Never Fight a Land War in Asia

By George Friedman

U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, speaking at West Point, said last week that “Any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined.” In saying this, Gates was repeating a dictum laid down by Douglas MacArthur after the Korean War, who urged the United States to avoid land wars in Asia. Given that the United States has fought four major land wars in Asia since World War II – Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq – none of which had ideal outcomes, it is useful to ask three questions: First, why is fighting a land war in Asia a bad idea? Second, why does the United States seem compelled to fight these wars? And third, what is the alternative that protects U.S. interests in Asia without large-scale military land wars?

The Hindrances of Overseas Wars

Let’s begin with the first question, the answer to which is rooted in demographics and space. The population of Iraq is currently about 32 million. Afghanistan has a population of less than 30 million. The U.S. military, all told, consists of about 1.5 million active-duty personnel (plus 980,000 in the reserves), of whom more than 550,000 belong to the Army and about 200,000 are part of the Marine Corps. Given this, it is important to note that the United States strains to deploy about 200,000 troops at any one time in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that many of these troops are in support rather than combat roles. The same was true in Vietnam, where the United States was challenged to field a maximum of about 550,000 troops (in a country much more populous than Iraq or Afghanistan) despite conscription and a larger standing army. Indeed, the same problem existed in World War II.

When the United States fights in the Eastern Hemisphere, it fights at great distances, and the greater the distance, the greater the logistical cost. More ships are needed to deliver the same amount of material, for example. That absorbs many troops. The logistical cost of fighting at a distance is that it diverts numbers of troops (or requires numbers of civilian personnel) disproportionate to the size of the combat force.

Regardless of the number of troops deployed, the U.S. military is always vastly outnumbered by the populations of the countries to which it is deployed. If parts of these populations resist as light-infantry guerrilla forces or employ terrorist tactics, the enemy rapidly swells to a size that can outnumber U.S. forces, as in Vietnam and Korea. At the same time, the enemy adopts strategies to take advantage of the core weakness of the United States – tactical intelligence. The resistance is fighting at home. It understands the terrain and the culture. The United States is fighting in an alien environment. It is constantly at an intelligence disadvantage. That means that the effectiveness of the native forces is multiplied by excellent intelligence, while the effectiveness of U.S. forces is divided by lack of intelligence.

The United States compensates with technology, from space-based reconnaissance and air power to counter-battery systems and advanced communications. This can make up the deficit but only by massive diversions of manpower from ground-combat operations. Maintaining a helicopter requires dozens of ground-crew personnel. Where the enemy operates with minimal technology multiplied by intelligence, the United States compensates for lack of intelligence with massive technology that further reduces available combat personnel. Between logistics and technological force multipliers, the U.S. “point of the spear” shrinks. If you add the need to train, relieve, rest and recuperate the ground-combat forces, you are left with a small percentage available to fight.

The paradox of this is that American forces will win the engagements but may still lose the war. Having identified the enemy, the United States can overwhelm it with firepower. The problem the United States has is finding the enemy and distinguishing it from the general population. As a result, the United States is well-suited for the initial phases of combat, when the task is to defeat a conventional force. But after the conventional force has been defeated, the resistance can switch to methods difficult for American intelligence to deal with. The enemy can then control the tempo of operations by declining combat where it is at a disadvantage and initiating combat when it chooses.

The example of the capitulation of Germany and Japan in World War II is frequently cited as a model of U.S. forces defeating and pacifying an opposing nation. But the Germans were not defeated primarily by U.S. ground troops. The back of the Wehrmacht was broken by the Soviets on their own soil with the logistical advantages of short supply lines. And, of course, Britain and numerous other countries were involved. It is doubtful that the Germans would have capitulated to the Americans alone. The force the United States deployed was insufficient to defeat Germany. The Germans had no appetite for continuing a resistance against the Russians and saw surrendering to the Americans and British as sanctuary from the Russians. They weren’t going to resist them. As for Japan, it was not ground forces but air power, submarine warfare and atomic bombs that finished them – and the emperor’s willingness to order a surrender. It was not land power that prevented resistance but air and sea power, plus a political compromise by MacArthur in retaining and using the emperor. Had the Japanese emperor been removed, I suspect that the occupation of Japan would have been much more costly. Neither Germany nor Japan are examples in which U.S. land forces compelled capitulation and suppressed resistance.

The problem the United States has in the Eastern Hemisphere is that the size of the force needed to occupy a country initially is much smaller than the force needed to pacify the country. The force available for pacification is much smaller than needed because the force the United States can deploy demographically without committing to total war is simply too small to do the job – and the size needed to do the job is unknown.

U.S. Global Interests

The deeper problem is this: The United States has global interests. While the Soviet Union was the primary focus of the United States during the Cold War, no power threatens to dominate Eurasia now, and therefore no threat justifies the singular focus of the United States. In time of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States must still retain a strategic reserve for other unanticipated contingencies. This further reduces the available force for combat.

Some people argue that the United States is insufficiently ruthless in prosecuting war, as if it would be more successful without political restraints at home. The Soviets and the Nazis, neither noted for gentleness, were unable to destroy the partisans behind German lines or the Yugoslav resistance, in spite of brutal tactics. The guerrilla has built-in advantages in warfare for which brutality cannot compensate.

Given all this, the question is why the United States has gotten involved in wars in Eurasia four times since World War II. In each case it is obvious: for political reasons. In Korea and Vietnam, it was to demonstrate to doubting allies that the United States had the will to resist the Soviets. In Afghanistan, it was to uproot al Qaeda. In Iraq, the reasons are murkier, more complex and less convincing, but the United States ultimately went in, in my opinion, to convince the Islamic world of American will.

The United States has tried to shape events in the Eastern Hemisphere by the direct application of land power. In Korea and Vietnam, it was trying to demonstrate resolve against Soviet and Chinese power. In Afghanistan and Iraq, it was trying to shape the politics of the Muslim world. The goal was understandable but the amount of ground force available was not. In Korea, it resulted in stalemate; in Vietnam, defeat. We await the outcome in Iraq and Afghanistan, but given Gates’ statement, the situation for the United States is not necessarily hopeful.

In each case, the military was given an ambiguous mission. This was because a clear outcome – defeating the enemy – was unattainable. At the same time, there were political interests in each. Having engaged, simply leaving did not seem an option. Therefore, Korea turned into an extended presence in a near-combat posture, Vietnam ended in defeat for the American side, and Iraq and Afghanistan have turned, for the time being, into an uncertain muddle that no reasonable person expects to end with the declared goals of a freed and democratic pair of countries.

Problems of Strategy

There are two problems with American strategy. The first is using the appropriate force for the political mission. This is not a question so much of the force as it is of the mission. The use of military force requires clarity of purpose; otherwise, a coherent strategy cannot emerge. Moreover, it requires an offensive mission. Defensive missions (such as Vietnam and Korea) by definition have no terminal point or any criteria for victory. Given the limited availability of ground combat forces, defensive missions allow the enemy’s level of effort to determine the size of the force inserted, and if the force is insufficient to achieve the mission, the result is indefinite deployment of scarce forces.

