That the drug is cheap and well tolerated is icing on the cake.

Propranolol has already been dubbed the "mourning after pill," largely by those who argue that its military use amounts to medicating away pangs of conscience. For the time being, though, we can set aside our dystopian visions of zombies with guns, since the tranquilizing effects of beta-blockers are unlikely to permit their widespread use on the battlefield. But pharmacology moves more swiftly with each passing year -- especially when helped along by defense-research dollars -- and we may need to revive those visions sooner than we think.

The Mediated Soldier

In the new model army, brute force and viscera are out. Cutting edge gadgetry, omniscient surveillance and precision long-distance termination is in. What motivates it all is the type of war we fear we'll be fighting.

On this, the strategists have spoken: with Iraq and Afghanistan as the testing grounds, the conflicts of the future will be guerrilla wars, open-ended, with no battle lines, no rules of engagement and ambivalent or openly hostile civilian populations in which any man, woman or child can turn combatant.

In breeding a future soldier for these future wars, we will inevitably leave behind the mere rectification of human weakness and enter into the realm of the superhuman. Glimpses of this realm have already become commonplace in the form of ceramic-Kevlar body armor and night-vision goggles -- wizardry that transforms squishy pink men into bullet-proof creatures of the night.

Such magic will continue apace under the auspices of dozens of military development initiatives across the globe, creating a species known variously as the Future Force Warrior by the U.S., FIST by the British Army, Félin by the French. All are merely the human components of broader visionary projects for what has been called "the army after next," the most noteworthy of which being the U.S. Army's Future Combat Systems. With a budget clocking in at $160 billion or so, FCS is not just one of history's most costly weapons programs; it is an all-encompassing modernization program, one that will usher in a total re-imagining of the armed forces. What FCS and its kin have imagined for soldiers is a battlefield experience increasingly mediated by technology, insulated in a cocoon of "force multipliers" -- military parlance for anything that allows you to accomplish more with fewer personnel. In concrete terms, that translates into an array of tools designed to enhance lethality and survivability: next-generation sidearms; headsets that provide live command and control, detailed geographic data and the ability to fire around corners; smart suits equipped with ultralight nanotech armor, micro-climate conditioning, real-time health monitoring and even automated medical care like CPR and drug delivery. Also on the docket are robotic exoskeletons that allow the soldiers wearing them to carry hundreds of pounds -- even while running -- without breaking a sweat, as well as handheld imaging equipment that grants the ability to see targets through walls.

None of these are sci-fi pipe dreams. The DARPA-developed Radar Scope is already in limited deployment, detecting human breathing through a foot of concrete on two AA batteries. Utah-based robotics company Sarcos is expected to deliver its prototype exoskeletons to the Army this year, at roughly the same time that many of the other Future Force Warrior components begin field testing. Full-scale production of a number of the systems is scheduled for early in the next decade.

The Absent Soldier

It is tempting to say that military technology is steadily transforming war into a video game. Yet there's a strange irony in the works: as the games claw themselves even closer to the look and feel of real, down-and-dirty warfare, real warfare is fluttering away into strategic and technological abstraction, effectively taking a step back from its own reality.

For all the PlayStation sexiness of the ultra lethal, force-multiplied warrior, the true fate of the in-the-flesh soldier is to vanish into the abstraction.

The explicit purpose of Future Combat Systems is to progressively supplement, to the point of ultimately displacing, the human soldier with a whole array of automated, autonomous and remote technologies -- things like unmanned surveillance drones, long-range and non-line-of-sight precision-guided munitions, and unmanned air and ground combat vehicles. Though the latter group may never look anything like Schwarzenegger minus skin, make no mistake that what we are talking about here is weaponized robots.

An oft-quoted U.S. Joint Forces Command study from 2003 (rather candidly titled Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human Out of the Loop) predicted that autonomous, networked robots -- faster and more lethal than human combatants -- could become the norm by 2025. That may prove overly confident, but a congressional mandate has already called for one-third of all U.S. military land vehicles to be unmanned by 2015, increasing to two-thirds by 2025.

If the idea of autonomous, homicidal robots dashing into troubled Third-World slums sends a major chill down your spine, you're certainly not alone. Well aware of the nightmarish optics, defense contractors and military brass alike have been presenting a united front, noting that this is about moving soldiers out of harm's way, not about deleting humans from the "kill chain" entirely.

While there is little doubt that protecting soldiers is the central motivation, shifting troops into a distant pixel-pushing role also performs a secondary purpose: it neatly removes obstacles for those looking to wage war overseas while expending as little of their domestic political capital as possible. You can call it a by-product, or you can call it an ulterior motive, depending upon how dismal your outlook is.

Whatever the reasons, as we lose ourselves in the lovely fantasy of sidestepping the maimed veterans and crying widows, we could be walking right into an even nastier pile of shit. During the bombing campaign that accompanied the 2003 coalition invasion of Iraq, satellite-guided munitions caused scores of accidental civilian deaths. If these people had perished at the barrel of coalition rifles, their deaths would have been called massacres; as it stands, they are mere technical glitches and failures of intelligence.

The moral here is straightforward: once the human presence in the kill chain is diluted, so too is accountability. The future's soldier could be one surrounded by an inveigling haze of pharmaceuticals, decision-making robots, errant bombs and faulty surveillance data; the only thing to emerge from this haze will be an exhilarating sense of our own guiltlessness. Alas, the populations against which we use our fancy toys are unlikely to share in the feeling.

Al Qaeda, The Eternal Intelligence Asset

Al-Qaeda, The Eternal Covert Operation: British “Terror” Incident Latest Product Of “War On Terror” Propaganda

By Larry Chin
Online Journal Associate Editor
Jul 5, 2007, 01:24
Courtesy Of Online Journal

It is a well-established and deliberately unaddressed historical fact that the CIA created “radical Islam” and Islamic “terrorism” during the Cold War. It is also a documented fact that the US, its allies, and their intelligence agencies (CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Britain’s MI-6, etc.) have -- from the 1970s to the present day -- continued to use and guide terrorist groups, including “Al-Qaeda,” as intelligence and propaganda assets. “Islamic terrorism” is a manufactured weapon of Western geostrategy, serving Anglo-American interests.

Planned covert operations and false flag operations using “terrorists” in direct and indirect military-intelligence roles are of imperial design. Such operations (exemplified by 9/11), and their predictable propaganda results (“the war on terrorism”) are now routine events.
Official “war on terrorism” disinformation is repeated ad nauseum, accepted as fact by the mass populace, and used as the justification for ever-expanding Anglo-American war and ever-deepening criminality. Virtually no attention is paid to the Anglo-American support and management of “Al-Qaeda” and other “terror” groups. Little or no attention is devoted to the criminally fabricated nature of modern “terrorism” or the fact that every major “terrorism” event in recent times has been a US or US-allied covert operation, followed by political manipulation and cover-up.

September 11 was a false flag operation. The Mumbai transit bomb attack was a covert operation carried out by terror cells directly connected to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI (a virtual branch of the American CIA), and the same (alleged “Al-Qaeda”) apparatus.

The London 7/7 attack was the work of British intelligence, as well as Pakistan's ISI. Previously foiled London terror incidents pin the responsibility on “homegrown” terrorists with ties to Pakistan and "Al-Qaeda,” and London 7/7 .

While new details continue to emerge, the botched July 30, 2007, Glasgow Airport and June 28, 2007, London nightclub incendiary attacks bear a marked resemblance to every other post-9/11 “terrorism” false flag operation.

The Political Choreography Of The Glasgow / London Incident

Regardless of the actual case evidence to come, what is clear and obvious is the propaganda and political effect that has already been achieved by the aggressive Anglo-American response to the events (violence that may have involved their own intelligence agencies and proxies).

Even before the fires at Glasgow Airport were put out, official accounts and worldwide media reports had already forcefully declared the event to be the work of “Al-Qaeda” and “Islamic extremists.” The new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, quickly declared, “We are dealing, in general terms, with people who are associated with al Qaeda,” and immediately enacted a draconian “security” agenda in the UK. The Telegraph attributed the incident to an “unknown Al-Qaeda terrorist cell thought to be preparing to launch a series of Baghdad-style car bombings.”

An ABC account of the foiled London night club attacks suggests that there was foreknowledge (a typical aspect of all recent false flag events), and that warnings were issued by unnamed intelligence operatives weeks in advance, and that “Al Qaeda had targeted nightclubs and other soft targets” using cars laden with gasoline and propane cylinders.

