Understanding Empire: Hierarchy, Networks and Clients: The Case OF Somalia

[Nur]

Understanding Empire: Hierarchy, Networks and Clients

 

By Prof. James Petras

 

The structure of power of the world imperial system can best be understood through a classification of countries according to their political, economic, diplomatic and military organization.

 

03/20/07 "ICH " -- --

 

Introduction:

 

The imperial system is much more complex than what is commonly referred to as the “US Empire”. The US Empire, with its vast network of financial investments, military bases, multi-national corporations and client states, is the single most important component of the global imperial system (1). Nevertheless, it is overly simplistic to overlook the complex hierarchies, networks, follower states and clients that define the contemporary imperial system (2). To understand empire and imperialism today requires us to look at the complex and changing system of imperial stratification.

 

Hierarchy of Empire

 

The structure of power of the world imperial system can best be understood through a classification of countries according to their political, economic, diplomatic and military organization. The following is a schema of this system:

 

 

I. Hierarchy of Empire (from top to bottom)

 

A. Central Imperial States (CIS)

B. Newly Emerging Imperial Powers (NEIP)

C. Semi-autonomous Client Regimes (SACR)

D. Client Collaborator Regimes (CCR)

 

II. Independent States:

 

A. Revolutionary

Cuba and Venezuela

B. Nationalist

Sudan, Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea

 

III. Contested Terrain and Regimes in Transition

 

Armed resistance, elected regimes, social movements

 

At the top of the imperial system are those imperial states whose power is projected on a world scale, whose ruling classes dominate investment and financial markets and who penetrate the economies of the rest of the world. At the apex of the imperial system stand the US, the European Union (itself highly stratified) and Japan. Led by the US they have established networks of ‘follower imperial states’ (largely regional hegemons) and client or vassal states which frequently act as surrogate military forces. Imperial states act in concert to break down barriers to penetration and takeovers, while at the same time, competing to gain advantages for their own state and multinational interests.

 

Just below the central imperial states are newly emerging imperial powers (NEIP), namely China, India, Canada, Russia and Australia. The NEIP states are subject to imperial penetration, as well as expanding into neighboring and overseas underdeveloped states and countries rich in extractive resources. The NEIP are linked to the central imperial states (CIS) through joint ventures in their home states, while they increasingly compete for control over extractive resources in the underdeveloped countries. They frequently ‘follow’ in the footsteps of the imperial powers, and in some cases take advantage of conflicts to better their own position.

 

For example China and India’s overseas expansion focuses on investments in extractive mineral and energy sectors to fuel domestic industrialization, similar to the earlier (1880-1950’s) imperial practices of the US and Europe. Similarly China invests in African countries, which are in conflict with the US and EU, just as the US developed ties with anti-colonial regimes (Algeria, Kenya and Francophone Africa) in conflict with their former European colonial rulers in the 1950’ and 1960’s.

 

Further down the hierarchy of the imperial system are the ‘semi-autonomous client regimes’ (SACR). These include Brazil, South Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Chile and lately Bolivia. These states have a substantial national economic base of support, through public or private ownership of key economic sectors. They are governed by regimes, which pursue diversified markets, though highly dependent on exports to the emerging imperial states. On the other hand these states are highly dependent on imperial state military protection (Taiwan, South Korea and Saudi Arabia) and provide regional military bases for imperial operations. Many are resource-dependent exporters (Saudi Arabia, Chile, Nigeria and Bolivia) who share revenues and profits with the multi-nationals of the imperial states. They include rapidly industrialized countries (Taiwan and South Korea), as well as relatively agro-mineral export states (Brazil, Argentina and Chile).

 

The wealthy oil states have close ties with the financial ruling classes of the imperial counties and invest heavily in real estate, financial instruments and Treasury notes which finance the deficits in the US and England.

 

On key issues such as imperial wars in the Middle East, the invasion of Haiti, destabilizing regimes in Africa, support for global neo-liberal policies and imperial takeovers of strategic sectors, they collaborate with rulers from the CIS and the NEIP. Nevertheless, because of powerful elite interests and in some cases of powerful national social movements, they come into limited conflicts with the imperial powers. For example, Brazil, Chile and Argentina disagree with the US efforts to undermine the nationalist Venezuelan government. They have lucrative trade, energy and investment relations with Venezuela. In addition they do not wish to legitimize military coups, which might threaten their own rule and legitimacy in the eyes of an electorate partial to President Chavez. While structurally deeply integrated into the imperial system, the SACR regimes retain a degree of autonomy in formulating foreign and domestic policy, which may even conflict or compete with imperial interests.

 

Despite their ‘relative autonomy’, the regimes also provide military and political mercenaries to serve the imperialist countries. This is best illustrated in the case of Haiti. Subsequent to the US invasion and overthrow of the elected Aristide Government in 2004, the US succeeded in securing an occupation force from its outright client and ‘semi-autonomous’ client regimes. President Lula of Brazil sent a major contingent. A Brazilian General headed the entire mercenary military force. Chile’s Gabriel Valdez headed the United Nations occupation administration as the senior official overseeing the bloody repression of Haitian resistance movements. Other ‘semi-autonomous’ clients, such as Uruguay and Bolivia, added military contingents along with soldiers from client regimes such as Panama, Paraguay, Colombia and Peru. President Evo Morales justified Bolivia’s continued military collaboration with the US in Haiti under his presidency by citing its ‘peacekeeping role’, knowing full well that between December 2006 and February 2007 scores of Haitian poor were slaughtered during a full-scale UN invasion of Haiti’s poorest and most densely populated slums.

 

The key theoretical point is that given Washington current state of being tied down in two wars in the Middle East and West Asia, it depends on its clients to police and repress anti-imperialist movements elsewhere. Somalia, as in Haiti, was invaded by mercenaries by Ethiopia, trained, financed, armed and directed by US military advisers. Subsequently, during the occupation, Washington succeeded in securing its African clients (via the so-called Organization of African Unity according to the White House’s stooge, Ugandan Army spokesman Captain Paddy Ankunda) to send a mercenary occupation army to prop up its unpopular client Somali warlord ruler. Despite opposition from its Parliament, Uganda is sending 1500 mercenaries along with contingents from Nigeria, Burundi, Ghana and Malawi.

 

At the bottom of the imperial hierarchy are the client collaborator regimes (CCR). These include Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf States, Central American and Caribbean Island states, the Axis of Sub-Saharan States (A.S.S) (namely Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Ghana), Colombia, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Eastern European states (in and out of the European Union), former states of the USSR (Georgia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Latvia, etc), Philippines, Indonesia, North Africa and Pakistan. These countries are governed by authoritarian political elites dependent on the imperial or NEIP states for arms, financing and political support. They provide vast opportunities for exploitation and export of raw materials. Unlike the SACR, exports from client regimes have little value added, as industrial processing of raw materials takes place in the imperial countries, particularly in the NEIP. Predator, rentier, comprador and kleptocratic elites who lack any entrepreneurial vocation rule the CCR. They frequently provide mercenary soldiers to service imperial countries intervening, conquering, occupying and imposing client regimes in imperial targeted countries. The client regimes thus are subordinate collaborators of the imperial powers in the plunder of wealth, the exploitation of billions of workers and the displacement of peasants and destruction of the environment.

 

The structure of the imperial system is based on the power of ruling classes to exercise and project state and market power, retain control of exploitative class relations at home and abroad and to organize mercenary armies from among its client states. Led and directed by imperial officials, mercenary armies collaborate in destroying autonomous popular, nationalist movements and independent states.

 

Client regimes form a crucial link in sustaining the imperial powers. They complement imperial occupation forces, facilitating the extraction of raw materials. Without the ‘mercenaries of color’ the imperial powers would have to extend and over-stretch their own military forces, provoking high levels of internal opposition, and heightening overseas resistance to overt wars of re-colonization. Moreover client mercenaries are less costly in terms of financing and reduce the loss of imperial soldiers. There are numerous euphemistic terms used to describe these client mercenary forces: United Nations, Organization of American States and Organization of African Unity ‘peacekeepers’, the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ among others. In many cases a few white imperial senior officers command the lower officers and soldiers of color of the client mercenary armies.

 

Independent States and Movements

 

The imperial system while it straddles the globe and penetrates deeply into societies, economies and states is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. Challenges to the imperial system come from two sources: relatively independent states and powerful social and political movements.

 

The ‘independent’ states are largely regimes, which are in opposition to and targeted by the imperial states. They include Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Zimbabwe. What defines these regimes as ‘independent’ is their willingness to reject the policies of the imperial powers, particularly imperial military interventions. They also reject imperialist demands for unconditional access to markets, resources and military bases.

 

These regimes differ widely in terms of social policy, degree of popular support, secular-religious identities, economic development and consistency in opposing imperialist aggression. All face immediate military threats and /or destabilization programs, designed to replace the independent governments with client regimes.

 

Contested Terrain

 

The imperial hierarchy and networks are based on class and national relations of power. This means that the maintenance of the entire system is based on the ruling classes dominating the underlying population – a very problematical situation given the unequal distribution of costs and benefits between the rulers and the ruled. Today massive armed resistance and social movements in numerous countries challenge the imperial system.

 

Contested terrain includes: Iraq, Afghanistan, Colombia, Somalia, Palestine, Sudan and Lebanon where armed resistance is intent on defeating imperial clients. Sites of mass confrontations include Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and Iran where the imperial powers are intent on overthrowing newly elected independent regimes. Large scale social movements organized to combat client regimes and the imperial patrons have recently emerged in Mexico, Palestine, Lebanon, China, Ecuador and elsewhere. Inside the imperial states there is mass opposition to particular imperial wars and policies, but only small and weak anti-imperialist movements.

 

The Anomaly: Israel in the Imperial System

 

Israel is clearly a colonialist power, with the fourth or fifth biggest nuclear arsenal and the second biggest arms exporter in the world. Its population size, territorial spread and economy however are puny in comparison with the imperial and newly emerging imperial powers. Despite these limitations Israel exercises supreme power in influencing the direction of United States war policy in the Middle East via a powerful Zionist political apparatus, which permeates the State, the mass media, elite economic sectors and civil society (3a). Through Israel’s direct political influence in making US foreign policy, as well as through its overseas military collaboration with dictatorial imperial client regimes, Israel can be considered part of the imperial power configuration despite its demographic constraints, its near universal pariah diplomatic status, and its externally sustained economy.

 

Regimes in Transition

 

The imperial system is highly asymmetrical, in constant disequilibrium and therefore in constant flux – as wars, class and national struggles break out and economic crises bring down regimes and raise new political forces to power. In recent times we have seen the rapid conversion of Russia from a world hegemonic contender (prior to 1989), converted into an imperial client state subject to unprecedented pillage (1991-1999) to its current position as a newly emerging imperial state. While Russia is one of the most dramatic cases of rapid and profound changes in the world imperialist system, other historical experiences exemplify the importance of political and social changes in shaping countries’ relationship to the world imperial system. China and Vietnam, former bulwarks as independent, anti-imperialist states, have seen the rise of liberal-capitalist elites, the dismantling of the socialized economy and China’s incorporation as a newly emerging imperialist power and Vietnam as a semi-autonomous client regime.

 

The major transitions during the 1980’s – 1990’s involved the conversion of independent anti-imperialist states into imperial client regimes. In the Western hemisphere, these transitions include Nicaragua, Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Jamaica and Grenada. In Africa, they include Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Algeria, Ethiopia and Libya, all converted into kleptocratic client regimes. In Asia similar processes are afoot in Indo-China. Because of the disastrous consequences of imperial-centered policies administered by client regimes, the first decade of the new millennium witnessed a series of massive popular upheavals and regime changes, especially in Latin America. Popular insurrections in Argentina and Bolivia led to regime shifts from client to semi-autonomous clients. In Venezuela after a failed coup and destabilization campaign, the Chavez regime moved decisively from semi-autonomous client to an independent anti-imperialist position.

 

Ongoing conflicts between imperial and anti-imperialist states, between client regimes and nationalist movements, between imperial and newly emerging imperial states, will change the structure of the imperial system. The outcomes of these conflicts will produce new coalitions among the principal forces, which compose the imperial hierarchy and its adversaries. What is clear from this account is that there is no singular omnipotent ‘imperial state’ that unilaterally defines the international or even the imperial system.

 

Even the most powerful imperial state has proven incapable of unilaterally (or with clients or imperial partners) defeating or even containing the popular anti-colonial resistance in Iraq or Afghanistan. The major imperial political successes have occurred where the imperial states have been able to activate the military forces of semi-autonomous and client regimes, secure a regional (OAS, OAU and NATO) or UN cover to legitimate its conquests. Collaborator elites from the client and semi-autonomous states are essential links to the maintenance and consolidation of the imperial system and in particular the US empire. A specific case is the US’, intervention and overthrow of the Somali Islamic regime.