Then there are missions with clear goals initially but without an understanding of how to deal with Act II. Iraq suffered from an offensive intention ill suited to the enemy’s response. Having destroyed the conventional forces of Iraq, the United States was unprepared for the Iraqi response, which was guerrilla resistance on a wide scale. The same was true in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency is occupation warfare. It is the need to render a population – rather than an army – unwilling and incapable of resisting. It requires vast resources and large numbers of troops that outstrip the interest. Low-cost counter-insurgency with insufficient forces will always fail. Since the United States uses limited forces because it has to, counterinsurgency is the most dangerous kind of war for the United States. The idea has always been that the people prefer the U.S. occupation to the threats posed by their fellow countrymen and that the United States can protect those who genuinely do prefer the former. That may be the idea, but there is never enough U.S. force available.

Another model for dealing with the problem of shaping political realities can be seen in the Iran-Iraq war. In that war, the United States allowed the mutual distrust of the two countries to eliminate the threats posed by both. When the Iraqis responded by invading Kuwait, the United States responded with a massive counter with very limited ends – the reconquest of Kuwait and the withdrawal of forces. It was a land war in Asia designed to defeat a known and finite enemy army without any attempt at occupation.

The problem with all four wars is that they were not wars in a conventional sense and did not use the military as militaries are supposed to be used. The purpose of a military is to defeat enemy conventional forces. As an army of occupation against a hostile population, military forces are relatively weak. The problem for the United States is that such an army must occupy a country for a long time, and the U.S. military simply lacks the ground forces needed to occupy countries and still be available to deal with other threats.

By having an unclear mission, you have an uncertain terminal point. When does it end? You then wind up with a political problem internationally – having engaged in the war, you have allies inside and outside of the country that have fought with you and taken risks with you. Withdrawal leaves them exposed, and potential allies will be cautious in joining with you in another war. The political costs spiral and the decision to disengage is postponed. The United States winds up in the worst of all worlds. It terminates not on its own but when its position becomes untenable, as in Vietnam. This pyramids the political costs dramatically.

Wars need to be fought with ends that can be achieved by the forces available. Donald Rumsfeld once said, “You go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” I think that is a fundamental misunderstanding of war. You do not engage in war if the army you have is insufficient. When you understand the foundations of American military capability and its limits in Eurasia, Gates’ view on war in the Eastern Hemisphere is far more sound than Rumsfeld’s.

The Diplomatic Alternative

The alternative is diplomacy, not understood as an alternative to war but as another tool in statecraft alongside war. Diplomacy can find the common ground between nations. It can also be used to identify the hostility of nations and use that hostility to insulate the United States by diverting the attention of other nations from challenging the United States. That is what happened during the Iran-Iraq war. It wasn’t pretty, but neither was the alternative.

Diplomacy for the United States is about maintaining the balance of power and using and diverting conflict to manage the international system. Force is the last resort, and when it is used, it must be devastating. The argument I have made, and which I think Gates is asserting, is that at a distance, the United States cannot be devastating in wars dependent on land power. That is the weakest aspect of American international power and the one the United States has resorted to all too often since World War II, with unacceptable results. Using U.S. land power as part of a combined arms strategy is occasionally effective in defeating conventional forces, as it was with North Korea (and not China) but is inadequate to the demands of occupation warfare. It makes too few troops available for success, and it does not know how many troops might be needed.

This is not a policy failure of any particular U.S. president. George W. Bush and Barack Obama have encountered precisely the same problem, which is that the forces that have existed in Eurasia, from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in Korea to the Taliban in Afghanistan, have either been too numerous or too agile (or both) for U.S. ground forces to deal with. In any war, the primary goal is not to be defeated. An elective war in which the criteria for success are unclear and for which the amount of land force is insufficient must be avoided. That is Gates’ message. It is the same one MacArthur delivered, and the one Dwight Eisenhower exercised when he refused to intervene in Vietnam on France’s behalf. As with the Monroe Doctrine, it should be elevated to a principle of U.S. foreign policy, not because it is a moral principle but because it is a very practical one.

Why Is Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard Back in the News?

Over the past two months, Benjamin Netanyahu has mentioned the fate of jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard six times in meetings with President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The Israel lobby also mounted a letter-writing campaign on Pollard’s behalf.

When Pollard was arrested for espionage in the 1980s, Tel Aviv swore he was part of a “rogue” operation. Only 12 years later did Israel concede he was their spy the entire time. That insider espionage by a purported ally damaged U.S. national security more than any incident in U.S. history.

During an earlier term as Prime Minister, Netanyahu secured a verbal agreement from Bill Clinton in 1998 to release Pollard. Clinton then faced a rebellion among U.S. intelligence agencies aware of the damage done. Clinton backed down and Netanyahu backed off.

Pollard took more than one million documents for copying by his Israeli handler. When transferred to the Soviets, reportedly in exchange for the emigration of Russian Jews, that stolen intelligence shifted the underlying dynamics of the Cold War.

What has its entangled alliance with Israel cost the U.S.? The U.S. committed $20 trillion to Cold War defense from 1948-1989 (in 2010 dollars). Pollard negated much of that outlay yet even now Israel pretends to be an ally. Few believe it; many realize the U.S. has been played for a fool.

Why Now?

The timing could be a Christmas season plea for clemency after 25 years of imprisonment. Former Assistant Secretary of State Lawrence Kolb now claims the sentence was excessive due to a personal distaste for Israel by then Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger.

At trial, Pollard claimed he wasn’t stealing from the U.S.; he was stealing secrets for Israel-with whom the U.S. has a “special relationship.” Aware of the harm done by Pollard during the Reagan-era defense buildup, Weinberger pressed for a longer sentence than the prosecution.

From 1981-1985, this U.S. Navy intelligence analyst provided Israel with 360 cubic feet of classified military documents on Soviet arms shipments, Pakistani nuclear weapons, Libyan air defense systems and other intelligence sought by Tel Aviv to advance its geopolitical agenda.

Even while in prison, Pollard’s iconic status among pro-Israelis may have played a strategic role. Or was it just coincidence that Tel Aviv announced a $1 million grant to their master spy ten days before 911? Is that how Israel signals its operatives in the U.S.?

Could that explain the timing of Israel’s latest announcement? Could this news flurry be a signal to pro-Israeli volunteers (sayanim in Hebrew) that another operation is underway?

Timing is Everything

Tel Aviv routinely schedules its operations during political “downtime” in the U.S. The Suez crisis was scheduled for the last week of President Eisenhower’s 1956 reelection campaign. Fast forward to 2008 and Israeli troops invaded Gaza just after Christmas, killing 1,400 Palestinians before exiting just prior to the Obama inaugural.

That well-timed provocation generated more outrage at the U.S. as Israel’s reliable enabler. The carnage also catalyzed reactions worldwide that undermined peace talks

This latest news about Pollard coincides with another political downtime. The U.S. Congress has adjourned and the White House has shut down for the holidays. Plus WikiLeaks successfully removed peace talks from the news and restored talk of war with Iran.

If there is another “incident” in the U.S. or the E.U., will the evidence point to Tehran? Islamabad? Damascus? If the U.S. cannot be persuaded to invade Iran, can it be provoked to do so? Stay tuned.