The ABC report concludes:

“All of this comes just three weeks after what was described as an al-Qaeda graduation ceremony for suicide bombers at a training camp in Pakistan. A video obtained by ABC News shows commanders sending teams of 50 to 60 men to the United States, Canada, Germany and Great Britain.”

Another piece from the Telegraph suggests that the US was already involved in steering British authorities towards an “Al-Qaeda” conclusion. The article states: “reports from the US that the three men had been identified and known to be an associate of Dhiren Barot [a British Al-Qaeda detainee - LC], a suspected terrorist who had planned to set off bombs across London, were dismissed by government officials.”

While the worldwide propaganda and “war on terrorism” policy effect has been largely uniform and aggressive, as of this writing, the actual case details have been wildly inconsistent, speculative, and even contradictory. According to the official narrative, on June 30, 2007, according to British security officials, two men crashed a Jeep containing propane and gasoline into the main terminal of the Glasgow Airport in Scotland. This botched suicide car attack came in the wake of the foiled London nightclub attacks of June 28, 2007, an incident that authorities have attempted to link to Glasgow.

At least eight arrests have been made, including at least six medical workers: Bilal Abdullah (an Iraqi doctor), Mohammed Asha, a Jordanian physician (of Palestinian origin) and his wife, and Khalid Ahmed (a doctor and colleague of Abdullah’s), Mohammed Haneef (an Indian doctor).

Foreign nationals from Iraq, Jordan, India and Saudi Arabia have been rounded up and arrested in connection with the case. Asha’s family insists that he is innocent. Friends, family and colleagues of many of the suspects are also expressing shock and doubt. Prime Minister Brown has begun a sweeping profiling operation of all Muslim medical personnel.

According to the July 4 Los Angeles Times, “officials have still not determined whether a foreign terrorist group sent them to Britain or if they were recruited here (London).” The same piece declares, “one of more of the detainees may have been radicalized and in touch with extremist networks before arriving, while others may have been radicalized only after establishing themselves in Britain.”

A July 3 article from the Los Angeles Times breathlessly speculates:

“Although Islamic terror cells are often ethnically and sociologically diverse, the doctors’ background breaks with a pattern in a string of recent terror cases in England, including last year’s plot to bomb US-bound jets and the London transport bombings of 2005 . . . In contrast, the Middle Eastern angle could point at the Iraqi war theater, where a constellation of extremist networks operate -- among them an al Qaeda offshoot dominated by foreign fighters.”

This coverage, like most Western media reporting, accepts official declarations without question, and strongly suggests the guilt of all suspects.

Of course, no mention is made regarding the key issue at the heart of every “terror” event, and at the heart of the entire post-9/11 world crisis: Anglo-American military-intelligence connections to “Al-Qaeda” and other “radical Islamic terror” groups.

Beneficiaries: Washington and London

What is clear and predictable is that the British incidents, like all post-9/11 “terror,” benefits the political agendas in Washington and London at a key moment, while undermining all political opposition to Anglo-American foreign and domestic policies:

1. Bush-Cheney (and the equally complicit Democratic Party leadership) is provided another justification to ramp up the “war on terrorism,” and expand its intensifying world war and resource conquest, and step up of the pace of installing a police state within US borders. The Bush administration and its allies around the world have been planning a new 9/11 (blamed on “terrorists”) that could create both a justification and an opportunity to retaliate against selected targets.

2. Britain’s incoming Gordon Brown government has been provided with a fresh London 7/7-9/11-style crisis around which it can now impose draconian police state measures upon the British people.

3. Brown seamlessly inherits the “war on terrorism” agenda from war criminal and liar Tony Blair, and ups the ante. It is not clear if Brown’s ham-fisted actions are completely of his own design, to “appear tough” to his new constituents, or the result of pressure from Blair and Bush (who is “pleased” with Brown’s forceful response).

4. A violent “wag the dog” distraction from ongoing US domestic political scandals, notably Bush’s commuting of the sentence of Scooter Libby in the CIA/Valerie Plame affair, benefits Bush-Cheney.

Spreading Al-Qaeda Everywhere

The British incidents come in the wake of a crescendo of “Al-Qaeda”-related events all over the world. Bush-Cheney’s “Al-Qaeda terror” propaganda is at full pre-Iraq invasion fervor.
A recent news search demonstrates the fact that “Al-Qaeda” activity is mushrooming, in Egypt, Pakistan-Iran, Spain, Iraq, Yemen, Gaza/Palestine, Afghanistan, Lebanon, as well as within the United States and the UK.

Given the true nature of “Al-Qaeda” as Anglo-American assets, this is a clear signal that Anglo-American covert operations are intensifying -- and that targets for the next round of Anglo-American wars are being lined up.

Al-Qaeda: Eternal Intelligence Asset

The central issue of our time cannot be overemphasized: extensive historical (but ignored and covered-up) documentation establishes the fact that Al-Qaeda and Islamic “terrorism” are the creation as well as key instruments of Anglo-American military-intelligence, and Western geostrategy, managed and guided by the CIA, Pakistan’s ISI, Britain’s MI-6 and MI-5, etc.
No “terror” event, current or past, can be understood without a full inquiry against this context.

Books such as Michel Chossudovsky’s America's "War on Terrorism" and Michael C. Ruppert’s Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the end of the Age of Oil exhaustively detail this milieu.

As written by Michel Chossudovsky in America's "War on Terrorism", while “Islamic terrorists” are featured by the Bush administration and its allies as eternal threats, and blamed for every terror event including and since 9/11, “these same Islamic organizations constitute a key instrument of U.S. military-intelligence operations” all over the world.

“According to the CIA,” writes Chossudovsky, “an ‘intelligence asset’ -- as distinct from a bona fide ‘intelligence agent’ -- need not be committed to the pursuit of U.S. interests. Rather, it is meant to act and/or behave in a way that serves U.S. foreign policy pursuits . . . Intelligence assets are invariably unaware of the precise functions and roles they are performing on behalf of the CIA on the geopolitical chessboard. In turn, for these covert operations to be ‘successful,’ the CIA will use various proxy and front organizations such as Pakistan’s extensive military intelligence apparatus (the ISI).”

A recently declassified French intelligence report details the extent to which “Al-Qaeda” and Osama bin Laden ran operations for the CIA. “Al-Qaeda” has also served multinational oil interests. Washington’s support and management of the "Militant Islamic Network", including “Al-Qaeda,” has been continuous since the Carter administration, through the Bosnia/Kosovo/Macedonia NATO wars of the Clinton administration, and in full flower beginning with and since 9/11. “Al-Qaeda” as well as Al-Qaeda “foreign fighter hordes” propaganda is a key component of the Pentagon’s Iraq occupation and pacification program.

Also see: "Who is Osama bin Laden?" and "Al-Qaeda: the database"

As written by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, “Great Britain -- one of the major players supporting the KLA in Kosovo -- also maintained secret relationships with bin Laden and al Qaeda that served its interests.” Britain’s MI-6 funded and worked with Al-Qaeda to assassinate and overthrow Libya’s Muammar Qaddafy in 1996. Since 9/11, bin Laden was a guest of British intelligence, even as a wanted man. As noted by Ruppert, “a November 2002 UPI story by Arnaud de Borchgrave indicated not only that Pakistani ISI had helped Osama bin Laden escape from Afghanistan but also that the American government had deliberately paid little attention to offers from an Afghan warlord to pinpoint and capture the alleged mastermind of 9/11.”

The eternal cycle of real and manufactured murder and destruction since 9/11, from the false flag operations to the genocidal wars justified by “terrorism,” has escalated beyond the ability of criminal governments to control and manage. It is now difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish assets of planned government covert operations from “homegrown” resistance and opposition to Anglo-America policy.

The idea of “blowback,” the notion that terrorist assets have turned on their sponsors, is, however, bogus: Western intelligence has not severed its ties to “terrorists.” The true “root cause” of “Islamic terrorism” remains Western manipulation and political guidance of “terror.”

Al-Qaeda Propaganda

As pointed out by Michel Chossudovsky in "The Anglo-American War of Terror: An Overview", the continuing US-led “war on terrorism” agenda rests squarely upon the perpetuation of the “Al-Qaeda” deception and the 9/11 lie, the perpetual threat of a fabricated outside enemy.

“Terrorism,” from violent attacks against civilians to bogus “resistance movements” (made up of sponsored “Islamic terrorists”) to pervasive propaganda and disinformation, undermines public support for all political opposition to Anglo-American foreign policy, and creates divisions within antiwar and peace movements.