 

 

The Case of Somalia: Black Masks - White Faces

 

 

The recent Ethiopian invasion of Somalia (December 2006) and overthrow of the de-facto governing Islamic Courts Union (ICU)or Supreme Council of Islamic Courts and imposition of a self-styled ‘transitional government’ of warlords is an excellent case study of the centrality of collaborator regimes in sustaining and expanding the US empire.

 

From 1991 with the overthrow of the government of Siad Barre until the middle of 2006, Somalia was ravaged by conflicts between feuding warlords based in clan-controlled fiefdoms (3). During the US/UN invasion and temporary occupation of Mogadishu in the mid-1990’s there were massacres of over 10,000 Somali civilians and the killing and wounding of a few dozen US/UN soldiers (4). During the lawless 1990’s small local groups, whose leaders later made up the ICU, began organizing community-based organizations against warlord depredations. Based on its success in building community-based movements, which cut across tribal and clan allegiances; the ICU began to eject the corrupt warlords ending extortion payments imposed on businesses and households (5). In June 2006 this loose coalition of Islamic clerics, jurists, workers, security forces and traders drove the most powerful warlords out of the capital, Mogadishu. The ICU gained widespread support among a multitude of market venders and trades people. In the total absence of anything resembling a government, the ICU began to provide security, the rule of law and protection of households and property against criminal predators (6). An extensive network of social welfare centers and programs, health clinics, soup kitchens and primary schools, were set up serving large numbers of refugees, displaced peasants and the urban poor. This enhanced popular support for the ICU.

 

After having driven the last of the warlords from Mogadishu and most of the countryside, the ICU established a de-facto government, which was recognized and welcomed by the great majority of Somalis and covered over 90% of the population (7a). All accounts, even those hostile to the ICU, pointed out that the Somali people welcomed the end of warlord rule and the establishment of law and order under the ICU.

 

The basis of the popular support for the Islam Courts during its short rule (from June to December 2006) rested on several factors. The ICU was a relatively honest administration, which ended warlord corruption and extortion. Personal safety and property were protected, ending arbitrary seizures and kidnappings by warlords and their armed thugs. The ICU is a broad multi-tendency movement that includes moderates and radical Islamists, civilian politicians and armed fighters, liberals and populists, electoralists and authoritarians (7). Most important, the Courts succeeded in unifying the country and creating some semblance of nationhood, overcoming clan fragmentation. In the process of unifying the country, the Islamic Courts government re-affirmed Somali sovereignty and opposition to US imperialist intervention in the Middle East and particularly in the Horn of Africa via its Ethiopian client regime.

 

US Intervention: The United Nations, Military Occupation, Warlords and Proxies

 

The recent history of US efforts to incorporate Somalia into its network of African client states began during the early 1990’s under President Clinton (8). While most commentators today rightly refer to Bush as an obsessive war-monger for his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they forget that President Clinton, in his time, engaged in several overlapping and sequential acts of war in Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Yugoslavia. Clinton’s military actions and the embargoes killed and maimed thousands of Somalis, resulted in 500,000 deaths among Iraqi children alone and caused thousands of civilian deaths and injuries in the Balkans. Clinton ordered the destruction of Sudan’s main pharmaceutical plant producing vital vaccines and drugs essential for both humans and their livestock leading to a critical shortage of these essential vaccines and treatments (9). President Clinton dispatched thousands of US troops to Somalia to occupy the country under the guise of a ‘humanitarian mission’ in 1994 (10). Washington intervened to bolster its favored pliant war-lord against another, against the advice of the Italian commanders of the UN troops in Somalia. Two-dozen US troops were killed in a botched assassination attempt and furious residents paraded their mutilated bodies in the streets of the Somali capital. Washington sent helicopter gunships, which shelled heavily, populated areas of Mogadishu, killing and maiming thousands of civilians in retaliation.

 

The US was ultimately forced to withdraw its soldiers as Congressional and public opinion turned overwhelmingly against Clinton’s messy little war. The United Nations, which no longed needed to provide a cover for US intervention, also withdrew. Clinton’s policy turned toward securing one subset of client warlords against the others, a policy which continued under the Bush Administration. The current ‘President’ of the US puppet regime, dubbed the ‘Transitional Federal Government’, is Abdullahi Yusuf. He is a veteran warlord deeply involved in all of the corrupt and lawless depredations which characterized Somalia between 1991 to 2006 (12). Yusuf had been President of the self-styled autonomous Puntland breakaway state in the 1990’s.

 

Despite US and Ethiopian financial backing, Abdullahi Yusuf and his warlord associates were finally driven out of Mogadishu in June 2006 and out of the entire south central part of the country. Yusuf was holed up and cornered in a single provincial town on the Ethiopian border and lacked any social basis of support even from most of the remaining warlord clans in the capital (13). Some warlords had withdrawn their support of Yusuf and accepted the ICU’s offers to disarm and integrate into Somali society underscoring the fact that Washington’s discredited and isolated puppet was no longer a real political or military factor in Somalia. Nevertheless, Washington secured a UN Security Council resolution recognizing the warlord’s tiny enclave of Baidoa as the legitimate government. This was despite the fact that the TFG’s very existence depended on a contingent of several hundred Ethiopian mercenaries financed by the US. As the ICU troops moved westward to oust Yusuf from his border outpost – comprising less than 5% of the country – the US increased its funding for the dictatorial regime of Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia to invade Somalia (14).

 

Despite the setbacks, scores of US military advisers prepared the Ethiopian mercenaries for a large-scale air and ground invasion of Somalia in order to re-impose their puppet-warlord Yusuf. Meles Zenawi, the Ethiopian dictator, depends heavily on US military and police weaponry, loans and advisors to retain power for his ethnic ‘Tigrayan’ based regime and to hold onto disputed Somali territory. The Tigrayan ethnic group represents less than 10% of the Ethiopian multi-ethnic population. Meles faced growing armed opposition form the Oromo and Ogandese liberation movements (15). His regime was despised by the influential Amhara population in the capital for rigging the election in May 2005, for killing 200 student protesters in October 2006 and jailing tens of thousands (16). Many military officials opposed him for engaging in a losing border war with Eritrea. Meles, lacking popular backing, has become the US most loyal and subservient client in the region. Embarrassingly parroting Washington’s imperial ‘anti-terrorist’ rhetoric for his attack on Somalia, Meles sent over 15,000 troops, hundreds of armored vehicles, dozens of helicopters and warplanes into Somalia (17). Claiming that he was engaged in the ‘war against terrorism’ Meles terrorized the people of Somalia with aerial bombardment and a scorched earth policy. In the name of ‘national security’ Meles sent his troops to the rescue of the encircled war lord and US puppet, Abdullahi Yusuf.

 

Washington co-coordinated its air and naval forces with the advance of the invading Ethiopian military juggernaut. As the US advised-Ethiopian mercenaries advanced by land, the US air force bombed fleeing Somalis killing scores, supposedly in hunting ‘Al Queda; sympathizers (18). According to reliable reports, which were confirmed later by US and Somali puppet sources, US and Somali military forces have failed to identify a single Al Queda leader after examining scores of dead and captured fighters and refugees (19). Once again the pretext to invade Somalia used by Washington and its Ethiopian client – that the ICU was attacked because it sheltered Al Queda terrorists - was demonstrated to be false. US naval forces illegally interdicted all ships off the coast of Somalia in pursuit of fleeing Somali leaders. In Kenya, Washington directed its Nairobi client to capture and return Somalis crossing the border. Under Washington’s direction both the United Nations and the Organization of African ‘Unity’ (sic) agreed to send an occupation army of ‘peace-keepers’ to protect the Ethiopian imposed puppet Yusuf regime.

 

Given Meles precarious internal position, he could not afford to keep his occupying army of 15,000 mercenaries in Somalia for long (20). Somali hatred for the Ethiopian occupiers surged from the first day they entered Mogadishu. There were massive demonstrations on a daily basis and increasing incidents of armed resistance from the re-grouped ICU fighters, local militants and anti-Yusuf warlords (21). The US directed Ethiopian occupation was followed in its wake by the return of the same warlords who had pillaged the country between 1991-2005 (22).

 

Most journalists, experts and independent observers recognize that without the presence of ‘outside’ support – namely the presence of at least 10,000 US and EU financed African mercenaries (‘peacekeepers’) the Yusuf regime will collapse in a matter of days if not hours. Washington counts on an informal coalition of African clients – a kind of ‘Association of Sub-Saharan Stooges’ (A.S.S) – to repress the mass unrest of the Somali population and to prevent the return of the popular Islamic Courts. The United Nations declared it would not send an occupation army until the ‘A.S.S’ military contingents of the Organization of African Unity had ‘pacified the country (23).

 

The A.S.S, however willing their client rulers in offering mercenary troops to do the bidding of Washington, found it difficult to actually send troops. Since it was transparently a ‘made-in-Washington’ operation it was unpopular at home and likely to set A.S.S forces against growing Somali national resistance. Even Uganda’s Yoweri Musevent, Washington’s subservient client, encountered resistance among his ‘loyal’ rubber-stamp congress (24). The rest of the A.S.S countries refused to move their troops, until the EU and US put the money up front and the Ethiopians secured the country for them. Facing passive opposition from the great majority of Somalis and active militant resistance from the Courts, the Ethiopian dictator began to withdraw his mercenary troops. Washington, recognizing that its Somali puppet, ‘President Yusuf’, is totally isolated and discredited, sought to co-opt the most conservative among the Islamic Court leaders (25). Yusuf, ever fearful of losing his fragile hold on power, refused to comply with Washington’s tactic of splitting the ICU.

 

The Somali Invasion: the Empire and its Networks

 

The Somali case illustrates the importance of client rulers, warlords, clans and other collaborators as the first line of defense of strategic geo-political positions for extending and defending the US empire. The Somali experience underlines the importance of the intervention by regional and client rulers of neighboring states in defense of the empire. Client regimes and collaborator elites greatly lower the political and economic cost of maintaining the outposts of empire. This is especially the case given the overextension of US ground forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and in their impending confrontation with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

 

Given the ‘over-extension’ of the US ground forces, the empire relies on air and sea assaults combined with regional mercenary ground forces to oust an independent regime with popular backing.

 

Without the Ethiopian invasion, the puppet Somali warlord Abdullahi Yusuf would have been easily driven out of Somalia, the country unified and Washington would no longer control the coastal areas facing a major maritime oil transport route. The loss of a Somali puppet regime would have deprived Washington of a coastal platform for threatening Sudan and Eritrea.

 

From a practical perspective however, Washington’s strategic plans for control over the Horn of Africa are deeply flawed. To secure maximum control over Somali, the White House chose to back a deeply detested veteran warlord with no social base in the country and dependent on discredited warring clans and criminal warlords. Isolated and discredited puppet rulers are a fragile thread on which to construct strategic policies of regional intervention (military bases and advisory missions). Secondly Washington chose to use a neighboring country (Ethiopia) hated by the entire Somali population to prop up its Somali puppet. Ethiopia had attacked Somali as late as 1979 over the independence of Ogadan, whose population is close to Somalis. Washington relied on the invading army of a regime in Addis Ababa, which was facing increasing popular and national unrest and was clearly incapable of sustaining a prolonged occupation. Finally, Washington counted on verbal assurances from the A.S.S regimes to promptly send troops to protect its re-installed client. Client regimes always tell their imperial masters what they want to hear even if they are incapable of prompt and full compliance. This is especially the case when clients fear internal opposition and prolonged costly overseas entanglements, which further discredit them.

 

The Somali experience demonstrates the gap between the empire’s strategic projection of power and its actual capacity to realize its goals. It also exemplifies how imperialists, impressed by the number of clients, their ‘paper’ commitments and servile behavior, fail to recognize their strategic weakness in the face of popular national liberation movements.

 

US empire building efforts in the Horn of Africa, especially in Somalia, demonstrate that even with elite collaborators and client regimes, mercenary armies and A.S.S regional allies, the empire encounters great difficulty in containing or defeating popular national liberation movements. The failure of the Clinton policy of intervention in Somalia between 1993-1994 demonstrated this.

 

The human and economic cost of prolonged military invasions with ground troops has repeatedly driven the US public to demand withdrawal (and even accept defeat) as was proven in Korea, Indochina and increasingly in Iraq.

 

Financial and diplomatic support, including UN Security Council decisions, and military advisory teams are not sufficient to establish stable client regimes. The precariousness of the mercenary-imposed Yusuf warlord dictatorship demonstrates the limits of US sponsored UN fiats.