What Next?

Tel Aviv may be growing desperate and for good reason. Israel and pro-Israelis were the source of the fixed intelligence that induced the U.S. to invade Iraq in response to the provocation of 911. Those facts are well known to intelligence agencies worldwide.

As with Pollard, Tel Aviv denies it.

With Pollard back in the news, anything is possible. Recall how long it took for a confession that he was an Israeli spy. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Tel Aviv to concede its role in provoking its primary ally to pursue a Zionist agenda in the Middle East.

Absent the mass murder of 911, would the U.S. now find itself at war in the Middle East? Absent another provocation, Americans are not inclined to expand these wars. At least not yet.

JB Campbell: Anti-American

by J. Bruce Campbell

The leakers are being called “anti-American.”

What decent person, anywhere in the world today, is not anti-American? Is there anyone more dangerous than our typical ignorant, arrogant American “citizen,” who very likely couldn’t find America on a marked map of the world? Well, yes: the American military man, who is the most dangerous son of a bitch on the planet. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

I’m anti-American. I really wasn’t until I returned to Rhodesia in January, ’73 to join up and help in their struggle against Communist terrorists. I’d been down there in ’71 for discussions with the government on bringing Americans and others wanting to be part of a new country project based on a book by my boss, Michael Oliver, called A New Constitution for a New Country. The plan was to have a minimum of a hundred square miles with no taxes and no draft, replacing the former tax-haven in Freeport, Bahamas. Thousands of productive Americans and others were ready to relocate.

Mike’s real name was Olitsky and he was a Lithuanian Jew who’d fled into Germany to escape Stalin’s Red Army. He wound up in Dachau for four years. He introduced me to Holocaust Revisionism when I ventured to ask him about his experience. He shrugged and said, “It was a factory. We worked during the day and stayed in a dormitory at night.”

“But what about the, uh, the-”
“The what?”
“You know, the killings.”
“I never saw any of that.”

Four years in Dachau, never saw any of that. Okay. He did see the US Army “liberate” the camp in April, ’45. The SS and Alpine troops recuperating there had negotiated a surrender to the Americans, who entered the camp and started shooting the guys who thought they were surrendering. Then the Americans marched the surviving soldiers (all the prison guards had fled days earlier) up to a wall near the hospital and set up a machine gun. Three hundred forty-six German soldiers on R&R were slaughtered in a few minutes, five hundred twenty in all that morning. George Patton handled the cover-up and protected the war criminals. The army doctor on the scene, Col. Howard Buechner, described it in his book, Dachau: Hour of the Avenger. Of the 32,000 inmates freed, about 1,200 were Jews, including Mike.

My new country project discussions were with the Rhodesian minister of internal affairs, Jack Howman. He rather indignantly turned us down. Nevertheless, I did return and take part in their war against Communist terror. I suppose it was during those two years that I became reluctantly anti-American. Our country, the good old USA, supported the Communist war of terror against the Rhodesian people, black and white. Our country put Robert Mugabe in power, just as it put Nelson Mandela in power a few years later. Mandela was Member Number One of the South African Communist Party. America put every Communist party in power in every single Communist country since 1917. That includes Lenin & Trotsky, Mao Tse Tung, Kim Il-sung, Ho Chi Minh, Tito, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro. Our government kept Stalin in power from 1924 until his death in ’53. It went to war in ’41 to rescue Stalin from well-deserved German destruction. Billions (trillions in today’s worthless money) were given by America to save Soviet Communism.

An itinerant writer named Robert K. Brown came to Salisbury, Rhodesia in 1974 to interview me. He said he was freelancing for Esquire Magazine and Guns Magazine. He wanted to know what would make a Californian such as I come over to this little country in southern Africa and fight terrorism? The interview eventually appeared in the first issue (Summer ’75) of a strange magazine called “Soldier of Fortune.” I took Brown up to Mt. Darwin and introduced him to my farmer friends who were on the front lines of terrorism every day and night of their lives. I asked him not to quote me because I could be prosecuted for “mercenary activities” by the State Department. He quoted the hell out of me but changed my name to “Mitchell McNair.” But the point of this is that he told me what he did for the CIA back in the ’50s… Brown was in the CIA’s Special Forces and was part of the assassination team that murdered Rafael Trujillo in ’61. But in ’58 and ’59, Brown ran guns to Fidel Castro to assist in his coup against Fulgencio Batista. Once Castro came to power, the CIA pretended to be against Castro to justify its gigantic power-grab of the government. But Castro, along with every other Communist leader in the world, was put in power by the US government. Then our government exploited the “threat” presented by Communism to justify “defense spending” and lucrative no-win wars. Today, the Chicoms, those ultimate Communists, are our business partners and we have arranged for the anti-Communist Moslems to be our new worst enemies.

Brown’s magazine was funded by the CIA and was immediately put to use in recruiting mercenaries for their ludicrous operation in Angola. I called Brown in Boulder at one point to ask why the hell he was recruiting for the foul Angolan terrorist, Holden Roberto? He said lamely, “Well, the CIA likes him.” Any questions so far?

The more I studied US history over the next few years, the more I came to hate everything this country stands for, or pretends to stand for. American history turns out to be one gigantic lie, as phony as a Hollywood movie. In fact, all we have come to believe about ourselves has pretty much come from Hollywood. This is no exaggeration. The American myth was created by a few Russian Jews who ripped off Tom Edison’s film process in New Jersey and split for the coast to avoid prosecution. Neal Gabler wrote a book entitled An Empire of Their Own, How the Jews Invented Hollywood. The inescapable fact is that not only did they invent Hollywood, but the entire myth of America as the promised land.

For Russian Jews, it was. America was the land of milk, honey and suckers by the millions. Our self-image as Americans is a Jewish image. The slaughter and rip-off and exile of American Indians to Bantustans we call “reservations” was glamorized (authorized) by Hollywood Jews. The reality of this genocide makes American condemnation of Zionist genocide of Palestinians meaningless. That is, it would be meaningless if any American politician condemned Israel, which hasn’t happened yet. If we had some bacon we could have bacon and eggs, if we had some eggs.

The whole American experience is based on mass murder and land-grabs and lies (broken treaties). Not one treaty made by the US Army with the Indians was left unbroken. Maybe the one with the Yakimas, but I’m not sure about that. Up in this country where we live, you see the slogan once in a while, “Custer Had It Coming.” When you investigate what all he did to the Lakota, Cheyenne and others, such as mass murdering women and children, for no reason other than ethnic cleansing, you have to conclude that he and his war criminals definitely had it coming.

Custer worked for Phil Sheridan and Bill Sherman, both of whom are in the War Crimes Hall of Fame. Their crimes against the Southern people and the Indian people will turn your hair white with shock. American (Yankee) war of aggression and genocide are the bases of all modern total war. The buffalo were exterminated just to cripple the Plains Indians. To punish the Nez Perce for resisting another broken treaty, the army slaughtered thousands of their Appaloosa horses. The army put the Nez Perce in boxcars in the winter of ’77 and shipped them to Ft. Leavenworth. This is the actual American way.