More importantly, absolute control of mass populations is made possible by fear. Based on Pavlovian reactions to every new “terror” incident, the fear of “terrorists” and bone-deep racism inspired by Bush-Cheney’s manufactured 9/11 false flag operation remain tragically potent.

The Imperial Hand Behind “Radicalism”

Who or what is truly behind “Islamic terrorism” and “terror” catastrophes? Who or what created it, and funds, manages, nurtures and wields “terror”? Whose geostrategic interests have been exclusively served by “terror”? Whose political goals have been permanently destroyed? Cui bono?

The answers lead directly t0 the highest levels in Washington, London, Tel Aviv, Islamabad, etc.

“Islamic terrorism” is a covert operation and a geostrategy. “Al-Qaeda” is a military-intelligence asset and a leading brand of war propaganda.

Copyright © 1998-2007 Online Journal

NOTE: The following video was not part of the above article, but was independently included by me.

The Phantom Enemy

Spies Without Borders

The CIA And The Raid On Ecuador

By WILLIAM BLUM
May 2, 2008
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

When Andreas Papandreou assumed his ministerial duties in 1964 in the Greek government led by his father George Papandreou, he was shocked to discover an intelligence service out of control, a shadow government with powers beyond the authority of the nation's nominal leaders, a service more loyal to the CIA than to the Papandreou government.

This was a fact of life for many countries in the world during the Cold War, when the CIA could dazzle a foreign secret service with devices of technical wizardry, classes in spycraft, vital intelligence, unlimited money, and American mystique and propaganda. Many of the world's intelligence agencies have long provided the CIA with information about their own government and citizens.

The nature of much of this information has been such that if a private citizen were to pass it to a foreign power he could be charged with treason. [William Blum, Killing Hope, pages 217-8.]

Leftist Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa declared in April that Ecuador's intelligence systems were "totally infiltrated and subjugated to the CIA," and accused senior Ecuadoran military officials of sharing intelligence with Colombia, the Bush administration's top (if not only) ally in Latin America.

The previous month missiles had been fired into a camp of the Colombian FARC rebels situated in Ecuador near the Colombian border, killing about 25. One of those killed was Franklin Aisalla, an Ecuadorean operative for the group. It turned out that Ecuadorean intelligence officials had been tracking Aisalla, a fact that was not shared with the president, but apparently with Colombian forces and their American military advisers.

"I, the president of the republic, found out about these operations by reading the newspaper," a visibly indignant Correa said. "This is not something we can tolerate." He added that he planned to restructure the intelligence agencies so he would have greater direct control over them. [New York Times, April 21, 2008.]

The FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) is routinely referred to in the world media as "Marxist", but that designation has not been appropriate for many years. The FARC has long been basically a criminal organization -- kidnapings for ransom, kidnapings for no apparent reason, selling protection services to businesses, trafficking in drugs, fighting the Colombian Army to be free to continue their criminal ways or to revenge their comrades' deaths.

But Washington, proceeding from its declared ideology of "If you ain't with us, you're against us; in fact, if you ain't with us you're a terrorist", has designated FARC as a terrorist group. Every stated definition of "terrorist", from the FBI to the United Nations to the US criminal code makes it plain that terrorism is essentially a political act.

This should, logically, exclude FARC from that category but, in actuality, has no effect on Washington's thinking. And now the Bush administration is threatening to add Venezuela to its list of "nations that support terrorism", following a claim by Colombia that it had captured a computer belonging to FARC after the attack on the group's campsite in Ecuador.

A file allegedly found on the alleged computer, we are told, suggests that the Venezuelan government had channeled $300 million to FARC, and that FARC had appeared interested in acquiring 110 pounds of uranium. [New York Times, March 4, 2008]

What next? Chavez had met with Osama bin Laden at the campsite?

Amongst the FARC members killed in the Colombian attack on Ecuador were several involved in negotiations to free Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian presidential candidate who also holds French citizenship and is gravely ill. The French government and Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez have been very active in trying to win Betancourt's freedom. Individuals collaborating with Chavez have twice this year escorted a total of six hostages freed by the FARC into freedom, including four former Colombian legislators.

The prestige thus acquired by Chavez has of course not made Washington ideologues happy. If Chavez should have a role in the freeing of Betancourt -- the FARC's most prominent prisoner -- his prestige would jump yet higher. The raid on the FARC camp has put an end to the Betancourt negotiations, at least for the near future.

The raid bore the fingerprints of the US military/CIA -- a Predator drone aircraft dropped "smart bombs" after pinpointing the spot by monitoring a satellite phone call between a FARC leader and Chavez. A Colombian Defense Ministry official admitted that the United States had provided his government with intelligence used in the attack, but denied that Washington had provided the weapons.[9] The New York Times observed that "The predawn operation bears remarkable similarities to one carried out in late January by the United States in Pakistan."[10]

So what do we have here? Washington has removed a couple of dozen terrorists (or "terrorists") from the ranks of the living without any kind of judicial process. Ingrid Betancourt continues her imprisonment, now in its sixth year, but another of Hugo Chavez's evil-commie plans has been thwarted.

And the CIA -- as with its torture renditions -- has once again demonstrated its awesome power: anyone, anywhere, anytime, anything, all laws domestic and international be damned, no lie too big.

William Blum is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Rogue State: a guide to the World's Only Super Power. and West-Bloc Dissident: a Cold War Political Memoir.

He can be reached at BBlum6@aol.com

Leave Israel Alone, You Bastards !!!

By The "Whining Israeli"

Leave Israel Alone (Version I)





Leave Israel Alone (Version II)

Iran Enters The "Pan - Regionalism" Sphere

Iran Moving Into The Big League

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
May 3, 2008
Courtesy Of Asia Times Online

Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's three-nation tour of Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India and the welter of agreements and understandings reached between Tehran and these governments serve notice beyond the mere issue of energy security and Iran's expanding role in the sub-continent's energy market; rather, these developments signify a new stage in Iran's foreign policy that is best described as "pan-regionalism".

From the Persian Gulf to the Caspian region, the Caucasus, Central Asia, South Asia and beyond, thanks to its unique geographical location, Iran is in many ways an ideal connecting bridge that has not until now fully exploited its advantageous "equidistance" from India and Europe.

Straddled between the two energy hubs of the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea, Iran is a suitable conduit for trade, energy and non-energy, between the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, which are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), and the landlocked Central Asian states. The GCC comprises Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Also, with ambitious transportation links projected under the veneer of a "north-south corridor", Iran, Russia and India have conceived new areas of cooperation that connect northern Europe to the Indian Ocean via Iran and the Russian Federation [1] . Already, Iran is an energy exporter to Europe through Turkey, funneling through Turkmenistan's gas and swapping oil with Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

Also, Iran has plans not to lag behind the so-called new "Silk Road" project that involves China, India and the GCC states first and foremost and yet for every conceivable reason must be considered Iran-inclusive because of the country's proximity, its expanding trade and economic cooperation with the GCC, and its own trade liberalization policies, reflected in the expansion of free-trade zones.

This is one reason why Iran is modernizing its Persian Gulf islands of Kish and Qeshm, hoping to turn them into tourist hotspots as well as hubs for trade and even finance in the near future [2].

The $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline (IPI), meanwhile, has the potential more than any other existing Iranian project to extend the purview of Iran's "pan-regional" approach, by organically connecting Iran to the sub-continent on a long-term basis and by providing a new Iran-Pakistan-India nexus that could in turn be used for addressing what is lacking so far, that is, more than paltry inter-regional trade.

The 2,600-kilometer IPI pipeline, which was conceived in 1994, envisages transporting Iranian gas to Pakistan and then on to India. Following Ahmadinejad's visit to India this week, Iran reported the three countries were close to signing a "final agreement".

The poor state of Iran's trade with South Asia is reflected in the sub-optimal trade between Iran and Pakistan, as is the case between Iran and other members of the region's 10-nation Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO) [3].

Attempts to make the ECO a fulcrum of regional cooperation have by and large failed and the ECO's struggle to achieve a major breakthrough in terms of regional cooperation has not brought significant tangible fruits.

Yet that may change, particularly if Iran (a) is inducted in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, at which it is presently an observer [4], and (b) the IPI project finally gets underway, in which case Iran's greater integration into larger entities will bolster its attempt within the ECO to make this regional organization, which is headquartered in Tehran, more effective.

With respect to the Persian Gulf, the GCC, which continues to shun Iran's olive branch of cooperation, is under new pressures to rethink that attitude as a result of the Shi'ite-led government in Iraq, a potential Iran allay in the politics of the Persian Gulf. It is not far-fetched to think that Iran and Iraq will one day join the GCC states in a new regional cooperative framework.