 

The Somali experience in failed empire-building reveals another even darker side of imperialism: A policy of ‘rule or ruin’. The Clinton regime’s failure to conquer Somalia was followed by a policy of playing off one brutal warlord against another, terrorizing the population, destroying the country and its economy until the ascent of the Islamic Courts Union. The ‘rule or ruin’ policy is currently in play in Iraq and Afghanistan and will come into force with the impending Israeli-backed US air and sea attack on Iran.

 

The origins of ‘rule or ruin’ policies are rooted in the fact that conquests by imperial armies do not result in stable, legitimate and popular regimes. Originating as products of imperial conquest, these client regimes are unstable and depend on foreign armies to sustain them. Foreign occupation and the accompanying wars on nationalist movements provoke mass opposition. Mass resistance results in imperial repression targeting entire populations and infrastructure. The inability to establish a stable occupation and client regime leads inevitable to imperial rulers deciding to scorch the entire country with the after thought that a weak and destroyed adversary is a consolation for a lost imperial war.

 

Faced with the rise of Islamic and secular anti-imperialist movements and states in Africa and possessing numerous client regimes in North Africa and the A.S.S grouping, Washington is establishing a US military command for Africa. The Africa Command will serve to tighten Washington’s control over African military forces and expedite their dispatch to repress independence movements or to overthrow anti-imperialist regimes. Given the expanded, highly competitive presence of Chinese traders, investors and aid programs, Washington is bolstering its reliable allies among the African client elites and generals (26).

 

-James Petras’ latest book is The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity Press: Atlanta). His articles in English can be found at the website – www.petras.lahaine.o rg

 

Footnotes

 

1. Petras, James and Morris Morley. Empire or Republic (NY: Routledge, 1995); Petras, J. and M. Morley: “The Role of the Imperial State” in US Hegemony Under Siege (London” Verso Books 1990).

2. Petras, James and Morris Morley. “The US imperial State” in James Petras et al Class State and Power in the Third World (Allanheld, Osmin: Montclair NJ, 1981).

3. (3A) see Petras, James The Power of Israel in the United States (Clarity: Atlanta 2006)

3. see Andrew England “Spectre of Rival Clans Returns to Mogadishu”, Financial Times (London), ) December 29, 2006 p.3)

4. Financial Times January 22, 2007 p.12.

5. Financial Times December 29, 2006 p.3.

6. William Church: “Somalia: CIA Blowback Weakens East Africa” Sudan Tribune Feb 2, 2007.

7. (7A) The Transitional government was restricted to Baldoa, a small town and its survival depended on Addis Abbaba. Financial Times December 29, 2006 p.3

7. Financial Times January 31, 2007 p.2.

8. Stephan Shalom “Gravy Train: Feeding the Pentagon by Feeding Somalia” Z Magazine February 1993.

9. Clinton claimed the pharmaceutical plant was producing biological and chemical weapons – a story which was refuted by scientific investigators.

10. Shalom ibid.

11. Mark Bowden Black Hawk Down (Signet: New York 2002)

12. FT December 31, 2006 p.2

13. FT January 5, 2007 p. 4

14. William Church ibid.

15 “Somalia” Another War Made in the USA” interview with Mohamed Hassan (Michel.Collon@skyne t.be)

16 ibid

17. FT January 5, 2007 p.5; FT December 29, 2006 p. 3

18. BBC News “US Somali Air Strikes ‘Kill Many’”, January 9, 2007; aljazeera.net “US Launches Air Strikes on Somalia” January 9, 2007

19. FT February 5, 2007 p.5 “…there has been no confirmation yet of targeted al-Queda suspects according to Meles Zenawi, Ethiopian Prime Minister.”

20. aljazeera.net January 23, 2007; BBC News “More Ethiopians to Quit Somalia” January 28, 2007.

21. aljazeera.net December 29, 2006; aljazeera.net January 6, 2007; BBC News January 26, 2007; Aljazeere.net January 28, 2007, aljazeera.net February 11, 2007

22. “Looting and shooting broke out as soon as the Islamic fighters left the crumbling capital as militias loyal to the local clans moved on to the streets.” FT December 29, 2006

23. BBC News January 25, 2007; BBC January 30, 2007; BBC January 5, 2007/

24. People’s Daily Online “Ugandan Parliament halts bid to rush deployment of peacekeepers to Somalia”. February 2, 2007

25.Financial Times January 26, 2007 p.6

26.aljazeera.net February 7, 2007

[Nur]

Very informative piece, dont miss sharing it with friends and family.

 

 

Nur

[Pi]

Sheikh Nur, I know you're stance on the ICU and TFG. But given the current situation, what would you tell the ICU turned clan to do?

 

1. Negotiate with the TFG and its allies (Ethiopian, American, Ugandan)

 

2. Hold a big Barbecue party. Menu: Somalis and their Ethiopian allies. Remember the KFC motto: finger lickin' good.

 

3. Fight to the end. This time without running away and without hiding amongst women and children.

 

Hmm, the first option is not attractive. The TFG and its allies control all of Somalia except Somaliland. There are other small pockets where they don't have much presence. Anyways, the ICU (or clan) whichever name they go by doesn't have much of a bargaining chip. What's there to negotiate then? Second option is against both religion and humanity. Though the ICU clan entity said those are expedient. So they might choose this option, it is attractive to their sense of morality. Third option is not workable. If carrying out a conventional war is possible, the remnants of the ICU clan would not have fled Bay and Bakool, only to hide under a googarad or stand behind a kid in diapers. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

[Nur]

Pi

 

Walaal, I do not think that you have read the article above, if you did, I fail to see the connection of your questions to the content of the article, the reason I posted the article was to solicit an intellectual discussion on the merits of the authors statements which are substantiated scholarly with footnotes from major world periodicals.

 

The language level that you have used is not befitting you, and this Islam forum, its a chauvenist thing to put women down as googarad and taunt men by claiming that they are as ineffective as women, that only inflames hatred of both those you are insulting and women alike and will never make peace in our country if that is what you would like to see happen.

 

Walaal, I have a lot of respect for different opinions, and yours is no exception, but please lets us rise to an intellectual level befitting an educated person like yourself, at least, that way you will be a glimpse of hope of our warring clans.

 

Finally, I can see from your signiture that you have contempt for religion, including Islam, quoting a Mushrik like Ghandi, who despised his own Hindu Faith along with Islam, which says a lot about your mindset at this stage, and consequently which may explain your current loyalty. This section of SOL, discusses issues with grace and good choice of words from an Islamic perspective, a perspective that makes all of us brothers in faith, loyal to each other and our country, but when religion is despised, and the rule of the Sharia is seen as barbaric, while willingly choosing subserviency to foreign powers as the trojan horse to power, then, its natural that loyalties are shifted to include those with great interest in our prolonged agony, division, and clan politics.

 

I Will assure you that glory only belongs to Allah, and those who align themselves with Him alone, anyone who seeks glory from other than Allah is doomed, lets us all come together in the side of our faith and positively respond to Allah's call for unity, the Prophet SAWS has said:

"Man yubti bihi camaluhu, lam yusric bihi nasabuhu" He whose bad deeds hold him back, his clan allegiance wll not speed him up to paradise.

 

Nur

[Fabregas]

Mr P.I, you don't worry about the fate of the wadaads, most of them have been "slaughtered like pigs( remember who said that?".

[N.O.R.F]

A very good read. Thanks for sharing Nurow

[Alle-ubaahne]

Great come back, yaa shiiiiiiiiiiiiq Nuuuuuuuuuur!

 

Masha Allah, shiiqow wax badan ayaan ku sugeynay, horta koob qaxwo ah oo kulul iga hoo, waa soo dhaweyn intaas.

 

Neef dheylo ahna aan kuu soo bireeyo. Waxaa intaas ii dheer, shiiqow bal soo ducee, muraad ayuu leeyahay walaalkaa Alle-ubaahne, inuu ilaahey sahlo muraadka.

 

Mar labaad, marxaba yaa shiiq fowqal shiiq, fiika kheyran kabiiran, walaahi!

[ElPunto]

Sheik Nur - I believe you have made a mistake by posting this article in the Islam section. It clearly belongs in the Politics section. And we hardly need the expansion of politics into other places least of all in the Islam section.

[Taliban]

Originally posted by ThePoint:

I believe you have made a mistake by posting this article in the Islam section. It clearly belongs in the Politics section. And we hardly need the expansion of politics into other places least of all in the Islam section.

What kind of topics dominate the Politics section? Current news report of Somalia, the armed struggle between the freedom fighters and the occupiers, iwm. This article isn't a news report; it's a study of how the various systems that govern the world function. Understanding the study is important to Muslims. Therefore, it's not a mistake to post the article in the Islam section.

[Nur]

The point walaal

 

I thank you for your suggestion, Islam, an Arabic word means surrender to the highest sovereign, as such, there is no issue that can fall out of the domain and regulation of Islam, and politics is no exception, Politics, or its Somali translation SIYAASADDA, means " the running of the affairs of the Public", and Islam's core job is regulating two affairs:

 

1. Affairs between man and His maker ( Allah)( Caqaa'id), that he should obey and not make partners for Him with his own creatures.

 

2. Affairs of the people, ( mucaamalaat) in which, Islam regulates, money, social issues, war and peace, judicial system, economy, governance, agriculture, trading, and the list goes on, as all these are found in the Fiqh books.

 

The idea of separating religion and politics is a Christian concept, reached between the Papacy and the pagan Romans after altering Christianity beyond recognition and rendering it a Pagan/Christian hybrid religion with many contradictions that can not lead peoples lives, while Islam, the last Devine revelation is a complete suite of applications for mankind, addressing all issues important to mankind on earth, by an all knowing, strong, wise, and living God, Allah.

 

Northerner and Allah U Baahne, Taliban

 

Thanks for your heartly appreciation of the topic and the welcome mat, I also enjoy to be in the company of the wise on this forum.

 

Nur

[S.O.S]

SOMALIA - A TRIP DOWN MEMORY HOLE LANE

 

Following recent American airstrikes in Somalia, the words ‘Black Hawk Down’ have been mentioned dozens of times across the UK national press, and more than 100 times in the US press, over the last month.

 

The words refer, of course, to the Hollywood film based on the October 3, 1993 raid by US forces on Mogadishu, the Somali capital. Press coverage has focused on two aspects of that raid: the claim that it was part of a humanitarian mission motivated to relieve famine, and the fact that 18 US rangers lost their lives.

 

With near-perfect consistency across both the US and UK press, other facts and claims have simply been ignored.

 

Noam Chomsky has reported the body count from US fire in Somalia in 1993: "The official estimate was 6-10,000 Somali casualties in the summer of 1993 alone, two-thirds women and children." (Chomsky, The New Military Humanism - Lessons From Kosovo, Pluto Press, 1999, p.68)

 

Charles Maynes, the editor of Foreign Policy, wrote in 1995: “CIA officials privately conceded that the US military may have killed from 7,000 to 10,000 Somalis.” (Maynes, Foreign Policy, Spring 1995)

 

In one of two sentences on the subject we have found in the entire English language press this year, the Independent on Sunday last weekend described how the Black Hawk Down raid resulted in “the deaths of an estimated 1,000 Somalis that day”. (Steve Bloomfield, ‘Black Hawk Down: the untold story,’ The Independent on Sunday, January 21, 2007)

 

Estimates were vague, the New York Times reported in 1993, as ”Somali casualties have been overlooked by reporters”. (Eric Schmitt, 'Somali war casualties may be 10,000,' New York Times, December 8, 1993) Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, who commanded the operation, declared: “I'm not counting bodies... I'm not interested.” (Chomsky, op. cit)

 

Following recent US airstrikes, the Independent reported a local MP in Somalia who said there had been many large-scale killings of civilians by the Americans and their Ethiopian allies:

 

"The number of the dead we have confirmed until now is 150 dead. But, every day, new reports are coming in and that number is expected to rise.” (Kim Sengupta, 'US strikes on Somalia "missed target",' The Independent, January 12, 2007)

 

Burying The Background With The Bodies

 

The United States had previously backed the Siad Barre dictatorship in Somalia (1969-1991) which bore direct responsibility for the famine the US was ostensibly intervening to relieve. Jim Naureckas of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted in 1993 that the Somali clan hardest hit by the famine, the *********, was the group living adjacent to the lands of Siad Barre's clan, the *******, and consequently had much of its fertile land stolen during the dictatorship:

 

“It was this political conflict, not natural disaster, that created the desperate condition of many of the starvation victims seen on TV,“ Naureckas wrote. (Naureckas, ‘Media on the Somalia Intervention - Tragedy Made Simple,’ FAIR, March 1993, www.fair.org/index.php?page=1211)[/url]

 

ABC's Peter Jennings reported that Siad Barre had received "almost $200 million in military aid and almost half a billion in economic aid". (July 12, 1992) Jennings explained why the US ignored Siad Barre's corruption and human rights abuses: "To Washington's satisfaction, he was more than willing to keep [soviet-allied] Ethiopia tied down in a debilitating war... Millions of innocent civilians paid the price."