I’ll skip over our genocidal adventures in the Philippines and our Jewish-engineered role in the Great War and go right to the World War, or rather its aftermath in Europe. Our mopping-up method is described above with the Dachau massacre of surrendered troops. Such sadistic butchery was encouraged by a 1941 book “highly recommended” to the troops by Franklin Roosevelt, a book by an obscure Jew in advertising named Theodore Kaufman, entitled “Germany Must Perish!” It was the basis for what became known as the Morgenthau Plan for Germany, which called for the extermination of a large percentage of Germans, the forced sterilization of the rest and the destruction of all industry or its removal to the Soviet Union, flooding all mines and turning Germany into a goat pasture. Henry Morgenthau was FDR’s Jewish treasury secretary. George Patton writes in his memoirs that Eisenhower gave Morgenthau his plan, which was eventually drafted by another Jew named Weiss (Harry Dexter “White”). Upon war’s end, Eisenhower put the plan into effect with his order to starve to death all captured German PoWs. This is documented in James Bacque’s Other Losses. Over a million German prisoners died eating grass and bugs out in open fields in the American starvation program from May to December, 1945.

Then, Ike starved millions more German civilians throughout that period ’til 1947, when the Cold War started and America needed Germany to pretend to fight our erstwhile ally, Stalin. This merciless starvation program is documented also by Bacque in his Crimes & Mercies. Naïve people have doubted this crime against humanity and asked, “Why didn’t the Germans complain, if what you say is true?” Answer: For one thing, the Germans are not a complaining people, the way Jews are. This is not a good thing, but it’s the way they are. They shut up and take it. But the real point is, to whom could they complain if they were complaining people? The Americans? The British, the Soviets, the French, all of whom were participants in the American genocide program? Bacque estimates that between nine and thirteen million Germans were slaughtered in Eisenhower’s starvation and forced exposure operation in two years.

Then there was the Eisenhower program officially called by the army, Operation Keelhaul. If you still think that being an American is a good thing, consider this one… During the war, millions of Russians, Ukrainians, Cossacks and others escaped from Soviet slave-terror into Italy, Austria, Yugoslavia and other countries. Many of them were Red Army soldiers captured by the German army at Stalingrad, Leningrad, Kursk and countless other battles and sent to PoW camps in Germany and Poland and Italy. The hysterical beast, Josef Stalin, who fled Moscow at the approach of the German army, gave the order that any Red Army soldier who surrendered was to be shot when the war was over. This was well-known. Nevertheless, Dwight Eisenhower broke all international laws regarding treatment of captured enemy forces and ordered the rounding up and handing over of these men and their families. Approximately five million of them were forced into boxcars by US Army soldiers at bayonet point and sent east to Hungary, where they were taken off the trains and either shot by the tracks or sent to the Gulag Archipelago to be worked to death over the next year. This was documented also by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his monumental record of Soviet/American bestiality. I have interviewed veterans who participated in this unimaginable betrayal of humanity.

Reportedly, the only photo on Ike’s Oval Office desk was one of Josef Stalin-autographed.

In 1956, our President Eisenhower encouraged the Hungarians to rise up and kick the Soviets out of Budapest, promising them American help if they showed they deserved it. So the Hungarians rose up and seized all the Jews that Khrushchev and Stalin had installed over them, hanging and shooting many hundreds, and forced the Soviets out of Budapest. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that he waited a couple of weeks for Eisenhower to follow through on his promise of aid, but it never came. So he ordered the tanks back in and the wiping out of the freedom fighters.

This is the actual American way, administered by respectable political pukes such as Dwight David Eisenhower, nicknamed in the 1915 West Point yearbook as “The Terrible Swedish Jew.”

We are just now learning what the army and air force did to the Koreans during the Korean War. Millions were slaughtered. We Americans wonder why the crazy North Koreans are so paranoid and ready to fight? We wonder because we don’t know what the hell our government did to those people in the 1950s. We have no idea that our government approved the Soviet occupation of North Korea in 1945, making it Communist in ’48. Then we drew an arbitrary line across the 38th parallel and created “South Korea” and prepared to go to war against “North Korea” when everyone was ready in 1950. War made to order with unbelievable profits to the bankers and “defense contractors.” 34,000 Americans killed – for what?

Viet Nam. Did you know that Ho Chi Minh was a US intelligence agent during World War II? He made his reports to the OSS at the Texaco office in Hanoi. Did you know that the American OSS installed Ho Chi Minh in power in the northern half of Indochina in 1945? An arbitrary line was drawn across the 17th parallel in ’54 and our northern puppet started the war against our southern puppet in ’59, which we of course lost in ’75. Another war made to order with unbelievable profits to the bankers and “defense contractors.” Millions of Vietnamese slaughtered by our wonderful boys, 58,000 of whom were also slaughtered – for what?

The United Nations is a US front. It was devised by American traitors in the Council on Foreign Relations in 1945 and has always been housed in New York. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. donated the sixteen acres in Manhattan and built the edifice in 1951. Its first crime against humanity was the creation of the Israeli nation of parasites in 1948, while the UN was still headquartered on Long Island. The UN waged war against Rhodesia and South Africa throughout the ’60s and ’70s, always subsidized by American taxpayers. Most Americans don’t know or remember that the Korean War was fought by American soldiers under the blue and white flag of the United Nations.

And now, our wonderful boys are fighting for Israel against Moslems in Iraq and Afghanistan and secretly killing thousands in Pakistan and Yemen. These wars are based on Israeli lies stemming from their massacre of 9/11. Even though the American FBI director, Mueller, admitted there was no evidence of Moslem hijackers, we invaded Afghanistan. Americans don’t know that the Taliban were our guys until they objected to a Unocal pipeline being constructed across their country. Richard Armitage told them they could either have a carpet of gold (if they went along with the pipeline) or a carpet of bombs if they didn’t cooperate. They didn’t cooperate and virtually overnight, the Americans categorized them as the enemy, showering our gold on a rival group, the Northern Alliance. Our former friends, the Taliban, are kicking our butts, which is only fair. You invade someone’s country based on your own lies, you deserve to have your butt kicked.

Football star and millionaire Pat Tillman fell for the 9/11 legend and joined the Army Rangers to hunt down Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. But then he and his brother were sent to Iraq, which puzzled them both. Why Iraq? Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 (but neither did Osama or Afghanistan). Pat Tillman signed his own death warrant with his questions and complaints about invading Iraq. So he was sent back to Afghanistan to be silenced. In one of the dumbest excuses for a skirmish I’ve ever heard of, he was sent forward to engage with some non-existent enemy fighters. Then he was shot at by his own guys behind him. The odd thing is that his forehead had three .22 caliber bullet holes in it. The M-4 rifle shoots a .22, of course, but it’s a high-power, high-velocity .223 that does serious damage. The fact that his forehead had three .22 holes and wasn’t obliterated means he was executed with three low-powered. 22LR bullets from a pistol. The general in charge of the official heroic lies about enemy action and then “friendly fire” was Stanley McChrystal, an infamous black ops leader of The Secret Team and organizer of many, many assassinations.