Certainly, that is how Iran wants it today, as seen in the recent unveiling of Iranian plans for cooperative security and the like put forward at their hitherto recalcitrant GCC neighbors [5], perhaps better pitched as part of an Islamic common market.

Certainly, significant hurdles confront Iran's "pan-regional" approach that seeks to make the country an integrative, nodal point of cooperation between and among various regions, ranging from United Nations and US sanctions out of fear of Iran and its purported "nuclear ambition", as well as a host of purely economic and technical difficulties, such as poor transportation links and cumbersome custom regulations.

Regarding the latter, one of the ECO's key contributions has been in the area of prioritizing a customs agreement, as well as tariff reduction schemes, between the member states that would facilitate trade in the ECO region. Still, the low level of trade between the ECO states is a harsh reminder of the long road ahead before Iran's lofty objective of "pan-regionalism" can be fully realized.

Irrespective, the tangible gains mentioned above illustrate the viability of Iran's "pan-regional" approach that could conceivably elevate its status beyond a mere regional power and add to the cluster of values in its arsenal as a global power.

In fact, as reflected in a recent statement by Iranian National Security Advisor Saeed Jalili regarding Iran as a "global power", Iran's self-image and self-understanding is global-looking and fuels an activist foreign policy that is fully within the camp of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and which constantly prioritizes "global justice".

Economically, however, for Iran and other NAM states seeking a redistribution of global wealth, concentrated in Western hands today, there is no alternative but to push for greater cooperation between themselves and achieve better coordination at international institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), in light of the WTO's ongoing trade wranglings known as the Doha rounds.

Although Iran is not yet a WTO member, it will be directly impacted by the final agreements of the Doha rounds, due later this year, which is why it is incumbent on Iranian policymakers to focus on the Doha rounds and to scrutinize the agricultural and non-agricultural new policies of the WTO that distinguish between developed and developing nations. Yet these fall short of addressing the adverse impacts of globalization and WTO-induced trade liberalization for a whole host of Third World nations.

One thing is clear, the greater the impetus for Iran's "pan-regional" goals and objectives, the more Tehran will find itself entangled in complex regional, extra-regional and global issues and controversies that impact the country's foreign policies, trade, and security both directly and indirectly.

One of the understudied aspects of Iran's "pan-regionalism" is, indeed, how it connects to the issue of globalization that, so far, has been a mixed blessing for the developing world. After all, regionalism and globalization have unhappy kindred relations, with the former simultaneously strengthening and weakening it.

Notes:

1. For more information on the International North-South Transport Corridor, click here.

2. For more on the free-trade zones, click here.

3. For more on the Economic Cooperation Organization, click here

4. For more on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, click here

5. See Iran unveils a Persian Gulf security plan by Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times Online, April 14, 2007.

Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.

(Copyright 2008 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Additional Information:

The Iranian Chessboard

Christianity and War

Readings In The Age Of Empire

Christianity and War and Other Essays Against the Warfare State

Laurence M. Vance
Vance Publications (Pensacola, Fl.),
2008
418 pp.

By Doug Bandow
May 2, 2008
Courtesy Of AntiWar

One of the great ironies of modern Christianity is how warlike many Christians are. Not all Christians, certainly. And many believers at many times in history have put state and ruler before church and God. Yet it remains striking how many conservative evangelicals unabashedly acted as shock troops backing the Iraq invasion. Everyone from Jerry Falwell to Pat Robertson to Chuck Colson to D. James Kennedy to James Dobson to a host of lesser Christian leaders propagandized on behalf of President George W. Bush. A few war supporters have been humbled by the resulting catastrophe in Iraq, but most disclaim any responsibility for the debacle. Some, such as John Hagee, who has endorsed Sen. John McCain for president, now bray for war against Iran.

Laurence Vance, a serious Christian writer and teacher, offers a dramatic counterpoint. In his latest book, Christianity and War, Vance collects 79 essays on military and foreign policy. He spares no one, declaring: "Christians who condone the warfare state and its nebulous crusades against ‘evil’ have been duped. There is nothing ‘Christian’ about the state’s aggressive militarism, its senseless wars, its interventions into the affairs of other countries, and its expanding empire."

I’m probably viewed as a bit of a nutty pacifist at my church. I opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, dismissed the argument that Christian theology requires reflexive support for extremist Likud Party rule in secular Israel, and criticized the tendency of believers to conflate Christianity with the Republican Party. But I am a hopeless squish compared to Vance, who lives in the Florida Panhandle, one of the most conservative parts of the country; it is a miracle that land so weighed down with military bases and personnel hasn’t sunk.

Vance ably mixes history and theology to make his points. Although evangelicals, in particular, act as if nothing could be more natural than carrying a Bible in one hand and shooting a gun in the other, many church fathers were strongly antiwar and sought to limit its occurrence. Vance cites as one example Hugo Grotius, the Dutch Christian who helped create the idea of international law.

Many early American Christians also railed against war, which, one wrote, "contradicts the genius and intention of Christianity" and is "contrary to the Gospel." Another Christian leader complained that "the chief wonder is that Christians, followers of the Prince of Peace, should have concurred in this mad idolatry of strife, and thus been inconsistent not only with themselves, but with the very genius of their system."

Grotius detailed conditions to govern just and fair conduct in war but, notes Vance, "The fact that a government claims a war is just is irrelevant, for American history is replete with examples of American presidents who have exaggerated, misinformed, misrepresented, and lied to deceive the American people into supporting wars that they would not have supported if they had known the facts." George W. Bush, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson all make the list. So do Abraham Lincoln and James Polk.

Argue that the wars were justified if you wish. But the deception is unmistakable. And use of deception to win over the American people cannot be justified.

However, deception probably wasn’t necessary to win over many clerics. Vance chastises Christians who fall for the age-old tactic of government using religion to whip up war fever. He writes: "Many supporters of the senseless war in Iraq are high on religion. Add a religious element to a war and the faithful will come out in droves in support of it. In the case of the current war in Iraq this is easy to do. Because the United States is supposedly a ‘Christian nation,’ the war can be turned into a modern-day crusade since Iraq is a ‘Muslim’ nation."

He also argues that "Christian warmongers … would rather be associated with Bush and the war than with people whom they and others have deemed undesirable. In actuality, however, they are choosing to be associated with a war criminal and murder than with the truth just because some people who are usually wrong happen to be right on this particular issue."

Here, as elsewhere, Vance speaks plainly. He compares the manipulation of American Christians today to that of other Christians at other times, noting how German soldiers wore belt buckles with the inscription "Gott Mit Uns" (God With Us). He adds that "The lesson here is clear: The state uses religion for its own sinister purposes, and especially for that most destructive purpose of all – what Jefferson called ‘the greatest scourge of mankind’ and Washington called ‘the plague of mankind’ – war."

Vance refuses to compromise his rhetoric when talking about the United States or the U.S. military. He’s at times painfully provocative but usually correct. His tone is like the proverbial fingernail across a chalkboard: a typical conservative Christian will want to cover his or her ears and run screaming from the room. Yet Vance forces the complacent, including antiwar activists such as myself, who want to think we are taking thoughtful, nuanced positions, to reconsider our most basic beliefs.

America proclaims liberty around the world, Vance writes, "But rather than receiving a proclamation of liberty, what many people in foreign countries receive instead are threats, bombs, and bullets." Ouch! He goes on, "From a Christian perspective there is only one way to describe U.S. foreign policy: it is evil. It was evil before the United States invaded Iraq, and it would still be evil if the United States withdrew all of its forces from Iraq tomorrow. It is because of our foreign policy that the U.S. military has become – through its wars, interventions, and occupations – the greatest force for evil in the world. U.S. foreign policy sows discord among nations, stirs up strife where none existed, intensifies the hatred that many foreigners around the world have for Americans and each other, and creates terrorists faster than we can kill them." Double ouch!

His negative view of military service may cut deepest. As the son and brother-in-law of career military men, I deeply respect the armed services, though it was not a life that appealed to me. As difficult as I imagined it would be to kill another human being, I’ve always believed that a military is necessary to protect America in a dangerous world. Yet Vance is right that most of the U.S. government’s wars, interventions, and threats do not advance American interests and often create enormous hardship for others.