 

On the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (February 12, 1992), Holly Burkhalter of Human Rights Watch noted that at the same time that Washington was claiming it was trying to moderate Siad Barre with $50 million in "security related assistance," the dictator "engaged in a counterinsurgency effort against the North that by our calculations left about 50,000 Somali civilians dead, [and] forced a half million... Somali civilians across the borders into the desert of Ethiopia."

 

In 1992, The Nation referred to Somalia as "one of the most strategically sensitive spots in the world today: astride the Horn of Africa, where oil, Islamic fundamentalism and Israeli, Iranian and Arab ambitions and arms are apt to crash and collide." (December 21, 1992)

 

Indeed Somalia contains mineral deposits and potential oil reserves and had been the site of oil exploration by companies such as Amoco, Chevron and Conoco. Naureckas found that not until six weeks into the 1993 US intervention (Operation Restore Hope) did a journalist for a major media outlet report on the close relationship between Conoco and the US intervention force. This was Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, who wrote:

 

“Far beneath the surface of the tragic drama of Somalia, four major U.S. oil companies are quietly sitting on a prospective fortune in exclusive concessions to explore and exploit tens of millions of acres of the Somali countryside.

 

“That land, in the opinion of geologists and industry sources, could yield significant amounts of oil and natural gas if the U.S.-led military mission can restore peace to the impoverished East African nation.” (Fineman, Los Angeles Times, ’The oil factor in Somalia,’ January 18, 1993)

 

Fineman added:

 

“Conoco, whose tireless exploration efforts in north-central Somalia reportedly had yielded the most encouraging prospects just before Siad Barre's fall, permitted its Mogadishu corporate compound to be transformed into a de facto American embassy a few days before the U.S. Marines landed in the capital, with Bush's special envoy using it as his temporary headquarters. In addition, the president of the company's subsidiary in Somalia won high official praise for serving as the government's volunteer ‘facilitator’ during the months before and during the U.S. intervention.”

 

Fineman noted that the close relationship between Conoco and the US military had led many Somalis and foreign development experts to compare the Somalia operation to a smaller version of Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 US-led assault to drive Iraq from Kuwait and to protect Kuwaiti oil reserves:

 

"‘They sent all the wrong signals when Oakley [the US envoy] moved into the Conoco compound,’ said one expert on Somalia who worked with one of the four major companies as they intensified their exploration efforts in the country in the late 1980s. ‘It's left everyone thinking the big question here isn't famine relief but oil - whether the oil concessions granted under Siad Barre will be transferred if and when peace is restored,’ the expert said. ‘It's potentially worth billions of dollars, and believe me, that's what the whole game is starting to look like.’"

 

Below we sample major US and British media outlets to give an idea of how journalists across the US-UK spectrum are burying the truth of US motives and killing in Somalia. Where we have not cited mention of Somali casualties it is because they were not discussed.

 

Prostrate Propagandists

 

Associated Press:

 

“It was the first overt military action by the U.S. in Somalia since it led a U.N. force that intervened in the 1990s in an effort to fight famine. The mission led to clashes between U.N. forces and Somali warlords, including the battle, chronicled in the book and movie ‘Black Hawk Down,’ that killed 18 U.S. soldiers. (January 10, 2007)

 

The Times:

 

“This was America's first overt operation in the Horn of Africa since 1993, when it was part of the ill-fated United Nations mission to relieve famine. That venture led to clashes with Somali warlords, including the infamous Black Hawk Down incident that left 18 US servicemen dead.” (January 10, 2007)

 

Sunday Times:

 

“America led a United Nations force into Somalia in an effort to fight famine. The mission saw clashes between UN forces and Somali warlords, including the humiliating Black Hawk Down battle of 1993 that killed 18 US soldiers.” (January 14, 2007)

 

Daily Telegraph:

 

“After the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ intervention in 1992-93, when a mob killed 18 US Rangers in Somalia's capital Mogadishu, no administration would consider sending troops to the anarchic country.” (January 10, 2007)

 

The Guardian:

 

“The US airstrikes... were the first overt military action Washington has taken in the country since 1994, the year after bloody clashes between UN forces and warlords and the grim Black Hawk Down battle which left 18 US servicemen dead.” (January 10, 2007)

 

The Independent:

 

“It was the first known direct US military intervention in Somalia since the disastrous ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident in 1993 in which 18 American Rangers died while on a mission to capture aides of Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aideed in Mogadishu.” (January 10, 2007)

 

Washington Times:

 

“It was the first overt U.S. military strike in Somalia since 1994, shortly after Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos battled Islamist militants and clans in a 1993 street battle immortalized in the book and movie ‘Black Hawk Down.’ The battle cost 18 American lives and prompted President Clinton to withdraw all U.S. forces.” (January 10, 2007)

 

Washington Post:

 

“It was the first acknowledged U.S. military action inside Somalia since 1994, when President Bill Clinton withdrew U.S. troops after a failed operation in Mogadishu that led to the deaths of 18 Army Rangers and Delta Force special operations soldiers.” (January 9, 2007)

 

New York Times:

 

“’They're just trying to get revenge for what we did to them in 1993,’ said Deeq Salad Mursel, a taxi driver, referring to the infamous ‘Black Hawk Down’ episode in which Somali gunmen killed 18 American soldiers and brought down two American helicopters during an intense battle in Mogadishu.” (January 10, 2007)

 

Corporate greed is not allowed to be a key factor explaining US-UK policy in the Third World. The lethal consequences for ordinary people are also downplayed to the point of invisibility. It is worth repeatedly mentioning the 18 US soldiers who died on October 3, 1993, but not the 1,000 Somalis, including many civilians, who lost their lives. Recognition of the truth would inflame public opinion and risk generating resistance to the goals of the corporate system of which the mainstream media is such an integral part.

 

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/070123_memory_hole_lane.php

[Nur]

S.O.S. ( Save Our Somalia )

 

 

Its about faithless (Oil, Greed, Supremacy ) on one hand, and faith armed with zeal on the other side, the picture is a reminder of Pharaoh and the Israelites, lets see if Moses will emerge as Somalis are being chased to the Indian Ocean, where is Moses?

 

 

Nur

[Nur]

Holocaust Redux

 

By Manuel Valenzuela

 

“The only thing for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”-- Edmund Burke

 

04/25/07 "ICH" -- --

 

The State of That Which Is

 

Such is the state of human affairs, whether in the present age or in those that came before, that not a decade passes without humanity resurrecting, in some corner of the globe, in some forsaken nation, the devastation unleashed by human wickedness. Whether mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, endemic rape, pillage, scorched earth and yes, even Holocaust, human wickedness prevails upon the human condition, leaving us impotent beasts in its wake, unable to control or suppress its malevolent tentacles, seemingly powerless to alter or halt its predictable and disastrous momentum.

 

The barbarity to which we are predisposed, to which we are unable to exorcise from our nature, is as common to so-called primitive peoples, those humanity likes to call “third worlders,” as it is to those societies considering themselves modern and developed. There is no difference between suicide bombers and guided missiles raining down from the sky. Technology does not behold humanity to label the terrorism falling from the sky as nobler, or as more moral, than that of terrorism bred through poverty. Possessing vast wealth and resources does not diminish murder and criminality, nor the birth of, and continuation in, a new Holocaust.

 

The crimes against humanity that are thrust upon the world with a consistency that betrays our anemic ability to control our mammalian nature do not discriminate based on race, color, ethnicity or religion. We are free to unleash wickedness, whether our powers derive from the machete or the smart-bomb, the suicide bomber or the guided missile, the knife or the machine gun, from tribal conflagrations or nation to nation war. The consistency by which human wickedness is thrust upon our conscious cannot be denied, nor can it be ignored.

 

Such is the state of human affairs, and so little progress have we made in dominating our primitive mammalian behaviors, that even in the supposed modern world of today, even in the supposed enlightened nations of the West, the harbingers of mass destruction and suffering are spawned, planned and executed. For those bastions of morality and exceptionalism we call the First World have realized that war is as old as humankind itself, and as profitable as well, for the violence that creates war is ingrained into our instincts, embedded into the most violent species the planet has ever evolved.

 

War and its multitude of deviations, along with its many devastating aftereffects, has never been controlled or sequestered; its extinction has never been a possibility granted the predisposition to our impotency of willpower. This reality the lords of war understand well. As long as internal strife exists inside a nation, as long as racial, ethnic and religious hatreds are fomented and maintained, and as long as tribes or peoples or sects or beliefs are allowed to mature into full blown animosity and anger there will be war.

 

As long as there exists individuals addicted to power and wealth, as long as governments and special interests vie for control of territory and land, as long as natural resources have immense value and as long as money is valued higher than people there will be war. As long as there is uneducation, intolerance, oppression, poverty, injustice, inequality and exploitation there will be war. As long as there is profit to be derived, money and power to be made, division to be birthed, resources to be stolen, there will be war.

 

As long as there is war, that is to say death, destruction, suffering and misery, there will also always be crimes against humanity, for war is the virus that unearths human wickedness and unleashes crimes against humanity upon each other. Indeed, if our history books and our anthropological and archeological studies teach us anything, if they convey any warnings that we must heed, it is that humankind has possessed a propensity to destroy one another from the time our first ancestors hung on trees.

 

This propensity, this inclination towards violence against members different than our own group or tribe, is apparent by observing our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, with whom we happen to share 98 percent of our genetic code with, as they wage violent war-like battles between groups. It is apparent with every war modern man gives birth to and nurtures through our indifference and silent acquiescence. It is apparent with every act of genocide, ethnic cleansing, torture, mass murder, rape and extermination, in all corners of the globe, regardless of time and space. From primate cousins to modern man, violence is a reality, and a curse.

 

For if this malevolence that possesses us were not ingrained in our core, in our behaviors and psychologies, if it were not part of our human condition, would it keep surfacing over and over again, irrespective of time, distance, space and peoples? If our propensity to unleash carnage and violence upon each other were not part of who and what we really are, would such a thing as human wickedness and destruction and violence even exist? Would war and violence and devastation upon our fellow human beings? In fact, they exist because they possess us like a miscreant demon, living within our nature, controlling our destiny and our lives, unwilling to escape or be exorcised from our condition, creating the most violent species to ever roam Earth. War and genocide and Holocaust exist for the simple fact that we exist, because war without humans is no war at all, because violence of man against man cannot exist if there is no man, because humans are impotent to rid ourselves of that demon called human wickedness.

 

Indeed, our species has been defined through war and its inevitable crimes against humanity. Lingering in our midst for hundreds of thousands of years, endemic to all civilizations, tribes and peoples, the human wickedness we seemingly resuscitate with every new generation is a symptom of our disease, the very sickness maintaining us from advancing forward as a species. Just when we believe ourselves enlightened or reborn, just as we think we have exorcised the demons within, just as we think a new generation of humans has defeated that which enslaves us to our passions, released again and reborn forever is the violence and the destruction and the suffering and the mass murder and the catastrophe that is war.

 

Repeating the pattern that has held us hostage from time immemorial, we believe ourselves enlightened enough to think that violence and war and crimes against humanity will settle our differences, instead of increasing our animosity and hatreds.

We have evolved war, yet war has not evolved us. There is but one common denominator in the perpetual stream of violence, war and crimes against humanity we have seen repeated over and over throughout history – whether it be written or long forgotten – and that is us, human beings, Homo sapiens. For we remain prisoners of our own delusions, slaves of our self-proclaimed exceptionalism, blinded to the true nature of our existence by the comfortable glow of our most primitive myths.

 

As long as we maintain our delusions, our purposeful ignorance, our disastrous belief in fictions and fables, the reality of man killing man will endure, long into perpetuity, possessing our nature and our condition, concocting war after war, molding violence and destruction through the deadly mixture of our instincts, behaviors and mammalian predispositions. Until we finally decide to purge the grip of our self-deception, of thinking ourselves beyond the realm of our reality and truth, of who and what we really are, and not what we pretend to be, humankind will linger on in the limbo of self-destruction, living a fantasy that does not comport with our reality, granting ourselves small windows of temporary sanity, inevitably blown to bits by the destructive qualities we chose to ignore and not confront.

 

The predictable unleashing of our worst inner demons invariably destroys all that is achieved during the small frames of sanity we exhibit. For every step we take forward in our evolution, the demons called human wickedness takes us ten steps back. This demon has prevented us from progressing to the full capabilities of human thought and understanding. In the near future, given our level of technology and modernity, it might very well be the catalyst that sends us back to the Stone Age or indeed, buries us permanently under the rubble of our once-great civilization. If the pattern continues, so will the trend, and in time, so will our self destruction, for as John F. Kennedy once said, “If we do not put an end to war, war will put an end to us.”