And so, I’m anti-American. I suspect that if Pat Tillman were alive he’d be just as anti-American. Real patriots can get that way quickly when they realize they’ve been hustled.

Don’t start about the Constitution. Don’t tell me that if we just stuck to the Constitution we’d be in good shape. I’ve found that people who go on about the Constitution have never read it. They don’t understand that it’s just a seven-part plan for running the government. They don’t understand that it was crafted by Freemasons using Masonic lodge rules of order as a template. They don’t know or forgot that the founders sneaked the Constitution on us when they were supposed to modify the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union between the States.

The Bill of Rights was our friend and it was added by Patrick Henry and truly patriotic friends to protect us from the Constitutional government. But George Bush and his PATRIOT Act destroyed the Bill of Rights. Obama is a foreign-born CIA asset so he has no understanding of the Bill of Rights. Apparently both he and his strange wife lost their law licenses several years ago anyway and I suspect they missed Bill of Rights day in law school.

I’m not sure what it is about America that we’re expected to love. The government? The Federal Reserve? The IRS? Our banking system? Wall Street? How about our schools? The way we conduct our foreign policy? How about the CIA and sanctioned kidnapping, torture and false imprisonment and killing Israel’s enemies with our cowardly Predator flying death machines? Maybe the FBI, America’s number one terrorist organization?

Tell me, what is there to love? Our farms and Monsanto suicide seeds and all our fake food? Our labor unions that don’t try to protect American jobs? How about NAFTA that was jammed down our throats by Bill Clinton and Rush Limbaugh? You don’t remember that 1994 tag-team?

Maybe we should love Wal-Mart and all the Chinese junk inside. How about our great industries? Wait a minute-we don’t have any industries. They’re all in China.

Should we love our cities? How about the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. We really need a War on Warmongers and Profiteers. I won’t even ask if we’re supposed to love our politicians, our judges and our news media. Our ranches are nice, except the cattle are full of growth hormones and antibiotics.

Nope. Sorry. Nothing here to love, if we’re honest. Maybe if we brought our occupation forces home from the 120 countries they’re occupying, this country wouldn’t be so hateful. But there’s a gene in us that makes us extremely dangerous and destructive. We have been conditioned to view ourselves as exceptional-better than other people-and deserving of whatever other people have, such as land, gold, oil, water, whatever. You can see this gene metastasizing in the leaked videos of Americans slaughtering Iraqi civilians from our multi-million dollar attack helicopters. I say they’re ours because we’re on the hook for them.

Somebody is going to say, Well partner, you better love your right to shoot your mouth off and you can thank a veteran for that right. Uh, huh. You mean the guy over in Iraq, blowing away a family that misunderstood orders in a foreign language to stop at this goddamned roadblock (that wasn’t here yesterday)? You think I owe my free-speech right to a guy who spent the war spraying Agent Orange on foreign civilians? Do you think any of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights was reinforced by the crew of the Enola Gay? My old man was a marine in the first World War. I said to him, Man, you made the world safe for Democracy! He just looked at me, like, very funny.

It is not safe to shoot your mouth off these days and hasn’t been for a long time. The military is not making it any safer, in fact, just the opposite. The US military is breaking the law wholesale by acting as “law enforcement,” in complete violation of the law (Posse Comitatus). But shut my mouth, because there is no law anymore. We’re under the law of the gun, or Deuteronomy, which is the same thing.

Most people today are afraid even to READ my material, let alone comment on it. Let alone write something along these lines. Why do you suppose there’s so much fear in this country since 9/11? Is the military relieving this fear or reinforcing it? What about the reports that the military will be rounding up dissidents? Don’t believe them? They’re already illegally working as cops. The military does not protect ANYONE’s rights. The military kills people and destroys property. No American is safer because our military is killing Moslems in Iraq or Afghanistan-just the opposite. Not only is the military killing the world with depleted uranium munitions, but it is causing a blinding hatred of us. Just imagine armed thugs breaking into your house or your relative’s house and what it would do to your mind, assuming they didn’t blow you away because of the look of resentment on your face.

I discovered myself, years ago, that the FEMA camps are staffed by the 300th Military Police POW Command headquartered in Inkster, Michigan.

An honest American has to admit that he hates this country, not just the government. The government is a reflection of the people who pay for it. This country isn’t what you thought it was and it never has been. We’ve been conditioned to pledge allegiance to the flag and to the nation for which it stands, but what it stands for isn’t what Hollywood has had us believing since we were little kids.

All leaks are good, as long as they’re the real deal, not redacted or altered to make us support Israel. The only way we can survive is to know the truth about what government and the corporations have been secretly doing to us and others. The truth may be anti-American, but that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced

BY: MATTHEW HICKLEY

When the U.S. Navy deploys a battle fleet on exercises, it takes the security of its aircraft carriers very seriously indeed.
At least a dozen warships provide a physical guard while the technical wizardry of the world’s only military superpower offers an invisible shield to detect and deter any intruders.

That is the theory. Or, rather, was the theory.

Uninvited guest: A Chinese Song Class submarine, like the one that sufaced by the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk – a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.
According to senior Nato officials the incident caused consternation in the U.S. Navy.

The Americans had no idea China’s fast-growing submarine fleet had reached such a level of sophistication, or that it posed such a threat.

One Nato figure said the effect was “as big a shock as the Russians launching Sputnik” – a reference to the Soviet Union’s first orbiting satellite in 1957 which marked the start of the space age.
The incident, which took place in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan, is a major embarrassment for the Pentagon.

Battle stations: The Kitty Hawk carries 4,500 personnel

The lone Chinese vessel slipped past at least a dozen other American warships which were supposed to protect the carrier from hostile aircraft or submarines.

And the rest of the costly defensive screen, which usually includes at least two U.S. submarines, was also apparently unable to detect it.

According to the Nato source, the encounter has forced a serious re-think of American and Nato naval strategy as commanders reconsider the level of threat from potentially hostile Chinese submarines.
It also led to tense diplomatic exchanges, with shaken American diplomats demanding to know why the submarine was “shadowing” the U.S. fleet while Beijing pleaded ignorance and dismissed the affair as coincidence.

Analysts believe Beijing was sending a message to America and the West demonstrating its rapidly-growing military capability to threaten foreign powers which try to interfere in its “backyard”.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy’s submarine fleet includes at least two nuclear-missile launching vessels.

Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.
Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane’s Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War.

He said: “It was certainly a wake-up call for the Americans.

“It would tie in with what we see the Chinese trying to do, which appears to be to deter the Americans from interfering or operating in their backyard, particularly in relation to Taiwan.”
In January China carried a successful missile test, shooting down a satellite in orbit for the first time.

The Way Toward a Global ‘Reset’

By MIKHAIL GORBACHEV

In both Russia and the United States, the “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations, to which the leaders of both countries first declared their commitment more than 18 months ago, is now being assessed. Some, often for reasons of domestic politics, are trying to belittle any achievements. Others are wondering whether a new stage in the relationship has truly begun, or whether this is just another pendulum swing in a positive direction, to be followed inevitably by a swing backward.

In assessing where we are today, it is useful to look back at the history of our relations. Even more importantly, we must consider those relations in a broader context, as part of the changes in our globalized world.