So what of the responsibility of military personnel? Vance complains that "Not only are U.S. soldiers not viewed as responsible for the death and destruction that they bring, we continually see signs and yellow ribbons expressing support for the troops. We also frequently hear from church pulpits that we should pray for the troops." However, in his view "it can’t be said that the actions of U.S. soldiers in this war are so different from the actions of Russians, Germans, and Turks that they should be commended instead of condemned. Labeling the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq a just war does not make it one."

It’s an extraordinary challenge. Certainly the U.S. invasion of Iraq was woefully imprudent and failed to meet just war criteria. It can’t be called humanitarian because it has created more death and destruction than it eliminated. Yet defenestrating Saddam Hussein was a blessing and many of those on the receiving end of U.S. bullets today are evil men who have murdered and brutalized others. My gut says Vance is wrong to blame service personnel but there is power and purity to his argument.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Vance argues against anyone joining the military. He doesn’t even think Christians should become military chaplains. He believes that being answerable to government inevitably compromises one’s convictions. More fundamentally, to become a chaplain requires that one "join the military" and "support the activities of the military." His question to those thinking of serving: "Is asking God to bless and protect the troops as they shoot, bomb, maim, mine, destroy, ‘interrogate,’ and kill for a rogue state with an evil foreign policy consistent with the Christianity you find in the New Testament?"

Wow.

There’s much more in Christianity and War. Vance devotes several essays to the practical case against the Iraq war. He cites then-Defense Secretary Richard Cheney’s arguments against invading Iraq. He flays talk show host Rush Limbaugh for contending that today’s troops losses don’t matter since traffic deaths are higher. Vance looks at other wars, and assesses America’s imperial foreign policy. He cheerfully explains "what’s wrong with the U.S. global empire."

Most of his essays are spot on. He’s not always right. But he always makes readers think.

Of course, Vance never changes his tone, bringing to mind abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s promise when he inaugurated The Liberator: "I will not equivocate. … I will not retreat a single inch – and I will be heard." Laurence Vance does not equivocate. And he will be heard.

The Iranian Chessboard

By Pepe Escobar and Tom Engelhardt
Source: TomDispatch
May 2, 2008
Courtesy Of AntiWar

It's like old times in the Persian Gulf. As of this week, a second aircraft carrier battle task force is being sent in – not long after Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Adm. Michael Mullen highlighted planning for "potential military courses of action" against Iran; just as the Bush administration's catechism of charges against the Iranians in Iraq reaches something like a fever pitch; at the moment when rumors of, leaks about, and denials of Pentagon back-to-the-drawing-board planning for new ways to attack Iran are zipping around ("Targets would include everything from the plants where weapons are made to the headquarters of the organization known as the Quds Force which directs operations in Iraq"); and only days before the U.S. military in Iraq is supposed to conduct its latest media dog-and-pony show on Iranian support for Iraqi Shi'ite militias ("including date stamps on newly found weapons caches showing that recently made Iranian weapons are flowing into Iraq at a steadily increasing rate"). On the dispatching of that second aircraft carrier, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates offered the following comment: "I don't see it as an escalation. I think it could be seen, though, as a reminder."

And, when you really think about it, it is indeed a "reminder" of sorts. After all, the name of that second carrier has a certain resonance. It's the USS Abraham Lincoln, the very carrier on which, on May 1st exactly five years ago, President George W. Bush landed in that S-3B Viking sub reconnaissance Naval jet, in what TV people call "magic hour light", for his Top-Gun strut to a podium. There, against a White House-produced banner emblazoned with the phrase "Mission Accomplished," he declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Now, more than five years after Baghdad fell, with Saddam Hussein long executed, Osama bin Laden alive and kicking, and American soldiers fighting and dying in the vast Shi'ite slum suburb of Sadr City in Baghdad, the dangerous administration game of chicken with Iran in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere once again intensifies. It's a dangerous moment. When you ratchet up the charges and send in the carriers, anything is possible.

We regularly read about all of this, of course, but almost never as seen through anything but American administration or journalistic eyes (and sometimes it's hard to tell the two apart). The author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues, Pepe Escobar, a continent-hopping super-journalist for the always fascinating Asia Times and now The Real News as well, has done a striking job of covering the Iraq War, the various oil wars and pipeline struggles of the Middle East and Central Asia, and, these last years, has regularly visited Iran. Today, in his first appearance at Tomdispatch, he offers something rare indeed, an assessment of Iran "under the gun" – without the American filter in place. Tom

The Iranian Chessboard

Five Ways To Think About Iran Under The Gun

By Pepe Escobar

More than two years ago, Seymour Hersh disclosed in the New Yorker how George W. Bush was considering strategic nuclear strikes against Iran. Ever since, a campaign to demonize that country has proceeded in a relentless, Terminator-like way, applying the same techniques and semantic contortions that were so familiar in the period before the Bush administration launched its invasion of Iraq.

The campaign's greatest hits are widely known: "The ayatollahs" are building a Shi'ite nuclear bomb; Iranian weapons are killing American soldiers in Iraq; Iranian gunboats are provoking U.S. warships in the Persian Gulf – Iran, in short, is the new al-Qaeda, a terror state aimed at the heart of the United States. It's idle to expect the American mainstream media to offer any tools that might put this orchestrated blitzkrieg in context.

Here are just a few recent instances of the ongoing campaign: Secretary of Defense Robert Gates insists that Iran "is hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons." Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, admits that the Pentagon is planning for "potential military courses of action" when it comes to Iran. In tandem with U.S. commander in Iraq Gen. David Petraeus, Mullen denounces Iran's "increasingly lethal and malign influence" in Iraq, although he claims to harbor "no expectations" of an attack on Iran "in the immediate future" and even admits he has "no smoking gun which could prove that the highest leadership [of Iran] is involved."

But keep in mind one thing the Great Saddam Take-out of 2003 proved: that a "smoking gun" is, in the end, irrelevant. And this week, the U.S. is ominously floating a second aircraft carrier battle group into the Persian Gulf.

But what of Iran itself under the blizzard of charges and threats? What to make of it? What does the world look like from Tehran? Here are five ways to think about Iran under the gun and to better decode the Iranian chessboard.

1. Don't Underestimate The Power Of Shi'ite Islam: Seventy-five percent of the world's oil reserves are in the Persian Gulf. Seventy percent of the Gulf's population is Shi'ite. Shi'ism is an eschatological – and revolutionary – religion, fueled by a passionate mixture of romanticism and cosmic despair. As much as it may instill fear in hegemonic Sunni Islam, some Westerners should feel a certain empathy for intellectual Shi'ism's almost Sartrean nausea towards the vacuous material world.

For more than a thousand years Shi'ite Islam has, in fact, been a galaxy of Shi'isms – a kind of Fourth World of its own, always cursed by political exclusion and implacable economic marginalization, always carrying an immensely dramatic view of history with it.

It's impossible to understand Iran without grasping the contradiction that the Iranian religious leadership faces in ruling, however fractiously, a nation state. In the minds of Iran's religious leaders, the very concept of the nation-state is regarded with deep suspicion, because it detracts from the umma, the global Muslim community. The nation-state, as they see it, is but a way station on the road to the final triumph of Shi'ism and pure Islam. To venture beyond the present stage of history, however, they also recognize the necessity of reinforcing the nation-state that offers Shi'ism a sanctuary – and that, of course, happens to be Iran. When Shi'ism finally triumphs, the concept of nation-state – a heritage, in any case, of the West – will disappear, replaced by a community organized according to the will of Prophet Muhammad.

In the right context, this is, believe me, a powerful message. I briefly became a mashti – a pilgrim visiting a privileged Shi'ite gateway to Paradise, the holy shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, four hours west of the Iran-Afghan border. At sunset, the only foreigner lost in a pious multitude of black chadors and white turbans occupying every square inch of the huge walled shrine, I felt a tremendous emotional jolt. And I wasn't even a believer, just a simple infidel.

2. Geography Is Destiny: Whenever I go to the holy city of Qom, bordering the central deserts in Iran, I am always reminded, in no uncertain terms, that, as far as the major ayatollahs are concerned, their supreme mission is to convert the rest of Islam to the original purity and revolutionary power of Shi'ism – a religion invariably critical of the established social and political order.

Even a Shi'ite leader in Tehran, however, can't simply live by preaching and conversion alone. Iran, after all, happens to be a nation-state at the crucial intersection of the Arabic, Turkish, Russian, and Indian worlds. It is the key transit point of the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Indian subcontinent. It lies between three seas (the Caspian, the Persian Gulf, and the sea of Oman). Close to Europe and yet at the gates of Asia (in fact part of Southwest Asia), Iran is the ultimate Eurasian crossroads. Isfahan, the country's third largest city, is roughly equidistant from Paris and Shanghai. No wonder Dick Cheney, checking out Iran, "salivates like a Pavlov dog" (to quote those rock 'n roll geopoliticians, the Rolling Stones).