 

Only time and our willingness to alter inevitability stand in the way of where we are headed. Only humankind can put a stop to human wickedness. Only we can destroy that which is slowly, but surely, destroying us all.

 

Abandonment of Brotherhood

 

How does one even begin to examine the devastation that Iraq has become? How does one begin to contemplate what is now, thanks to America’s illegal and immoral invasion and occupation, an utter collapse of incomprehensible proportions?

 

What was once the nation, and the people, of Iraq has been transformed into an amalgam of carnage, blood, misery and decimation the likes of which the world has not seen since World War II, or Vietnam. Iraq has become a human catastrophe, a defeat for humanity itself, birthed not through tempests or tsunamis or earthquakes, but through the criminality, corruption and human wickedness of one nation. It has been humankind that has routed itself in self-debasement, our failure to act one more silver chalice in our trophy case of human wickedness.

 

It boggles the mind to even begin to fathom the suffering and misery of the Iraqi people, a collection of what was once 25 million human beings, the vast majority living in peace and apparent happiness, maintaining sectarian harmony, content with stability and security, living normal lives and cherished memories. The collapse of their society into chaos and anarchy has been one of the most spectacular crimes against humanity ever witnessed. Indeed, hell on Earth has been imported into Mesopotamia, creating, since the early 1990’s, a Holocaust that defies logic, reason and common sense, an evil so malevolent, so egregious, that its devastation will not cease until decades after Empire’s last throes have returned normalcy to the people of the planet. What is now seen as a debacle, as a failure, is nothing more than a malevolent crime of mass murder, rape and pillage, a crime against humanity itself.

 

The seeds of Holocaust were planted in the fertile soils of Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates flow, where humankind was nurtured, feeding off the bosom of rich land and life-giving water, at the beginning and after the end of the first Gulf War. It was at this time that the Iraqi people, and not the government, were chosen to feel the collective punishment of the rising Empire, a nation so consumed by hubris and arrogance that, using its vast powers of persuasion and control, instituted a regime of devastating sanctions, most targeting the infrastructure, food and medicine necessary for the general welfare of the populace.

 

The decision was made in the upper echelons of governance during the Clinton administration to enact and enforce sanctions that were always known to harm only average, ordinary citizens, those that depended on the state for health, food, shelter and education. This conscious decision was made even knowing that the Saddam Hussein regime would not suffer as a result of the sanctions. Indeed, the regime of sanctions was aimed specifically at the Iraqi people, 25 million innocent human beings whose only crime was being Iraqi, their homes located above the enormous fields of the devil’s excrement. The Iraqi people were about to feel the wrath of the American Empire, enabler and disseminator of a new Holocaust.

 

Compounded with the complete destruction by aerial bombing of Iraq’s electricity, sanitation, sewage, food production, medical industry and civil infrastructure during the war, all using radiation-saturated depleted uranium filled missiles, artillery and shells, a nation once among the healthiest on the planet began to feel the aftereffects of disease, cancers, stillbirths and deformities. With little food supplies trickling into the nation, hundreds of thousands of children and adults began to suffer malnutrition, hunger and starvation. Soon disease and malnutrition, easily remedied by adequate supplies of food and medicine, began to take their terrible and debilitating toll.

 

This medieval and barbaric blockade, sponsored, enacted, enforced, defended and maintained by the Empire, began to rob 25 million Iraqis of nutrition, healthcare, education and of the standard of living that was the envy of the Middle East. Iraq soon went from having some of the most nourished children and adults in the world to having one of the most malnourished populations on the planet. One of the best standards of living in the Middle East was transformed into a cesspool of backwardness, a rotting and eroding society robbed of strength and vitality. Without adequate medicines, supplies and machines, their importation into Iraq being prevented by America, children began to die by the thousands every month.

 

Children became weak and anemic, their bodies and bellies turning to symbols of malnutrition. Immune systems were weakened, collapsing the body’s ability to fight disease, toxins and viruses. Those once healthy and strong now succumbed to easily preventable diseases and viruses, losing once vibrant energy, losing the will to live. Those once bright and intelligent had their development halted, for food and the energy needed to sustain growth dwindled. Children began to die in an epidemic of economic genocide, enacted and enforced by the American Empire, as always tightening the noose on the sanctions regime, as always caring nothing for the plight of millions of Iraqis. An entire generation of Iraqi children had perished, vanished from the Earth, never more able to play and dream and grow up, never able to experience the life we all strive to have.

 

After a decade of sanctions, up to one million Iraqi children had died, with 500,000 adults buried in graves as well, the products of easily preventable disease, the products of a nation not being allowed to have medicine, supplies and the necessary machines that can save lives. Close to 5,000 children were dying every month, to say nothing of those whose brain and body development became stagnant due to malnutrition. By the beginning of the 21st century, the American Empire had caused the death of 1.5 million Iraqis, spirits like you and I, never to take a breath of air or a gulp of water, never having the opportunity to grow old and enjoy the wonders of life, perishing in a war upon the Iraqi people they were impotent to wage war against.

 

The seeds of Empire had been planted, cast upon soils of genocide, watered with the blood of dead Iraqi children, winds of devastating silence spreading disease and viruses and cancer and mutations to all corners of Mesopotamia, affecting rich and poor, Shiite and Sunni, its invisible wickedness scattering itself into young and old, indiscriminately securing new victims through the inhalation of oxygen.

 

By the time new Pearl Harbors had been concocted by the Empire, by the time towers were demolished and the American people became the obedient warmongers of those cheerleaders pretending to be leaders, by the time Iraq had been chosen for destruction, invasion and occupation, up to two million Iraqis had died at the hand of the Evil Empire, victims of sanctions, a genocide in itself, a Holocaust by any definition, though only a precursor to what was yet to come.

 

The devastation of the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq has brought unfathomable levels of misery and suffering to the Iraqi people. The utter debacle that is Iraq, many would say the greatest strategic disaster in American foreign policy, has become a monument to human wickedness, yet at the same time it represents one of the most egregious criminal enterprises in the history of humankind.

 

For what transpires today, and what has transpired for the last four years, cannot be labeled as a mistake, or a lie, or a quagmire. What it is, indeed, what it has always been, is a crime against humanity, war crimes of the highest order, a conspiracy that has led to the collapse of Iraq as a state and to a creation of a Holocaust that will in the end, years from today – when combined with the economic genocide of the 1990’s, endemic disease and the radiation poisoning that will kill for decades to come – have cost the lives of anywhere from four to six million human beings, to say nothing of the refugee crisis, the mass displacement of people, ethnic cleansing, the loss of property, collapse of society, of lives altered, nation shattered and child development damaged.

 

The Iraq War represents humanity at its worst, with the elite of the Empire destroying a nation as an excuse to rebuild it, caring nothing for dark skinned Arabs, yet claiming contracts in the billions of dollars, as always designed to pillage the American treasury and rob the people. Meanwhile, the American masses have and continue to sit silently in lazy obedience and acquiescence while war crimes and crimes against humanity are committed in our name. Like the Good Germans of World War II, millions of Americans will one day claim they had no idea what was being done in Iraq, all the while knowing that comfort and gluttony helped maintain silence and willful ignorance to one of the worst cases of human wickedness ever to rise from the violent nature of humankind. To millions of Americans, the latest gossip from tele-trash and infotainment has more value than a Holocaust presently being waged by our government.

 

Where humanity once rose and was nurtured today only Holocaust, torture, mass detentions, mass rapes, genocide, ethnic cleansing, radiation poisoning, stunted development, miscarriages, hatred and dehumanization can be seen, as clear as sunlight, penetrating deep into the dark recesses of our conscious, wanting to stop blood from flowing and body parts from exploding, yet impotent and unwilling to put a halt to a nightmare Iraqis live on a daily basis and Americans only read about.

 

To be living in Iraq today is to live in constant and perpetual fear, unable to walk once tranquil streets, unable to shop in comfort, as always grazing bullets and bombs, unsure where explosions will go off next, afraid to be caught between warring factions. It is to experience an insecurity and a fear no American has ever felt inside our shores, of chaos, anarchy, of civil war where to be one religious sect and not another could cost you your life, and that of your family. To live in Iraq is to be subjected to daily car bombs and suicide bombers exploding in markets and streets, of having bullets whizzing by your head, of shrapnel attacking your every pore. It is to breathe the smell of death in every street corner, of feeling the concussions of bombs reverberating inside your home, and head.

 

To live in Iraq is to be unsure whether you will make it through the end of the day, if you will see another sunrise, another sunset. It is to see 70 percent of your children exhibiting symptoms of acute stress and traumatic disorders, not being able to sleep at night because the nightmare of what they have seen, smelled and heard cannot be exorcised from their minds. It is to see your child become a constant bed wetter due to the fear and insecurity that roams her mind. It is to see your son unable to comprehend the endemic death and bodies he sees trying to get to school. It is to witness as your child can no longer learn what she is taught, nor understand her schooling, as the fear and stress of living in civil war has become too much to bear. To live in Iraq is to realize that there are now 900,000 children who are orphans, their parents dead from a war that makes no sense, their tiny minds forced to confront the reality of being alone. It is to experience death firsthand, in large numbers, as no family left in Iraq has gone unharmed, without a murder of a relative.

 

To be Iraqi today is to see the most horrible deformities in young children, many mutated unlike anything seen before, a product of the invisible ghost of death afflicting expectant mothers, its radiation penetrating a body’s pores and bloodstream, traveling into placentas and embryos. To be Iraqi is to see cancer become an endemic reality, over the last fifteen years growing exponentially and methodically, inevitably claiming its victims with the tumors and infections caused by depleted uranium, becoming a silent killer that will last centuries, quite possibly altering the genetic code of your fellow citizens.

 

To be an Iraqi today is to realize that the professional class has left the country, becoming refugees in Syria or Jordan, a number two million strong, while one million more have become displaced within their own nation, ethnically cleansed by religious sects, forced to leave their homes, possessions and neighborhoods, forced to abandon both hope and lives once worth living. To remain living inside Iraq is to witness criminals control the streets and militias transforming entire neighborhoods and districts. To remain in Iraq is to live without doctors or medical providers, knowing that it has become too dangerous for them to stay. It is to see professors assassinated on a daily basis, many now having fled along with architects, teachers, engineers and state officials. To remain in Iraq is to see the shortage of professionals, to see that only the poor and those that do not have the money to flee remain, trapped in hell on Earth, in a land a devastation, of Holocaust.

 

The state of Iraq has now lost 1,000,000 citizens since the beginning of America’s war of arrogant ignorance began. In four years, one million human beings have died, an average of 250,000 every year, nearly 70 people every day. Combined with the two million people who have died as a result of sanctions, it can be stated that 3 million Iraqis have died since the early 1990’s. The carnage has only intensified, with bombings routinely killing 200 Iraqis one day and 150 more another day. Assassinations of military age men has become routine, found in the morning haze, bullet holes in the back of their heads, victims of America’s counter-insurgency, El Salvador-style tactics. Over 20,000 men, most of them innocent civilians, now saturate America’s vast gulag system in Iraq, held captive without due process, existing in limbo and uncertainty, in essence kidnapped from their homes or from the street, victims of American dehumanization and ignorance of culture. How many of these men have been or are tortured in places such as Abu Ghraib? How many have died while in custody, made to disappear, forever lost in some remote mass grave?

 

To be in Iraq is to be living in hell on Earth, a place so devastating, so horrific, that it has become the rule, not the exception, to see feral dogs eating from dead corpses. It is to see football fields become mass graveyards, mosques become mortuaries, and how missiles and artillery destroy homes and businesses, turning lives into rubble. It is to experience the rape of your daughter, the mental retardation of your son, the humiliation of your family, the invasion into your home by American forces, the dehumanization of American boots stomping your face, placing a dark hood over your head, taking your clothes off, calling you humiliating words, treating you like an animal.

 

Living in Iraq is to survive day to day, roaming city streets ducking bombs and bullets, possessing little money for food, lost in a sea of fear and uncertainty, unable to find employment, having two to four hours of electricity, an unworkable sewage and garbage collection system, having to spend up to three days waiting in line in order to fill your vehicle with gasoline. It is to have the smell of death permeate your every pore every single day, the smell of bombs and smoke and bullets becoming constant reminders of your closeness with death. It is to wonder if luck and fate will decide a car bomb will blow you to bits when you walk to the market, or whether a sniper will cause your head to explode like a watermelon. It is to fear an American contractor or soldier will decide your vehicle should be machine-gunned for fun and games, because it is cool to destroy the lives of enemies that are not considered human, and whether your son and father have had enough of the occupation and humiliation and will inevitably join the resistance.