In the early 1990s, Russian expectations for cooperation with the United States were so great, the mood was euphoric. Some of that euphoria was based on illusions and on an idealized view of America – a sense that was particularly widespread among the intelligentsia. Yet, those expectations also reflected a sound belief that our two nations could indeed achieve a great deal together, both in their own interests and for global benefit.

Euphoria soon gave way to disillusionment. Later in that decade, when the Russian economy was undermined by inept reforms and while millions of Russians were plunged into poverty, many Americans applauded Russia’s leaders. Many Russians could not help wondering if a weak, cornered Russia was what the United States wanted.

Also in the 1990s, NATO was expanded while the United States proclaimed its victory in the Cold War and its intention to maintain military superiority.

What, then, was the value of the pledge President Ronald Reagan made at the Geneva summit meeting in 1985, when he joined me in solemnly stating that our two nations would not seek military superiority? And how could a relationship of trust be built on the foundation set in the 1990s?

The period when the United States could regard itself as the sole remaining superpower and even a “hyperpower,” capable of creating a new kind of empire, turned out to be relatively short. The global financial crisis – which, this time, started in America itself rather than on the world’s periphery – spurred the process of global realignment in favor of new centers of power and influence. America has had to adjust to this shift, and it has not been easy.

The proposal to “reset” relations with Russia reflected the acknowledgement that previous policy had failed. It also recognized the great potential of a partnership between the two nations. Nevertheless, objections arose from the very start. Naysayers stressed that our nations were too different to be able to build a sustainable, “organic” relationship for the long term. Moreover, in both Russia and the United States it became clear that some people still believe that our countries are potential adversaries.

Neither Russia nor the United States can afford another confrontation. Though quite different, both nations are going through a transition. They are trying to build new, often unpredictable relationships with emerging powers. The European Union, too, faces this challenge – a challenge made even more difficult by problems arising from a hasty E.U. enlargement and monetary integration.

The intercontinental area from Vancouver to Vladivostok confronts many similar problems, and many shared interests are emerging. Powerful forces of mutual attraction must emerge as well. The U.S.-Russia “reset” and the declared E.U.-Russia “partnership for modernization” should mark the beginning of the road toward a new intercontinental community. Only by working together can the United States, Europe and Russia secure a position of leadership and influence in a rapidly changing global world.

Am I calling for an association of “the North” as a counterweight to “the South,” the Islamic world or perhaps China? Far from it.

Such a plan would be a recipe for a real rather than a hypothetical conflict of civilizations – something that in today’s world is totally unacceptable. In relations with other countries, we must always seek cooperation, joint problem-solving and ways to overcome difficulties – both those that have already arisen and those that are bound to arise.

The Islamic world is grappling with the challenge of adapting to the modern era while trying to protect its cultural identity and unique civilization. As part of this painful process, extremist tendencies within political Islam are opposed by moderate tendencies and regimes that are not averse to modernization and are ready for dialogue. A community of shared civilization, with common cultural roots and diverse experience interacting with the Islamic world, must be a party to such a dialogue.

Such a community could play an equally important role in a dialogue with China.

China’s political importance will undoubtedly increase with its population and economic power. This will be a serious test, for the international community as well as China, especially since the historic evolution of any nation is not always linear. There are forks in the road, when difficult decisions must be made. China, sooner or later, will face a political choice – the problem of democracy. Engagement and cooperation with a great nation that has become not just the “factory to the world” but also a giant economic and political “laboratory” will be another key task for the intercontinental community I am advocating.

How this community will emerge and what its final shape will be is still unclear. What is clear is that we must start by building a durable security architecture, first and foremost in Europe, with the United States and Russia as partners. Recent U.S. policy statements suggest that at last even American leaders recognize that security cannot be achieved unilaterally; it requires partnership.

The proposal by Russia’s president, Dmitri Medvedev, to conclude a pan-European security treaty applies to the same area, extending from North America to Europe and all of Russia.

I am convinced that in the future an intercontinental association of nations with a common destiny will emerge.

Big goals may seem overly ambitious or abstract, particularly at a time when Russia and the United States cannot agree on the issue of imported poultry despite their public commitment to a new relationship, and the European Union still denies Russian citizens visa-free travel.

Yet I am convinced that my proposal is not a pipe dream. The scale of global change is so vast, and the potential contribution of nations across the intercontinental space of Russia, Europe and North America is so enormous, that their close association should be seen as imperative. We must move from “reset” and partnership toward a reconfiguration of global political relations.

Mikhail Gorbachev was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until its dissolution in 1991. He is a founding member of Green Cross International and is on its board.

Zardari revokes sacking of Khosa by PM

By Syed Irfan Raza

ISLAMABAD: A dormant cold war between President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani heated up on Tuesday when the former rejected the latter’s decision to remove his adviser on Information Technology (IT), Sardar Latif Khosa.

Latif Khosa is Advisor to Prime Minister on Information Technology and Telecommunication.-File photo

The president revoked the decision of the prime minister during a meeting with Mr Khosa at the Presidency, when the adviser presented his resignation.

Sources in the IT ministry said Prime Minister Gilani and senior bureaucrats in the ministry were not ‘happy’ with the way the adviser worked.

The IT secretary is reported to close to the prime minister and his working relations with Mr Khosa were not ‘cordial’; he always complained to the prime minister about the adviser’s handling of administrative and financial matters, the sources said.

On the other hand, Mr Khosa is reported to have told the president that he was not allowed to work ‘independently’ in the ministry.He tendered his resignation after a notification of the Cabinet Division was issued on Monday, saying that Mr Khosa had been removed from the office of the adviser.

The notification issued by a deputy secretary said: “The undersigned is directed to state that Cabinet Division’s office memorandum of even number date 27th March 2010, designating Sardar Muhammad Latif Khosa, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Information Technology, as Minister-in-Charge for the Ministry of Information and Technology, is hereby withdrawn with immediate effect.

“Consequent upon the above decision the prime minister, himself will henceforth look after the Ministry of Information Technology as per first proviso to rule 3(4) of the Rules of Business, 1973.”

But according to the president’s spokesman, Mr Zardari in his capacity of PPP’s co-chairperson did not accept Mr Khosa’s resignation.

Presidential spokesman Farhatullah Babar quoted President Zardari as saying that Mr Khosa was an old party loyalist who had “remained steadfast and served selflessly the cause of democracy and the party through tick and thin”.

The president said Mr Khosa stood by the slain PPP leader Benazir Bhutto and the party leadership in difficult times. Besides, he was a gifted and competent person whom the party and the government would not abandon.

The president asked Mr Khosa to take back his resignation and continue working as adviser to the prime minister.

Several reports have appeared in the media in recent days about differences between the president and prime minister on several issues but both of them have denied the reports in their separate statements.

The high price of American hubris

By George F. Will
Thursday, July 15, 2010

The story mocks a cliche: As they were leaving the Garden of Eden, Adam said to Eve, “Darling, we live in an age of transition.” The first sentence of Barack Obama’s letter introducing his new strategic review says Americans have often coped with “moments of transition” such as today’s “time of sweeping change.” Such boilerplate makes one weep — and yearn for serious, meaning unsentimental, assessments of America’s foreign policy tradition.