Members of the Iranian upper middle classes in North Tehran might spin dreams of Iran recapturing the expansive range of influence once held by the Persian empire; but the silky, Qom-carpet-like diplomats at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will assure you that what they really dream of is an Iran respected as a major regional power. To this end, they have little choice, faced with the enmity of the globe's "sole superpower," but to employ a sophisticated counter-encirclement foreign policy. After all, Iran is now completely surrounded by post-9/11 American military bases in Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, and the Gulf states. It faces the U.S. military on its Afghan, Iraqi, Pakistani, and Persian Gulf borders, and lives with ever tightening U.S. economic sanctions, as well as a continuing drumbeat of Bush administration threats involving possible air assaults on Iranian nuclear (and probably other) facilities.

The Iranian counter-response to sanctions and to its demonization as a rogue or pariah state has been to develop a "Look East" foreign policy that is, in itself, a challenge to American energy hegemony in the Gulf. The policy has been conducted with great skill by Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who was educated in Bangalore, India. While focused on massive energy deals with China, India, and Pakistan, it looks as well to Africa and Latin America. To the horror of American neocons, an intercontinental "axis of evil" air link already exists – a weekly commercial Tehran-Caracas flight via Iran Air.

Iran's diplomatic (and energy) reach is now striking. When I was in Bolivia early this year, I learned of a tour Iran's ambassador to Venezuela had taken on the jet of Bolivian President Evo Morales. The ambassador reportedly offered Morales "everything he wanted" to offset the influence of "American imperialism."

Meanwhile, a fierce energy competition is developing among the Turks, Iranians, Russians, Chinese, and Americans – all placing their bets on which future trade routes will be the crucial ones as oil and natural gas flow out of Central Asia. As a player, Iran is trying to position itself as the unavoidable bazaar-state in an oil-and-gas-fueled New Silk Road – the backbone of a new Asian Energy Security Grid. That's how it could recover some of the preeminence it enjoyed in the distant era of Darius, the King of Kings. And that's the main reason why U.S. neo-Cold Warriors, Zio-cons, armchair imperialists, or all of the above, are throwing such a collective – and threatening – fit.

3. What Is The Nuclear "New Hitler" Ahmadinejad Up To?: Ever since the days when former Iranian President Mohammed Khatami suggested a "dialogue of civilizations," Iranian diplomats have endlessly repeated the official position on Iran's nuclear program: It's peaceful; the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has found no proof of the military development of nuclear power; the religious leadership opposes atomic weapons; and Iran – unlike the US – has not invaded or attacked any nation for the past quarter millennium.

Think of George W. Bush and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new Blues Brothers: Both believe they are on a mission from God. Both are religious fundamentalists. Ahmadinejad believes fervently in the imminent return of the Mahdi, the Shi'ite messiah, who "disappeared" and has remained hidden since the ninth century. Bush believes fervently in a coming end time and the return of Jesus Christ. But only Bush, despite his actual invasions and constant threats, gets a (sort of) free pass from the Western ideological machine, while Ahmadinejad is portrayed as a Hitlerian believer in a new Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad is relentlessly depicted as an angry, totally irrational, Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who wants to "wipe Israel off the map." That infamous quote, repeated ad nauseam but out of context, comes from an October 2005 speech at an obscure anti-Zionist student conference. What Ahmadinejad really said, in a literal translation from Farsi, was that "the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time." He was actually quoting the leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who said it first in the early 1980s. Khomeini hoped that a regime so unjust toward the Palestinians would be replaced by another more equitable one. He was not, however, threatening to nuke Israel.

In the 1980s, in the bitterest years of the Iran-Iraq War, Khomeini also made it very clear that the production, possession, or use of nuclear weapons is against Islam. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later issued a fatwa – a religious injunction – under the same terms. For the theocratic regime, however, the Iranian nuclear program is a powerful symbol of independence vis-á-vis what is still widely considered by Iranians of all social classes and educational backgrounds as Anglo-Saxon colonialism.

Ahmadinejad is mad for the Iranian nuclear program. It's his bread and butter in terms of domestic popularity. During the Iran-Iraq War, he was a member of a support team aiding anti-Saddam Hussein Kurdish forces. (That's when he became friends with "Uncle" Jalal Talabani, now the Kurdish president of Iraq.) Not many presidents have been trained in guerrilla warfare. Speculation is rampant in Tehran that Ahmadinejad, the leadership of the Quds Force, an elite division of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), plus the hardcore volunteer militia, the Basij (informally known in Iran as "the army of twenty million") are betting on a U.S. attack on Iran's nuclear facilities to strengthen the country's theocratic regime and their faction of it.

Reformists refer to Russian President Vladimir Putin's visit to Tehran last October, when he was received by the Supreme Leader (a very rare honor). Putin offered a new plan to resolve the explosive Iranian nuclear dossier: Iran would halt nuclear enrichment on Iranian soil in return for peaceful nuclear cooperation and development in league with Russia, the Europeans, and the IAEA.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator of that moment, Ali Larijani, a confidant of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as well as the Leader himself let it be known that the idea would be seriously considered. But Ahmadinejad immediately contradicted the Supreme Leader in public. Even more startling, yet evidently with the Leader's acquiescence, he then sacked Larijani and replaced him with a longtime friend, Saeed Jalili, an ideological hardliner.

4. A Velvet Revolution Is Not Around The Corner: Before the 2005 Iranian elections, at a secret, high-level meeting of the ruling ayatollahs in his house, the Supreme Leader concluded that Ahmadinejad would be able to revive the regime with his populist rhetoric and pious conservatism, which then seemed very appealing to the downtrodden masses. (Curiously enough, Ahmadinejad's campaign motto was: "We can.")

But the ruling ayatollahs miscalculated. Since they controlled all key levers of power – the Supreme National Security Council, the Council of Guardians, the Judiciary, the bonyads (Islamic foundations that control vast sections of the economy), the army, the IRGC (the parallel army created by Khomeini in 1979 and recently branded a terrorist organization by the Bush administration), the media – they assumed they would also control the self-described "street cleaner of the people." How wrong they have been.

For Khamenei himself, this was big business. After 18 years of non-stop internal struggle, he was finally in full control of executive power, as well as of the legislature, the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, and the key ayatollahs in Qom.

Ahmadinejad, for his part, unleashed his own agenda. He purged the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of many reformist-minded diplomats; encouraged the Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance to crackdown on all forms of "nefarious" Western influences, from entertainment industry products to colorful made-in-India scarves for women; and filled his cabinet with revolutionary friends from the Iran-Iraq War days. These friends proved to be as faithful as administratively incompetent – especially in terms of economic policy. Instead of solidifying the theocratic leadership under Supreme Leader Khamenei, Ahmadinejad increasingly fractured an increasingly unpopular ruling elite.

Nonetheless, discontent with Ahmadinejad's economic incompetence has not translated into street barricades and it probably will not; nor, contrary to neocon fantasyland scenarios, would an attack on Iran's nuclear facilities provoke a popular uprising. Every single political faction supports the nuclear program out of patriotic pride.

There is surely a glaring paradox here. The regime may be wildly unpopular – because of so much enforced austerity in an energy-rich land and the virtual absence of social mobility – but for millions, especially in the countryside and the remote provinces, life is still bearable. In the large urban centers – Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz – most would be in favor of a move toward a more market-oriented economy combined with a progressive liberalization of mores (even as the regime insists on going the other way). No velvet revolution, however, seems to be on the horizon.

At least four main factions are at play in the intricate Persian-miniature-like game of today's Iranian power politics – and two others, the revolutionary left and the secular right, even though thoroughly marginalized, shouldn't be forgotten either.

The extreme right, very religiously conservative but economically socialist, has, from the beginning, been closely aligned with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmadinejad is the star of this faction.

The clerics, from the Supreme Leader to thousands of provincial religious figures, are pure conservatives, even more patriotic than the extreme right, yet generally no lovers of Ahmadinejad. But there is a crucial internal split. The substantially wealthy bonyads – the Islamic foundations, active in all economic sectors – badly want a reconciliation with the West. They know that, under the pressure of Western sanctions, the relentless flight of both capital and brains is working against the national interest.