 

To be Iraqi is to wonder if the world has forgotten your plight, if it even cares about the fate of millions of your fellow citizens. To live in Iraq is to see the worst in the human condition, to see human wickedness stamped with the seal of the United States. It is to believe life has abandoned you, wondering what you and your people have done to deserve America’s wrath and punishment. It is to wish for the nightmare to end, to wake up to normalcy, to security and peace, just how it was before, when Iraq was a model for the Middle East and the Arab world. You want to open your eyes and hope the last two decades have been but an illusion, a hallucination that does not really exist.

 

Perhaps you feel hope has been lost, that wickedness has triumphed, that Iraq will never be the same, that she is no more, that the land of fertile soils and running water has ceased to be a viable society. You think the occupation will never end, that America will be your master until the last drop of oil is exhausted, that the nightmare you have lived will only dissipate when the Empire is defeated by the resistance, or by its own over-extension and ignorance. You see a one-hundred acre fortress being built, larger even than the Vatican, the largest embassy the world has ever seen quickly rising from Iraqi ground, and you know the Empire will never leave. You see permanent military bases sprouting up alongside petroleum pipelines and you notice the pillage of your land’s oil through laws enacted by the Empire’s puppets and you weep for a nation destroyed from within, damned by the devil’s excrement, cursed by Western powers who for a century have only cared for the black gold lying below your feet.

 

Most importantly, perhaps, you wonder where the voice of the world has gone, in her uncomfortable silence, in her complete stillness, why she does not heed your calls for help, why she fails to stop the carnage and the destruction, why she has turned a blind eye to you and your people. You look to the heavens and ask why even in Iraq’s despair and suffering the world’s people have abandoned millions of her children to the greed and hubris of the rapacious Pax Americana. You ask fate why the American people have done nothing to stop this new Holocaust from continuing, why they casually ignore the plight of Iraqis, why they continue their blissful ignorance of reality. You ask why the death of millions of Iraqis is hardly mourned, why the maiming and psychological devastation of her children is ignored, why her implosion as a state and as a people is hidden from the beautiful minds of Americans.

 

In the end, you ask yourself how a nation that mourns the tragic loss of thirty-two college students, with wall to wall media coverage, with flags flying at half staff nationwide, with services held from coast to coast, rarely, if ever, cares to even blink at the death and horrible misery of millions of Iraqis, or offer the same mourning, memorials and media coverage to the death, and memory, of nearly 3,500 of its sons and daughters. You ask how it is not understood by the people of the world that Iraq loses in one month what America lost in one day, on September 11, 2001, when 3,000 innocent victims of state terrorism and psychological war were murdered.

 

Holocaust Redux

 

It is reality, not hyperbole, to describe what is presently happening in Iraq as a new Holocaust, a new paradigm of devastation and destruction, of mass murder and horrific suffering. An entire nation has been made to implode, an entire society has been disemboweled, its vital organs gutted and spilled into hell on Earth. The blood of one million Iraqis covers her streets, the severed body parts of the maimed pile up on her corners, and the severed psychology of her youth lies in tatters. Iraq’s entire society is in disarray, her upper and middle classes having fled her bosom, living the life of refugees, her poor and working classes trapped in an inferno from which escape is but a wishful dream.

 

Disease and radiation poisoning, those silent assassins that kill and murder in clandestine pleasure, those unleashed poisons imported by the Empire, have and will continue to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s poorest and weakest individuals. For like the gas chambers of yesteryear, radiation poisoning from depleted uranium, along with the Empire’s destruction of sanitation, sewer and civil infrastructure, will, in the end, kill countless and as yet untold numbers of Iraqis, most forced to suffer sickness and cancer, deformity and miscarriage, misery and death.

 

For a Holocaust does not need toxic chambers to count its dead, nor crematoriums to hide its victims. It does not depend on concentration camps to starve its prisoners, nor barbed wire to hide the truth. Deadly poison can be released into the air, penetrating soil, crops, water and food, slowly penetrating human bodies, killing from within. It can be created by the destruction of the infrastructure needed to contain and fight off infection, disease and outbreaks. Holocaust exists in sanctions that refuse to let in vital medicines and food, it exists in making the Iraqi nation itself into an enormous concentration camp. Holocaust can be flamed by the dropping of bombs, missiles or artillery into homes and neighborhoods. Holocaust can be created, molded and furthered by causing civil war among religious sects, using counter-insurgency machinations to divide and conquer, caring nothing for the plight of millions caught in the crosshairs of a societal collapse engineered by the Empire’s war architects. In the end, the result is the same, whether a Holocaust is molded by Nazis or nurtured by the Empire itself. The only reality that changes is the method to the madness and the cast of characters for whom the flame of humanity has long since ceased to exist.

 

What the world is seeing today, for those few who care to see and disturb their beautiful minds, is a carnage and a devastation that fits the pattern of Holocaust throughout humankind’s brief reign on the planet. The Iraq Holocaust, while still not apparent to all, while still hidden from the conscious of the world, while still taking place even today, is but another manifestation of a pattern that is all too familiar to the human condition.

 

For no ethnic minority or religious group can claim a monopoly on Holocaust, no matter how convenient it has become, no matter how beneficial its incantation and remembrance may be. Holocaust is an all-inclusive devastation, a human wickedness that preys upon all peoples, throughout all time and space, whether they be from 20th century Armenia, Korea, Manchuria, Vietnam, Cambodia, Philippines, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda, Sudan, Mao’s China, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Yugoslavia or World War II’s wickedness, which killed tens of millions in Russia and more than a dozen in Germany and Eastern Europe. The term Holocaust is not exclusive to any one particular group, nor can its use be defined by Empire's propagandists or by history’s victors.

 

Of course the Empire will never call what is happening in Iraq a Holocaust, for to do so would criminalize the very enterprise of destroying a nation and its people for the purpose of controlling its vast oil fields. To call the Iraq Holocaust by its rightful name would be to make war criminals of its architects, its boosters, its propagandists, its stenographers and its military leaders. It would be to place the Empire on par with some of the worst atrocities of the vanquished Nazi regime, creating comparisons between warmongers and leaders of different eras. To call what is happening in Iraq by its proper term would be to make tens of millions of American citizens the equivalent of yesterday’s good Germans. To allow the use of the term Holocaust to describe present day Iraq, America would risk the shame and scorn of the people of the world, becoming a pariah nation, a rogue state, and a failed people.

 

The Empire will never allow the term Holocaust to be used alongside the reality, and devastation, of Iraq. The truth of what has been done and continues to be unleashed upon Iraqis will, as always, be whitewashed and made to be hidden in a dark, dank recess of history’s uncomfortable dirty little secrets. In time, even though the magnitude of what transpired in Iraq will become known to some, its truth will be suppressed, its reality contorted, its victims soon forgotten. Just as three to four million dead Vietnamese were erased from uncomfortable memories, just as that Holocaust was a reality that never took place, so too will the Iraq Holocaust dissipate from our conscious, to be replaced by the dumbed-down heroin of tele-trash, the addiction of infotainment, usurped by the only Holocaust that ever took place, the only one that matters, the only mass murder that must remain ingrained in our memories, never allowed to be replaced, never allowed to be forgotten.

 

Yet to the Iraqi people, to those that will invariably survive the catastrophe that has been imported to their land, the Iraqi Holocaust will remain an all too real calamity, a truth that exists in rubble, in mass graves, in the memory of lost souls and never forgotten memories. To these human beings, the millions that have already died, along with the millions that have yet to perish, will never be forgotten, becoming a reality ignored by the world, yet remaining entrenched like a small flame inside the hearts of survivors. Every deformity or mutation of Iraqi babies will remind survivors of the poisons unleashed by the Empire. Every death caused by malignant cancer and disease will bring back memories of dropped bombs and devastating guided missiles. Every scar, burn and amputated limb will forever become a horrific and eternal memory and reminder that cannot be erased from one’s brain, their grotesque appearance becoming a time machine of suffering and misery. Seared in their minds for decades and centuries to come, the Iraq Holocaust and its creator will never be forgotten, to be passed down to each new child born, to each new generation.

 

In time the present collapse and corruption of humanity, the present entanglement of human wickedness, this thing called Holocaust, which we as a species always vow to never again repeat, will predictably be replaced by another such tragedy. In time that new horror will itself be replaced by yet another. The cycle of violence will continue, just as it has always been, just as it will always be, for its viciousness has never been stopped, its demons have never been controlled. We are slaves to its demands, mere weaklings to its call to arms. Impotent we have been from the very beginning, from the genesis of humankind, passing enlightenments, reformations, renaissance and modernity, and still today it cannot be defeated, still we have failed to free ourselves from its omnipotent grip. Every century that passes we fall prey to its temptations and its cruelty, its brief rewards and long-term curse.

 

Today, in every corner of the globe, in every continent where man exists the genesis of the next Holocaust is being birthed. Somewhere, someplace, the next Hitler or Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or Bush is being nurtured by hate or anger, feeding off the breast of intolerance and ideology, living among corruption of morality, breeding in the self a taste for psychotic narcissism. For it is a given that wherever man settles in, death, destruction, extermination and devastation soon follows. It is written in our history books, in stone tablets, in our cultures and ruined cities. Its warnings and lessons are everywhere, if only we wished to look. It is wired into our human condition. It remains a virus afflicting our conscious, never exorcised, always resurrected.

 

Somewhere, someplace, a leader is being molded among men, as always infected in delusion, infested with selfishness, though possessing the qualities of attraction, of leadership, of hypnotizing thousands through stare and voice. It is this human being, like so many that have come before, that will recruit a group of like minded individuals, each, like him, with an insatiable thirst for power, immoral in character, criminal in personality, in time concocting power grabs and debasement of the human condition.

 

It is from these so-called leaders of men, these alpha males, from where human wickedness derives, flowing from its oasis of hate, through rivers of unending blood and carnage. For mostly, throughout time, it is the warmongers, the war-like leaders that create the devastation and destruction called Holocaust. It is from war-like leaders that war-like people are created. It is from them where human wickedness derives, passing from person to person like a virus, making monsters of us all.

 

Such is the state of human affairs that one Holocaust will give rise to another, and another after that, filling a century of civilization with systematic death and murder. Its consistency is overwhelming, clear as day to see, for those willing to confront uncomfortable realities. For every step forward we take, our self-destructive ways push us back ten, committing us to the primitiveness that has yet to be surpassed and the mammalian behaviors we have yet to understand. The human wickedness will continue until we reach an enlightenment of who and what we truly are, escaping the machinations and institutions that spawn hatred, injustice, inequality, anger, division, bigotry, animosity, oppression, ignorance and poverty.

 

From where will the next Holocaust be born, ruining land and people, corrupting humankind ever more? When will humanity say enough is enough, never again, and actually mean it? Will it be when we put an end to war and human wickedness, or when war and human wickedness put an end to us? In the meantime, the seeds of the next act of human devastation are today being planted. Where, we wonder, will this wicked weed grow next? For where can be anywhere, and anywhere can be gone tomorrow.

 

In Iraq we find the answer, for its shows where we have been, where we at present are and where we will again, and inevitably, soon be.

[Nur]

Setting the Stage for Turmoil in Caracas

 

Washington’s New Imperial Strategy In Venezuela

 

By Chris Carlson

 

05/15/07 "Venezuel Analysis" -- - First used in Serbia in 2000, Washington has now perfected a new imperial strategy to maintain their supremacy around the globe. Whereas military invasions and installing dictatorships have traditionally been the way to control foreign populations and keep them out of the way of business, the U.S. government has now developed a new strategy that is not so messy or brutal, and much more sleek; so sleek, in fact, that it’s almost invisible.

 

It was so invisible in Serbia that no one seemed to notice in 2000 when a regime was toppled, the country was opened to massive privatization, and huge public-sector industries, businesses, and natural resources fell into the hands of U.S. and multinational corporations. Likewise, few have noticed as countries in the former Soviet-bloc have recently been victims of the same strategy, with the exact same results.

 

 

 

Nations that do not give in to the demands of the empire and the expansion of global capitalism are targeted by an undercover, well-designed plan to change the political situation in the country, and open it up to corporate investors. U.S.-supported groups inside the country overthrow the president, making it seem like there is no outside intervention. And now, Washington has turned toward its new biggest threat: Latin America, and more specifically, Venezuela.

 

 

 

The Rise of the New World Order

 

 

 

During the second half of the twentieth century, capitalists in the first world began to saturate domestic opportunities for investment and growth. Big business reached a point where possibilities for expansion within national borders were mostly exhausted, and the only option for growth was to look for new opportunities abroad. Growing corporate conglomerates looked to expand their operations throughout the world, investing, privatizing, and buying up everything they could get their hands on. National capital was looking to go international, and by the end of the century, capitalism had become truly global.