One is at hand. Taken to heart, Peter Beinart’s “The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris” might spare the nation some tears.

In the Greek myth, Icarus is given wings in the form of feathers affixed by wax to a wooden frame. He also is given a warning: Do not fly too high lest the sun melt the wax. In the ecstasy of soaring, he forgot, and fell to his death.

Beinart discerns three varieties of highflying foreign policy hubris in the past 100 years, beginning with Woodrow Wilson, who injected the progressives’ faith in domestic policy expertise into foreign policy. He exemplified the hubris of reason, which supposedly could bring permanent, because “scientific,” peace to Europe. The political science professor told his wife they should draft a constitution for their marriage, then “make bylaws at our leisure.” As president, he created the Inquiry, a bevy of intellectuals using reason to revise the borders that history had given to Old World nations.

Colonel Edward House, Wilson’s aide, said he and the president received the Inquiry’s report on Jan. 2, 1918: “We actually got down to work at half past ten and finished remaking the map of the world, as we would have it, at half past twelve.”

Wilson said, in effect, “Stop the world, America wants to get off.” He actually said America would “in no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue and force.” And so the next war came, on Sept. 1, 1939, when dignitaries were in Geneva, birthplace and cemetery of the League of Nations, unveiling a statue of Wilson.

The First World War — a.k.a. the war to end all wars — was followed by the Second World War, and then the Cold War and the hubris of toughness. America, which Beinart says needed “a wider menu of analogies,” now saw every foreign policy challenge through the retrospective prism of Munich:

“In 1939, few American politicians believed that a Nazi takeover of Warsaw constituted a grave danger to the United States. By 1965, many believed we couldn’t live with a North Vietnamese takeover of Saigon. In the 1980s, Americans lived peacefully, albeit anxiously, with thousands of Soviet nuclear warheads pointed our way. By 2003, many Washington commentators claimed that even Iraqi biological or chemical weapons put us in mortal peril.”

The postwar belief that U.S. “credibility” was crucial, perishable and at stake in far-flung crises “meant,” Beinart says, “that unimportant places were important after all,” and turned the doctrine of containment into an uncontained, hence hubristic, impulse. As the restraining memory of Korea faded — a memory that helped President Dwight Eisenhower conduct a prudent foreign policy — the (in John Kennedy’s inaugural formulation)“trumpet” calling on America to “pay any price, bear any burden” summoned the country to worry perhaps excessively about involvement in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, America’s supremacy — ideological, military and economic: the stock market doubled in value between 1992 and 1996 — fed, Beinart says, a hubris of dominance. Using only air power, America compelled Serbia to remove its soldiers from part of Serbia — the province of Kosovo. In Bosnia, America acted in response to ethnic cleansing. In Kosovo, Beinart argues, America acted to preempt ethnic cleansing: “Kosovo nudged open an intellectual door, a door George W. Bush would fling wide open four years later, when he cited ‘preemption’ to justify his invasion of Iraq.”

Events eventually pop what Beinart calls “hubris bubbles.” This may soon happen inAfghanistan, where Obama is in a tenuous, uneasy alliance with those Beinart calls “dominance conservatives.”

Generational envy has, Beinart believes, propelled some Americans’ searches for Hitlers to not appease. Boredom born of Cold War success caused them to find some. Hubris is a vice arising from ambition, which is, in moderation, a virtue. Hubris is a byproduct of success, of which America has had much. By producing folly, of which America has had too much, hubris is its own corrective. There is, however, a high tuition paid for such instruction.

georgewill@washpost.com

NATO: Problems with No Solutions?

James Joyner

NATO risks becoming a relic of the Cold War unless it finds a renewed sense of solidarity and political will while framing its new Strategic Concept. That’s the central message of STRATCON 2010: An Alliance for a Global Century, a report by the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Advisors Group.

The project, co-chaired by General Brent Scowcroft, Dr. Thomas Enders, and Senator Chuck Hagel, provides a blueprint for avoiding this outcome, offering concrete recommendations for how the Alliance must be transformed in order to meet the global threats and challenges of the 21st Century. The report was co-authored by SAG members Dr. Julian Lindley-French and Dr. Yves Boyer.

Below are some key quotes from the report and my brief reaction to them:

Locating Singapore in India’s Strategic Radar

Rahul Mishra

The week ending 28 March 2010 was dominated by Singapore in terms of India’s politico-military and cultural diplomacy moves. It started with Minister for External Affairs S.M. Krishna’s visit to Singapore and ended with the armies of the two countries conducting a joint military exercise codenamed ‘Bold Kurukshetra’ in Madhya Pradesh. Krishna’s two-day visit was to “discuss ways of enhancing bilateral relationship in all spheres to a higher level.” During this visit, his first since appointment as Minister for External Affairs, Krishna met Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew as well as other leaders. He also visited the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and applauded the faculty there for its outstanding academic contribution to strengthening cultural linkages between India and Southeast Asia. He also updated the media on developments regarding the proposed Nalanda University in India. The visit underscores the cultural linkages India shares with Singapore.

Krishna’s visit was complimented in the politico-military sphere by the holding of the two-day annual joint armour exercise at the Babina Field Firing Range in Madhya Pradesh. The exercise was aimed at ‘validating inter-operability between the two forces’. This was the sixth in the ‘Bold Kurukshetra Series’ between the two armed forces. Among other things, the exercise involved the Singapore Armed Forces’ BIONIX Infantry Fighting Vehicle and BRONCO All-Terrain Tracked Carrier as well as BMP-2 Infantry Fighting Vehicle and T-72 Main Battle Tank of the Indian Army. The exercise also included professional exchange between the two armies in the form of getting used to each other’s equipment and sand-model exercises.

Cold War Syndrome

By Afshain Afzal

There have been scores of parleys between India and Pakistan at all possible levels; however, they always met the same fate. One gets the feeling as if positive outcome of these parleys can only be achieved through some sort of divine intervention. This time around also, before the two respective foreign secretaries met on 25 February 2010, there were very little hopes that the talks would bear any fruits due to indifferent views and comments in the print and electronic media on either side of the dividing line. Still, sequel to the talks, both the countries showed their nerves in giving the impression that all was not lost despite the gloomy stalemate that has been the trademark of bilateral parleys. The Indian Foreign Minister SM Krishna told the parliament that the talks marked an “encouraging step towards restoring dialogue.” Pakistani foreign secretary termed the same interaction as “exploratory” and the one that “cannot be judged on the basis of success and failure.? Stephen P. Cohen, an author and former professor, who conducts research on proliferation and the militaries of India and Pakistan at the Brookings Institute, with respect to the age old stand off between India and Pakistan once wryly said, “Stalemate seems to be more attractive to each side than finding a solution.”