Economists in Tehran project there may be as much as $600 billion in Iranian funds invested in the economies of Persian Gulf petro-monarchies. The best and the brightest continue to flee the country. But the Islamic foundations also know that this state of affairs slowly undermines Ahmadinejad's power.

The extremely influential Revolutionary Guard Corps, a key component of government with vast economic interests, transits between these two factions. They privilege the fight against what they define as Zionism, are in favor of close relations with Sunni Arab states, and want to go all the way with the nuclear program. In fact, substantial sections of the IRGC and the Basij believe Iran must enter the nuclear club not only to prevent an attack by the "American Satan," but to irreversibly change the balance of power in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.

The current reformists/progressives of the left were originally former partisans of Khomeini's son, Ahmad Khomeini. Later, after a spectacular mutation from Soviet-style socialism to some sort of religious democracy, their new icon became former President Khatami (of "dialogue of civilizations" fame). Here, after all, was an Islamic president who had captured the youth vote and the women's vote and had written about the ideas of German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as applied to civil society as well as the possibility of democratization in Iran. Unfortunately, his "Tehran Spring" didn't last long – and is now long gone.

The key establishment faction is undoubtedly that of moderate Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term President, current chairman of the Expediency Council and a key member of the Council of Experts – 86 clerics, no women, the Holy Grail of the system, and the only institution in the Islamic Republic capable of removing the Supreme Leader from office. He is now supported by the intelligentsia and urban youth. Colloquially known as "The Shark," Rafsanjani is the consummate Machiavellian. He retains privileged ties to key Washington players and has proven to be the ultimate survivor – moving like a skilled juggler between Khatami and Khamenei as power in the country shifted.

Rafsanjani is, and will always remain, a supporter of the Supreme Leader. As the regime's de facto number two, his quest is not only to "save" the Islamic Revolution, but also to consolidate Iran's regional power and reconcile the country with the West. His reasoning is clear: He knows that an anti-Islamic tempest is already brewing among the young in Iran's major cities, who dream of integrating with the nomad elites of liquid global modernity.

If the Bush administration had any real desire to let its aircraft carriers float out of the Gulf and establish an entente cordiale with Tehran, Rafsanjani would be the man to talk to.

5. Heading Down The New Silk Road

Reformist friends in Tehran keep telling me the country is now immersed in an atmosphere similar to the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China or the 1980s rectification campaign in Cuba – and nothing "velvet" or "orange" or "tulip" or any of the other color-coded Western-style movements that Washington might dream of is, as yet, on the horizon.

Under such conditions, what if there were an American air attack on Iran? The Supreme Leader, on the record, offered his own version of threats in 2006. If Iran were attacked, he said, the retaliation would be doubly powerful against U.S. interests elsewhere in the world.

From American supply lines and bases in southern Iraq to the Straits of Hormuz, the Iranians, though no military powerhouse, do have the ability to cause real damage to American forces and interests – and certainly to drive the price of oil into the stratosphere. Such a "war" would clearly be a disaster for everyone.

The Iranian theocratic leadership, however, seems to doubt that the Bush administration and the U.S. military, exhausted by their wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, will attack. They feel a tide at their backs. Meanwhile the "Look East" strategy, driven by soaring energy prices, is bearing fruit.

Ahmadinejad has just concluded a tour of South Asia and, to the despair of American neocons, the Asian Energy Security Grid is quickly becoming a reality. Two years ago, at the Petroleum Ministry in Tehran, I was told Iran is betting on the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-economic politics." This year Iran finally becomes a natural gas-exporting country. The framework for the $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India pipeline, also known as the "peace" pipeline, is a go. Both these key South Asian U.S. allies are ignoring Bush administration desires and rapidly bolstering their economic, political, cultural, and – crucially – geostrategic connections with Iran. An attack on Iran would now inevitably be viewed as an attack against Asia.

What a disaster in the making, and yet, now more than ever, Vice President Dick Cheney's faction in Washington (not to mention possible future president John McCain) seems ready to bomb. Perhaps the Mahdi himself – in his occult wisdom – is betting on a U.S. war against Asia to slouch towards Qom to be reborn.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News. He's been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge, both published by Nimble Books in 2007.

Copyright 2008 Pepe Escobar

Navy Is Re-Establishing 4th Fleet

By Jeff Schogol,
Stars and Stripes
Mideast Edition,
Friday, April 25, 2008
Stripes

ARLINGTON, Va. — The Navy announced Thursday it is re-establishing U.S. 4th Fleet, which will have purview over waters in the Caribbean as well as in Central and South America.

“U.S. Fourth Fleet will be dual-hatted with the existing Commander U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command (NAVSO), currently located in Mayport, Fla.,” a Navy news release said.

As of July 1, the fleet will be in charge of Navy ships, aircraft and submarines conducting missions that include counter-narcoterrorism, bilateral training and humanitarian assistance, the Navy news release said.

“U.S. Fourth Fleet has been re-established to address the increased role of maritime forces in the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) area of operations, and to demonstrate the U.S. commitment to regional partners,” the release said.

Rear Adm. Joseph D. Kernan, now head of Naval Special Warfare Command, will be in charge of both 4th Fleet and U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command, making him the first Navy SEAL to be in charge of a numbered fleet, the release said.

Kernan will remain a two-star admiral, unlike the three-star admirals in charge of the other numbered fleets, because the Navy is limited by Congress on the number of three-star admirals that it can have, a Defense official said.

Fourth Fleet was initially established in 1943 to protect the United States against raiders and other threats, such as German U-Boats, Lt. Sean Robertson, a Navy spokesman, said.

The fleet was disestablished in 1950, when its responsibilities were taken over by U.S. 2nd Fleet, Robertson said.

Today, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command serves as the Navy’s component of U.S. Southern Command, he said. U.S Naval Forces Southern Command was established in 2000 and initially based in Puerto Rico, according to the command’s Web site.

In addition to being responsible for the Navy’s UNITAS deployments around South America and counternarcotics missions in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, the command was heavily focused on community relations issues dealing with the Navy’s training range on Vieques Island, said Defense Department spokesman Cmdr. Jeffrey D. Gordon.

UNITAS are annual exercises between the U.S. Navy and local naval forces in South America, such as Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile and Colombia.

After President Bush announced in 2001 that the Navy would no longer use the training range, the command went from having a two-star admiral to a one-star admiral in command, and it eventually moved to Florida, Gordon said.

Base-Less Strategy

Col. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.)
April 25, 2008
Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco
Foreign Policy In Focus
FPIF.org

With nine months left in office, the Bush administration has opened negotiations with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki that are expected to set parameters within which future relationships between Iraq and the United States will be conducted. The end product, as presently envisioned by Washington, will be either one document with two major sections–security issues and all others–or possibly two documents. The main thrust of the security document reportedly will be a traditional status of forces agreement (SOFA) that defines the extent to which Iraq's laws will apply to U.S. personnel in Iraq. The other agreement will cover non-security issues.

When assured of anonymity, Iraqi officials have been more open than the U.S. negotiators about their expectations. Iraqi descriptions of the non-SOFA discussions, said to cover economic, social, financial, trade, political, military, and environmental matters, suggest that there may well be a series of specialized subject-matter documents rather than the one or two mentioned by U.S. sources. Such an outcome presumably would please the White House which has taken the position that no documents emerging from the negotiations will rise to the level of a treaty and thus require legislative imprimatur.

Permanent Bases Debate

Understandably, the White House has been extremely reticent and defensive about the discussions, perhaps remembering past subterfuge of its own. And while there are no signs of panic – yet – negotiators are quite aware that critical details, leaked to opponents before the final signatures are affixed, potentially could scuttle months of maneuvering by the Bush administration on sensitive topics. Of these, the most politically sensitive issue is whether U.S. bases being built in Iraq should be, or clearly already are, permanent.

Ironically, the basing debate is more of a U.S. domestic controversy that pits Democrats in Congress against Republicans in Congress and the White House than an issue between the United States and Iraq. The current (110th) and previous (109th) Congresses enacted legislation banning the expenditure of funds for the construction of "permanent" bases in Iraq. Each time, Bush signed the legislation into law ( PL 109-284, PL 109-364, PL 110-28, PL 110-116, PL 110-181 ) That he evidently never had any intention of complying (as commander in chief he believes he has virtually unlimited leeway to ignore provisions of law pertaining to the "global war on terror"), Bush included in his signing statement for PL 110-181 a specific reference to the anti-base provision as one that he would interpret for its consistency with his duties as commander in chief.