 

 

 

"Get big, or get eaten," was their new philosophy, and they decided to get big by eating whole nations. With the help of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, economies everywhere were opened up to privatization. The phone systems, electrical grids, water systems, and natural resources were bought up by wealthy capitalists in countries around the world. Free-market capitalism now ruled the day; a paradise for international capital as the world’s wealth became more and more concentrated in their hands. [1]

 

 

 

Some nations, however, were determined to not be eaten. Privatization was an unpopular idea among populations who had developed the crazy idea that their natural resources belonged to them, and not foreign corporations. Resistance developed in several areas of the world, and some nations would not consent to the logic of global capitalism. Washington, however, was determined to open the world up to corporate expansion. They would oblige those countries that didn’t comply, either by force or by cunning.

 

 

 

The Case of Yugoslavia: A Model for Regime Change

 

 

 

It was in Yugoslavia, and more specifically, in Serbia, where Washington’s new strategy would really take shape for the first time. From here they would carry it on to other countries in an attempt to repeat the tremendous success of the Serbian experience. And it’s not hard to see why. After the toppling of the Milosevic regime allowed for mass privatization, all that remained of the formerly socialist country, including some of Europe’s largest reserves of natural resources, soon fell into the hands of U.S. and international investors.

 

 

 

The strategy is a sophisticated one. With the intention of ousting an undesirable regime, the U.S. government dedicates itself to strengthening and uniting opposition to the government. This includes funding opposition political parties, and creating non-governmental organizations dedicated to toppling the regime in power. On top of this, the U.S. might contract political consultants and polling agencies to help their favored candidate win at the ballot box. But in the event they cannot win the election, fake polls cast doubt on the official electoral results, and the opposition claims fraud. Massive protests and media attention put pressure on the regime to step down, or to give in to opposition demands. [2]

 

 

 

As implausible as it might sound, it was exactly this strategy that toppled Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in 2000. After the war in Kosovo and NATO bombing had failed to produce regime change, the United States worked to strengthen Milosevic’s internal opponents by uniting them behind one candidate, Vojislav Kostunica, and pumping about $40 million into his election campaign. [3] U.S.-funded NGO’s and electoral consultants helped create a propaganda campaign surrounding the elections, and worked behind the scenes to help organize mass resistance to the Milosevic regime. [4] U.S.-trained “election helpers” were deployed around the country on election day to monitor results. The U.S. even provided young activists with thousands of cans of spray paint and campaign stickers to cover the country with anti-Milosevic slogans. [5]

 

 

 

According to official results of the first round elections neither candidate had won a majority of the vote, and so it would require a second round run-off. But U.S. consultants published their own “exit polls” giving Kostunica a huge victory and Milosevic refused to recognize them. [6] The opposition claimed fraud and U.S.-backed groups staged acts of non-violent resistance to put pressure on the government. Armed groups stormed the Federal Assembly and the state television headquarters. [7] Massive protests and rebellion forced Milosevic to step down. There would be no second round election, and Washington’s candidate Vojislav Kostunica took power. The strategy had worked.

 

 

 

But why had the U.S. targeted Serbia, and, even more specifically, the small province of Kosovo? The answer goes back to the Reagan administration and a 1984 secret document on “US Policy towards Yugoslavia.” A censored version was revealed in 1990 advocating “expanded efforts to promote a ‘quiet revolution’ to overthrow Communist government and parties.” [8]

 

 

 

The US government had worked on dismantling and dividing the socialist Yugoslavia for years, supporting any and all independence movements within the individual provinces, including the 1999 military intervention to help the province of Kosovo break away. What was once a relative economic success under the famous Josip Tito, the socialist economy, based on socially-owned, worker-controlled companies, did not allow for foreign investment or US capital. This was a mortal sin in modern global capitalism. As Michael Parenti put it:

 

 

 

“Yugoslavia was the only country in Eastern Europe that would not dismantle its welfare state and public sector economy. It was the only one that did not beg for entry into NATO. It was - and what's left of it, still is - c*****ng an independent course not in keeping with the New World Order.” [9]

 

 

 

Breaking up the country into smaller, dependent states and destroying their public-sector economy was the ultimate goal, and Milosevic, an admirer of socialist Tito, was the only thing standing in their way.

 

 

 

The rewards for their work were substantial. Once Milosevic was gone, one of the first actions taken by the new government was the to repeal the 1997 privatization law and allow 70% of a company to be sold to foreign investors. [10] In 2004 the UN Mission in Kosovo announced the privatization of 500 enterprises, and U.S. corporations came out the big winners. Phillip Morris bought up a $580 million tobacco factory, U.S. Steel got a $250 million deal on a steel producer, Coca-Cola grabbed a bottled water producer for $21 million, and the list goes on. [11]

 

 

 

In addition, western investors now had access to what the New York Times called the “war’s glittering prize,” the second largest coal reserves in Europe and large reserves of lead, zinc, gold, silver, and, even petroleum. [12] And the real gem was located in the province of Kosovo; the huge Trepca mine complex, valued at over $5 billion, now open to the highest bidder. [13]

 

 

 

The success of the strategy in Serbia was an important lesson for the Washington policy makers. They would repeat it several more times throughout Eastern Europe in places like Georgia (2003), the Ukraine (2004) Kyrgyzstan (2005), and Belarus (unsuccessfully in 2001). In what became known as the “Color Revolutions,” each U.S.-aided movement would remove a regime in exchange for one more favorable to the “free-market” policies promoted by Washington. [14] The preferred strategy for regime change became this new sort of non-violent resistance, and now the empire turned its gaze on South America, where a new threat to global capitalism had suddenly emerged.

 

 

 

The Problem of Venezuela

 

 

 

If the Trepca mine in Kosovo was the jackpot of the Serbian intervention, in Venezuela it is the state-owned oil company, PDVSA. Venezuela has some of the largest oil reserves in the world, possibly passing Saudi Arabia in total reserves if all heavy crude deposits are included. And it is PDVSA that dominates in Venezuela with a total monopoly over the nation’s oil resources. With a production capacity of 4 billion barrels per day, and a $65 billion yearly revenue, the company also possesses a network of more than 15 thousand gas stations in the United States including several refineries in both the U.S. and Europe making it the second largest company in all of Latin America. [15]

 

 

 

You can be sure that corporate investors would love to get their hands on the PDVSA company, along with other public sector companies in Venezuela. In fact, they were doing just that throughout the 1990’s. By 1998, multinational corporations had already bought up the national phone company, the largest electricity company, and PDVSA was going through what they called an “opening” to international capital; a prettier way of saying privatization. [16]

 

 

 

But that same year, Hugo Chavez was elected president on an anti-imperialist platform, and the auctioning-off of Venezuela came to an abrupt halt. In fact, Hugo Chavez has become a real problem for the corporate imperialists and their servants in Washington. Not only has he stopped privatization, but he is reversing it by re-nationalizing all that was once privatized. The privatization of the state oil company is now prohibited by law, and his government has taken complete control of it, using it to finance the country’s development.

 

 

 

But what is even more worrying for Washington and their corporate sponsors is how this trend is spreading through Latin America. The Chavez government has built close ties to many of his neighbors, and many are following in his footsteps. Countries like Bolivia and Ecuador are taking greater control of their huge gas and oil reserves, leaving less room for the huge corporations that hoped to one day own them.

 

 

 

And so, just as they did in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine and others, Washington has deployed its forces in Venezuela with the intention of getting rid of the Chavez menace. After trying many things over the years including a short-lived coup, electoral manipulation, and mass protests, Washington has not been able to topple the popular leader. But they haven’t given up. To the contrary, they’ve actually just continued to increase their level of involvement.

 

 

 

Repeating the East European experience in Venezuela

 

 

 

The new imperial strategy includes something called “American Corners.” These “corners” are small offices set up by Washington throughout the target country that basically serve as mini-embassies. It is not completely clear what exactly these “corners” do, but inside you will find an array of information about the United States, including study abroad opportunities, English classes, and pro-U.S. propaganda. On top of this, the mini-embassies also organize events, trainings, and lectures for young students.

 

 

 

Interestingly, they seem to be very abundant in countries that Washington seeks to destabilize. The former Yugoslavian countries have a total of 22 American Corners, including 7 in Serbia. The Ukraine has 24, Belarus 11, Russia 30, even Iraq, with 11. By far the highest concentration of the “corners” is in Eastern Europe, where Washington has focused its destabilization efforts in recent years. [17]

 

 

 

There are at least 4 “American Corners” in Venezuela, the most for any Latin American country, and the U.S. also finances literally hundreds of organizations throughout the country to the tune of more than $5 million a year. [18] Together, these U.S.-funded organizations are working to implant the Eastern European experience in Venezuela. As reported by Reuters, the Venezuelan opposition is already learning the Serbian tactics to overthrow a regime from a retired U.S. army colonel named Robert Helvey.

 

 

 

“Helvey, who has taught young activists in Myanmar and Serbian students who helped topple the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, is giving courses on non-violent opposition tactics this week at an east Caracas university,” said the article. “Neither Helvey nor the organizers of the Caracas seminar would give details of exactly what opposition tactics were being taught. But in his work in Serbia before Milosevic’s fall, Helvey briefed students on ways to organize a strike and on how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime,” reported Reuters. [19]

 

 

 

And more recently, in the university city of Mérida, history professor from Texas, Neil Foley, hosted an event sponsored by the U.S. embassy and the Venezuelan-American Center (Cevam), not an official “American Corner” but serving the same purpose. Foley, who has also spoken in various “American Corners” in Serbia, gave speeches in both Bolivia and Venezuela on “American values.” [20]

 

 

 

I attended one of Foley’s speeches and, as expected, it was a complete pro-U.S. propaganda campaign imposed upon the university students. The professor gave exactly the message that the U.S. Embassy had paid him to give, speaking wonders about American society and “American democracy.” According to Foley, the United States solves all of its problems by tolerance for others and an all-inclusive “dialogue,” between opposing parties. And sending a clear hint to the Venezuelan students, Foley implied that any government that does not live up to these standards “must be overthrown.” [21]

 

 

 

All of these efforts come together into a nationwide campaign to unite, strengthen, and mobilize opposition to the democratically elected Chavez government. The ultimate goal, of course, is to destabilize the government by organizing and directing opposition groups to commit acts of peaceful resistance and mass protests. Just like they did in 2002, when the Venezuelan opposition groups staged massive protests that turned violent, and eventually led to the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government, the U.S.-financed campaign seeks to destabilize the government in any way they can, perhaps provoking violence for which they will later blame the government. [22]

 

 

 

Now nearly every element of the strategy used in Serbia and other Eastern European countries has been implemented in Venezuela as Washington directs and controls the campaign of the Venezuelan opposition. The same “electoral consultants” that were used in Serbia, the Washington-based Penn, Schoen and Berland, have also been used in Venezuela to publish fake exit polls in an effort to cast doubt on Venezuelan elections. This strategy of electoral manipulation was used during the 2004 recall referendum when the U.S.-funded NGO Sumate and the Penn, Schoen and Berland firm released false exit polls claiming that Chavez had lost the referendum. They did the same thing before the 2006 elections, claiming that Chavez’ opponent “clearly has the momentum.” [23] Both in 2004 and 2006 the fake polls would give credence to the opposition’s claims of fraud with the hope of producing massive protests against the government. The strategy mostly failed, but it did cast doubt on the legitimacy of the Chavez government and weakened its image internationally.

 

 

 

The destabilization attempts are taking form in a concrete way in the coming weeks in the form of huge anti-government protests in Caracas to reject the government’s actions against the private TV channel RCTV. Opposition groups have organized around the government decision, claiming that it steps on their “freedom of expression,” and have organized a series of large protests in the capital leading up to a massive march on May 27th, the day RCTV’s broadcast license expires.

 

 

 

All the private media have played a role in advertising and calling on viewers to attend the march to protest against the government. All expectations are that there will be a huge turnout by both pro-government and anti-government groups, and the government has already warned of the possibility that violence could be used during the march in an attempt to blame the government and destabilize the regime. In the last few days, government intelligence found 5 sniper rifles in the hands of opposition groups as well as 144 Molotov cocktails in what appears to be evidence that there are plans for some sort of violence. [24] [25]

 

 

 

It was exactly this kind of protest in 2002 that led to dozens of deaths, hundreds wounded, and the temporary overthrow of the Chavez government. Private media channels like RCTV manipulated video footage to blame deaths on Chavez supporters, and condemned the government for human rights abuses. So this time government officials have called on pro-government activists to monitor the opposition protests with photos and video on May 27th and May 28th in order to avoid a situation similar to the 2002 coup.

 

 

 

If it had not been for huge pro-government protests after Chavez had been overthrown in 2002, Washington’s strategy might have already gotten rid of the popular president. But the strategy failed, and so the empire keeps trying. Just as they did in the Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia and others, the strategy requires getting a large number of people into the streets to protest against the government. Regardless of whether the government is popularly-supported or not, or democratically-elected or not, the opposition groups attempt to impose their will on the government by putting on the pressure.