Moreover, as a harbinger of what the administration hopes will come out of its discussions with Baghdad, even as Bush was signing the latest bill banning permanent bases in Iraq, his Office of Management and Budget was compiling the president's budget for the 2009 fiscal year–including requests in the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars destined for military construction throughout Iraq. When challenged on the intended use for this stream of funds, the response, if any, comes down to improving the security of U.S. troops. (And as it always does, Congress rolls over when it hears this phrase and votes to appropriate the funds requested.)

So when General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and U.S. Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker testified before Congress, April 8-9, 2008, both specifically denied that permanent bases were envisioned in Iraq for U.S. soldiers. Spokespersons for the administration also reiterated that the discussions with Iraq did not include permanent bases. The question, therefore, in light of the 2009 military construction appropriations request from the White House, is the meaning of "permanent."

Defining Permanent Bases

The administration has drawn comparisons between the structure of bases in post-World War II Germany and in South Korea after 1953 and its expectations for the longevity of bases in Iraq. Taking that as his cue, two days after Petraeus and Crocker testified before the Senate, Senator James Webb (D-VA) asked Assistant Defense Secretary Mary Beth Long to define what, in the administration's jargon, is a "permanent" base. When Long conceded that there was no such definition in her department, let alone in the administration, Webb observed that the word described not what the bases will be but what they won't be.

"Permanent," it now seems, "refers more to the state of mind contemplated by the use of the term," according to Long, rather than a physical reality. Thus administration officials can testify, as they did repeatedly during the hearing just referenced, that the United States will have no permanent bases in Iraq because their "state of mind" is that the bases are non-permanent. By extension, for every negotiation involving security commitments and the forward basing of military units (and what authorities these units might be permitted), defining the meaning of such terms as "permanent" and "commitment" becomes a recurring task. All participants in a potential agreement have to be clear as to the connotations as well as the denotations of the language used. Equally, like the dog that didn't bark in the middle of the night in Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes' mystery "Silver Blaze," negotiators need to agree on what is not meant by such words.

The Cash

How does one do this if words themselves no longer can be trusted? One way is to heed the old saw, "Follow the money," for where government spends thereto will be the principles and beliefs that are its priorities.

What turns up is a rather more expansive list of regional bases funded by Washington than many Americans realize. As part of the National Defense Authorization Act for the 2008 fiscal year, signed into law by President Bush on January 28 (PL 110-181), Congress authorized Army and Air Force military construction funding totaling $425.7 million for three bases in Afghanistan and nearly $1.9 billion for 16 bases in Iraq. Moreover, the law does not require that all funds allocated actually be spent in FY2008. But the most intriguing part of the request is the $203 million for a catch-all "various location" line item entry, suggesting that special operations units (military and CIA) are part of the mix under consideration. (That this might actually be the case is mind-boggling in light of the just completed 104-acre $736 million U.S. embassy in Baghdad – a "super base if there ever was one.)

Hardly had the ink dried on FY2008 legislation when the president sent Congress his proposed budget for the 2009 fiscal year. This proposes worldwide military construction spending that exceeds $21 billion, more than triple actual spending in FY2007. Even in a $550 billion budget, $21 billion is "real money."

Treaty Ratification

But this year, the real fight – if there is to be one – will center on the question of ratification, The preferred U.S. timeline calls for completion of discussions and agreement with al-Maliki's government by the end of July – the same time line for the complete withdrawal of the last Brigade Combat Team that went to Iraq in 2007 as part of the Bush administration's "surge." In his recent testimony to the Armed Services and Foreign Relations/Foreign Affairs Committees of the U.S. Congress, General Petraeus called for a 45-day "pause" in troop withdrawals to consolidate and assess the reaction to decreasing U.S. forces to 140,000. With Congress, as usual, in recess for all of August, the administration undoubtedly hopes the Iraqi parliament will approve all relevant documents sometime in July and send them to Washington for Bush to sign while Congress is in recess and unable to stop another instance of the "unitary presidency"

Should this time line not materialize, the administration will undoubtedly try to finesse all efforts by Congress to compel the White House to submit any document that emerges for Senate ratification as treaties. Unfortunately, given the slim margins the Democrats have in each chamber in the current Congress, it is likely the congressional leaders will find most of their efforts consumed by the struggle to enact appropriations bills before adjournment, traditionally within the first week of October, so that lawmakers standing for re-election can get home to campaign.

This circumstance makes the electoral calendar the ally of the White House, not Congress. Compounding the administration's advantage is the large number of Republican incumbents not seeking reelection: by early March, Republicans constituted three-quarters of the 40 House members who have announced they will not seek reelection. The 40 Republicans running to replace those leaving are unaffected by the congressional calendar.

Al-Maliki could play a key role in the White House calculations if the "Plan B" timeline comes into play. All he needs to do is to hold back submitting the Iraqi parliament any agreements negotiated with the United States until after parliament's August recess and the observance of the Holy Month of Ramadan, which in 2008 begins approximately September 2. This could delay the arrival of the agreements in the Oval Office until mid-October with Congress adjourned.

In fact, the only time requirement is that both the United States and Iraq complete their negotiations and sign the relevant documents by December 31, 2008. That's the expiration date of the current UN Security Council mandate authorizing the presence of armed foreign soldiers in Iraq to help maintain order and to assist other national and international agencies working to restore Iraq to its place in the community of nations.

Some U.S. lawmakers have suggested that a further extension of the UN mandate may be necessary if negotiations over the terms of the status of forces agreement don't resolve all the issues by December 31, 2008. Such a delay cannot be ruled out as a number of Iraqi parliamentarians have expressed displeasure at proposed provisions that would allow U.S. soldiers to arrest and detain Iraqi's in their own country. Iraqi lawmakers note that no other SOFA permits this – but then, the United States has no SOFA with the government of a country fighting a civil war.

All in all, it is shaping up to be an interesting autumn.

Colonel. Daniel Smith, U.S. Army (Ret.) is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, a retired U.S. Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Email at dan@fcnl.org or blog "The Quakers’ Colonel."

US Considered Nuking China

Documents Show US Considered Using Nuclear Weapons

Eisenhower Overruled Air Force Commanders During Taiwan Crisis, Ordered Them Not To Use Nukes

BARRY SCHWEID
AP News
Apr 30, 2008 15:23 EST
Courtesy Of WireDispatch

President Dwight D. Eisenhower overruled some of his military commanders in the summer of 1958, ordering them not to use nuclear weapons against China if communist forces blockaded the Taiwan Strait, according to declassified Air Force documents.

Eisenhower "made it clear that the Chinese would be given a warning with conventional explosives before he would authorize dropping of the deadlier ordnance" on Chinese territories, according to the documents made public by George Washington University's National Security Archive.

The president had the support of a congressional resolution to use force in defense of Taiwan. His decision not to use nuclear weapons still left them available if needed for subsequent attacks, according to the newly released narrative by a contemporary Air Force historian, Bernard C. Nalty.

Disclosure of the top-secret document was one in a collection obtained by a freedom-of-information lawsuit filed by the Archive after more than a decade of requests that the documents be declassified, said William Burr of the Archive.

As the crisis grew, according to the papers, five B-47 bombers on Guam went on alert in mid-August to conduct nuclear raids against Chinese airfields.

The idea of using nuclear weapons to prevent the Chinese from using ships and aircraft to isolate Nationalist-held islands in the strait was accepted by Eisenhower's Cabinet — except for Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who was away on vacation.

The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Air Force Gen. Nathan F. Twining, had explained at a Cabinet meeting that U.S. planes would drop 10-to-15 kiloton nuclear bombs in the vicinity of Amoy, a coastal city on the Taiwan strait now called Xiamen.

The idea was that the Chinese would have to lift their blockade. Otherwise the United States would proceed to attack Chinese airfields.

But Eisenhower ruled out the initial use of nuclear weapons, concluding the fallout would cause civilian casualties in China and on Taiwan, risking nuclear escalation.

The Pacific Air Force commander, Gen. Lawrence S. Kuter, whose operations plan had assumed the United States would carry out nuclear strikes as necessary to defeat attacking Chinese communists, characterized the idea of a "limited response" as disastrous.

As tensions grew, Chinese artillery fired thousands of rounds against Big and Little Quemoy, but there was no evidence a Chinese invasion was in the works. Eisenhower approved recommendations by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to strengthen Taiwan's air defenses and the Seventh Fleet. The U.S.-backed nationalist air force shot down 32 communist MIG fighters during the crisis.

In October, China announced a ceasefire. Shelling subsequently resumed, then tapered off, possibly because the Chinese concluded the United States might reply with its own use of force.

Source: AP News