 

 

 

What most protesters probably do not know is that they are simply pawns in a larger strategy to open up the world to “free-market” global capitalism and corporate-dominated privatizations. While huge multinational corporations carve up the world among themselves, small nations like Serbia and Venezuela are simply unfortunate obstacles to their objectives. In the worldwide scramble to see who will get bigger, and who will get eaten, the fact that some countries would prefer not to be eaten simply doesn’t matter to the bureaucrats in Washington.

 

 

 

______________

 

 

 

1. To read more about how the World Bank and IMF force privatization on poor countries, Third World Traveler has a large section devoted to the topic. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/IMF_WB/IMF_WB.html

 

 

 

2. Michael Barker has a 4 part series of articles on Znet that explain this strategy in further detail. http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10987

 

 

 

3. Michael A. Cohen and Maria Figueroa Küpçü, Privatizing Foreign Policy, World Policy Journal, Volume xXII, No 3, Fall 2005 http://worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj05-3/cohen.html

 

 

 

4. Chulia, Sreeram. Democratisation, Colour Revolutions and the Role of the NGO’s: Catalysts or Saboteurs?, Global Research, December 25, 2005, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20051225&articleId=1638

 

 

 

5. Michael Dobbs, ‘US advice guided Milosevic opposition: political consultants helped Yugoslav opposition topple authoritarian leader’, The Washington Post, 11 December 2000, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A18395-2000Dec3¬Found=true

 

 

 

6. Ian Traynor explains how opposition “exit polls” have been strategically used to weaken or overthrow regimes in Eastern Europe in his November 2004 article in The Guardian. “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/ukraine/story/0,15569,1360236,00.html

 

 

 

7. Chris Marsden, “How the West organised Milosevic's downfall,” World Socialist Web Site, 13 October 2000, http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/oct2000/yugo-o13_prn.shtml

 

8. Finley, Brooke. “Remembering Yugoslavia: Managed News and Weapons of Mass Destruction,” from the book Censored 2005, Project Censored, Seven Stories Press, 2004.

 

 

 

9. Michael Parenti, The Media and Their Atrocities, You Are Being Lied To, pg. 53 , The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2001

 

 

 

10. Neil Clark, “The Spoils of Another War – NATO’s Kosovo Privatizations,” Znet, September 21, 2004, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=6275

 

 

 

11. Elise Hugus, “Eight Years After NATO’s “Humanitarian War” – Serbia’s new “third way”, Z Magazine, April 2007, Volume 20 Number 4, http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Apr2007/hugus0407.html

 

 

 

12. Hedges, C., "Kosovo War's Glittering Prize Rests Underground," New York Times, 08/08/98

 

 

 

13. Michel Chossudovsky, “Dismantling Former Yugoslavia, Recolonizing Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Global Research February 19, 2002, Covert Action Quarterly, Spring 1996-06-18, http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=MIC20020219&articleId=370

 

 

 

14. Jonathan Mowat, “Coup d’État in Disguise: Washingtons’s New World Order “Democratization” Template,” Global Research, February 9, 2005, http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOW502A.html

 

 

 

15. http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petróleos_de_Venezuela

 

 

 

16. Steve Ellner, The Politics of Privatization, NACLA Report on the Americas, 30 April 1998, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/170.html

 

 

 

17. http://veszprem.americancorner.hu/htmls/american_corners_worldwide1.html

 

 

 

18. Jim McIlroy & Coral Wynter, “Eva Golinger: Washington's 'three fronts of attack' on Venezuela,” Green Left Weekly, 17 November 2006, http://www.greenleft.org.au/2006/691/35882

 

 

 

19. Pascal Fletcher, ”US democracy expert teaches Venezuelan opposition,” Reuters, April 30, 2003, http://www.burmalibrary.org/TinKyi/archives/2003-05/msg00000.html

 

 

 

20. On the web page of the U.S. Embassy in Bolivia it shows that Neil Foley gave a speech in La Paz, Bolivia for “U.S. Culture Week” the week before he was in Venezuela. http://www.megalink.com/USEMBLAPAZ/english/Pressrel2007En/0404-USweek-eng.pdf

 

 

 

21. From my personal notes of Mr. Foley’s speech at the University of the Andes in Merida, Venezuela on April 16, 2007

 

 

 

22. For the best, most detailed, account in English of the 2002 coup, read Gregory Wilpert’s recent article, “The 47-Hour Coup That Changed Everything,” www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=2018

 

 

 

23. See my previous article “Coup d’État in Venezuela: Made in the U.S.A. – The U.S.-designed Plan to Overthrow Hugo Chavez in the Days Following the Election,” Venezuelanalysis.com, November 22, 2006 www.venezuelanalysis.com/articles.php?artno=1884

 

 

 

24. President Chavez announced that his intelligence had infiltrated opposition groups and found a man belonging to an opposition group with 5 sniper rifles with silencers and scopes. “Chávez anuncia incautación armas vinculadas a complot en su contra,” Milenio.com, May 6th, 2007, http://www.milenio.com/index.php/2007/05/05/65937/

 

 

 

25. Police in Los Teques, near Caracas, found 144 Molotov cocktails all ready to be used to “take them out to the street next week with the intention of disturbing the public order and for direct confrontation with authorities,” Prensa Latina, May 9, 2007, http://www.prensalatina.com.mx/article.asp?ID=%7BEEAA37C7-DE27-48EB-A23B-CDC19EAD2ADA%7D)

[Nur]

Putin’s War-whoop: The impending clash with Russia

 

By Mike Whitney

 

06/21/07 "ICH" -- --- “What is a ‘unipolar’ world?

 

It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign--- one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.

 

It has nothing in common with democracy, which is the power of the majority in respect to the interests and opinions of the minority.

 

In Russia , we are constantly being lectured about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves.” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Munich Conference on Security Policy 2-10-07

 

The deployment of the US Missile Defense System in Eastern Europe is a de-facto declaration of war on the Russian Federation . As Russian President Putin said in a recent press conference, “If this missile system is put in place, it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States . It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability.” This will disrupt the current configuration of international security and force Russia to begin work on a new regime of tactical nuclear weapons. This is a very serious development. Russia will now have to rethink its current policy vis a vis the United States and develop a long-range strategy for fending off further hostile encroachments into former-Soviet states by NATO.

 

Welcome to the new Cold War.

 

Putin cannot ignore the gravity of the proposed system or the threat it poses to Russia ’s national security. Bush’s Missile Defense is not defensive at all, but offensive. It thrusts US military bases--with nuclear infrastructure and radar--up to Russia ’s doorstep giving the US a clear advantage in “first-strike” capability. That means that Washington will be able to intimidate Russia on issues that are of critical international importance. Putin cannot allow this. He must force Bush to remove this dagger held to Moscow ’s throat.

 

Bush’s Pyrrhic Victory at the G-8

 

The central issues on the docket at the G-8 meetings were downplayed in the media. The press primarily focused its attention on the “anticipated” conflict between Bush and Putin. But, the brouhaha never materialized; both were respectful and gracious.

 

President Bush, however, was adamant that his plan for missile defense in Czechoslovakia and Poland would go ahead according to schedule. Putin, for the most part remained politely silent. His objections were censored in the media.

 

But less than 10 hours after the closing ceremonies of the G-8, Putin fired off the first salvo in what will certainly be remembered as “the war that brought down the Empire”.

 

Putin addressed 200 corporate leaders at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg and his comments left little doubt that he had already settled on a plan for countering Bush’s missile shield in the Czech Republic .

 

Putin’s speech articulated his vision of a “Moscow-centered” new world order which would create a ``new balance of power''--less dependent on Washington .

 

He said, ``The new architecture of economic relations requires a completely new approach. Russia intends to become an alternative global financial center and to make the ruble a reserve currency for central banks.”

 

“The world is changing before our eyes.'' Countries that yesterday seemed hopelessly behind are today the fastest growing economies of the world. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the IMF are ``archaic, undemocratic and inflexible''. They don’t `` reflect the new balance of power.''

 

Putin's speech is defiant rejection of the present system. We can be sure that it has not passed unnoticed by anxious mandarins in the US political establishment. Russia is announcing the beginning of an asymmetrical war; designed to cripple the United States economically, weaken the institutions which have traditionally enhanced its wealth, and precipitate a shift of global power away from Washington .

 

Putin’s challenge to the US dollar is particularly worrisome. He emphasizes the inherent unfairness of the current system, which relies almost entirely on the dollar and which has an extremely negative effect on many smaller countries’ economies and financial reserves.

 

"There can be only one answer to this challenge,” he said. “The creation of several world currencies and several financial centers.”

 

Putin’s remarks are a direct attack on the dollar and its position as the de facto international currency. He imagines a world where goods and resources are traded in rubles or “baskets of currencies”--not just greenbacks. This would create greater parity between the countries and, hence, a more even distribution of power.

 

Putin's vision is a clear threat to America ’s ongoing economic dominance. Already, in the last few months, Norway , Iran , Syria , UAE, Kuwait , and Venezuela have announced that they are either cutting back on their USD reserves or converting from the greenback to the euro or a “basket of currencies”. Dollar hegemony is at the very center of American power, and yet, the downturn is visible everywhere. If the dollar loses its place as the world’s “reserve currency”; the US will have to pay-down its monstrous current account deficit and live within its means. America will lose the ability to simply print fiat money and use it in exchange for valuable resources and manufactured goods. Putin is now openly challenging the monetary-system that provides the flow of oxygen to the American superpower.

 

Can he carry it off?

 

What kind of damage can Russia really inflict on the dollar or on the many lofty-sounding organizations (WTO, World Bank, IMF, NATO and Federal Reserve) which prop up the US Empire?

 

Russia ’s power is mushrooming. Its GDP is leaping ahead at 8% per annum and by 2020 Russia will be among the five biggest economies in the world. It now has the third largest Forex reserves in the world and it is gradually moving away from the anemic dollar to euros and rubles. Nearly 10% of its wealth is currently in gold.

 

Russia has also overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading supplier of petroleum. It produces 13% of the world’s daily output and has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. In fact, Putin has worked energetically to create the world’s first Natural Gas cartel—an alliance between Russia , Qatar , Iran and Algeria . The group could potentially control 40% of the world’s remaining natural gas and set prices as it sees fit.

 

Putin’s ambitions are not limited to the energy sector either---although he has strengthened the country by turning away foreign investment and “re-nationalization” vital resources. As Pavel Korduban says in his recent article “Putin Harvests Political Dividends from Russian Economic Dynamism”; Putin intends to expand beyond energy and focus on technological modernization:

 

“The shift in official discourse to “innovations” reflects an attempt to reorient economic policy from the goal of consolidating the status of “energy superpower” to the emphasis on industrial modernization and catching up with the technological revolution. The key role in formulating this new policy is given to Sergei Ivanov, who promised that by the year 2020 Russia would gain leadership (measured as 10% of the world market) in such high-technology sectors as nuclear energy, shipbuilding, aircraft, satellites and delivery systems, and computer software.”

 

Putin has also strengthened ties with his Central Asian neighbors and engaged in “cooperative” military maneuvers with China .

 

“Last month it signed deals with Turkmenistan , Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to revive the Soviet-era united system of gas pipelines, which will help Russia strengthen its role of the monopoly supplier from the region”. (Reuters) He has transformed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into a formidable economic-military alliance capable of resisting foreign intervention in Central Asia by the United States and NATO.

 

The CIS is bound to play a major role in regional issues as the real motives behind the “war on terror” are exposed and America's geopolitical objectives in Central Asia become clearer. So far, Washington has established its military bases and outposts throughout the region with impunity. But the mood is darkening in Moscow and Beijing and there may be changes in the future. We should also remember that Putin is surrounded by ex-KGB agents and Soviet-era hardliners. They’ve never trusted America's motives and now they can point to the new US bases, the “colored-coded” revolutions, the broken treaties and the projected missile defense system--to prove that Uncle Sam is “up to no good”.

 

Putin sees himself as leading a global insurgency against the US Empire. He represents the emerging-market economies of China , India and Brazil . These 4 nations will progressively overtake the “old order”. Last year 60% of the world's output was produced outside the G-7 countries. According to Goldman Sachs, by 2050 Brazil , Russia , India and China will be the world's leading economies.

 

The transition from “superpower rule” is already underway. The centers of geopolitical power are shifting like giant tectonic plates. The trend is irreversible. The deployment of Bush’s missile defense system will only hasten the decline of the “unipolar-model” by triggering an asymmetrical war, where Forex reserves, vital resources and political maneuvering will be used as the weapons-of-choice.

 

War with Russia is pointless and preventable. There are better choices than confrontation.