Indio-Semite Nexus & Saudi Arabia

EVEN AMERICA IS WARRY OF INDO-SEMITE NEXUS

Zaheerul Hassan

India and Saudi Arabia has signed extradition treaty and number of other pacts to enhance cooperation in various sectors, like economy, energy and defence in recent visit of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to India. According to the Hindu media, leaders of both the countries also emphasized for long-term strategic relations between two states. It is also a known fact that Saudi Arabian king in one to one meeting with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has shown concern over the regional and global adverse security environment and urged him to resolve bilateral issues with Pakistan. India never liked Saudi interference on occupied Kashmir issue and always tried to tone down the conflicts in negotiations with Saudi leadership. Indo-Israel growing ties are also alarming for the Arabs and other non-Arab Muslim leadership.

Arab world including Saudi’s leadership must be well aware of the facts that India has provided bases to Israel to strike Iran and Syria. India is seeking cooperation from Israel in aerospace industries and at the same time to meet her local crude oil energy requirements approached Saudi Arabia. It is also notable here that she also recently went into arms deal with Israel purchasing over $ 200 million arms and naval crafts with a view to strengthen armed forces as one feature of her per-planned hegemonic design. Saudi rulers should be mindful to the increasing influence of Israel in central Asian region. As per Israel’s greater design, Madina (Muslim Holy City) falls in the jurisdiction of future Israeli state.

Putin, China’s Xi vow ‘strategic’ support in first meeting

AFP

MOSCOW – Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, tipped to become China’s president, hailed the strength of bilateral ties Tuesday as they looked to forge a counterbalance to the power of the US.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin (L) shakes hands with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping

“We are in favour of Russia playing an important role in international and regional affairs,” Xi, currently China’s vice-president, said after the pair held their first talks. “We will surely support you.

Pakistan: ‘Arena’ of Next Cold War

Sajjad Shaukat

We should not judge multi-faceted crises of Pakistan including perennial wave of suicide attacks in isolation because rapidly developing geo-political differences among regional and global powers in Asia show that the next cold war which is in its embryonic stage is likely to be waged between the Russia-China alliance and the US-led nations, while Pakistan has already become its arena.

Despite cooperation, disagreements exist between Washington and Beijing over Chinese export of missile technology, human rights and Taiwan issue. American strategic thinkers take China’s military modernisation as a great threat to its military bases in the continent.

Some new developments have also revived the old animosity between Russia and the USA. Apart from differences over American occupation of Iraq and its national missile defence system (NMD), in August 2007, America blamed Russia in connection with an incident of a missile, dropped on Georgian soil. In that backdrop, the then Russian President Putin had openly stated that his country was returning to its Soviet era practice of sending long-range bomber aircraft on regular patrols near NATO airspace.

Now, it seems that differences of the US with Russia and China are moving from strategic partnership to strategic competition. Notably, it was due to Moscow-Beijing stand in the UN Security Council that the US could not succeed in imposing tough economic sanctions on Iran which is determined to continue its nuclear programme.

On 16 August 2007, during the annual summit, leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) displayed their strength against the rising dominance of the US in the region, calling for a multi-polar system in the world. The Russian President Putin had even proposed defence cooperation among the member states. Pakistan and Iran also participated in the summit as observers and are expected to get permanent membership. The SCO is seen as anti-American club, which is also against the NATO military presence in Afghanistan, near the region of Central Asia which is replete with oil and gas.

Last year, Islamabad and Tehran signed the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) gas pipeline project without New Delhi as the latter was reluctant in this context owing to its pro-US tilt.

As regards India, frustrated in achieving its aims of getting the status of superpower power, Indian rulers have now openly started threatening Pakistan and China with war. In this context, Indian Army Chief General Deepak Kapoor vocally revealed on December 29, 2009 that Indian Army “is now revising its five-year-old doctrine” and is preparing for a “possible two-front war with China and Pakistan.”

India which successfully tested missile, Agni-111 in May 2007, has been extending its range to target all the big cities of China.

In fact, Pakistan’s province, Balochistan where China has invested billion of dollars to develop Gwadar seaport which could link Central Asian trade with rest of the world, irritates both Washington and New Delhi. It has even shifted the central gravity of the Great Game to Pakistan.

On the other hand, China has signed a number of agreements with Pakistan to help the latter in diverse sectors. So Sino-Indian cold war is part of the prospective greater cold war between the US and China.
America which signed a nuclear deal with India in 2008, intends to make India a great power of Asia to contain China and destablise Pakistan as well as Iran.

As Pakistan will be the arena of the next cold war, hence American strategic partners like India and Israel are creating instability by supporting separatist and hostile elements in the Frontier Province, Balochistan and other cities of our country. In this regard, besides suicide attacks and assaults on Pakistan’s security personnel, other incidents like kidnappings and killings of Iranians and Chinese engineers in the last three years might be cited as example.

Meanwhile, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi and the ISPR spokesman Major-General Athar Abbas have repeatedly stated that they have concrete evidence of Indian support to terrorism in Pakistan through Afghanistan.

As a matter of fact, the United States has been playing a double game with our country. Tough conditions of the Kerry-Lugar aid bill coupled with the admiration of Swat-Malakand and Wiziristan’s successful military operations by Pakistan’s armed forces might be noted as instance.

Owing to American perennial wave of drone strikes and a blame game that Al Qaeda leaders are hiding in Pakistan, especially in Balochistan, a gulf has been created in Pak-US friendship which is likely to be widened in future. Our foreign minister calls it ‘a trust deficit.’

Besides, terrorism on global level has added a dangerous element of ‘hot war’ to the future cold war. Particularly, an unending ‘different war’ between the US-led NATO forces and the Taliban has created instability in Afghanistan, rendering the US power obsolete.

Nevertheless, the impending new cold war would divide the world between two blocks�Russia-China block and the US block. Main players of the game such as North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Asian Republics are likely to align with Russia-China alliance. On the other side, Japan, Georgia, Ukraine, South Korea and India would join American block. In case of foreign troops’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, the latter could also join the Russia-China block.

Since Pakistan is the only nuclear country in the Islamic World, hence US, India and Israel are determined to de-nuclearise it. It is mentionable that on October 7, 2009, BBC displayed a documentary movie regarding the eighth anniversary of the US-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan. It stated, “Now this war is being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and “it will soon spread to Pakistan.”

Nonetheless, Pakistan has already become the arena of the next cold war because of its geo-political location. Therefore unrest created by the foreign elements continues unabated in our country.

Sajjad Shaukat writes on international affairs and is author of the book: US vs Islamic Militants, Invisible Balance of Power: Dangerous Shift in International Affairs. Email: sajjad_logic@yahoo.com

PAKISTAN’S IMRAN KHAN: LOOKING FOR “AMERICA” IN THE STRANGEST PLACES

IMRAN NEEDS A TEAM OF GOOD ADVISORS

Gordon Duff

Traveling around Pakistan is a challenge for an American nowadays. It’s not the highways. It isn’t even that our second vehicle was “armed to the teeth” as we weaved through traffic and up and down superhighways and dusty back roads. The difficulty is the landscape itself, a land, at times, very American in appearance and yet strange and wondrous too. It was the similarities that scared us.

We were there as Americans for a series of lectures and meetings to discuss economics and regional politics at universities and “think tanks.” Pakistan, a country of poverty and wealth, a nation threatened like no other was much like looking in a mirror, perhaps a mirror into America’s future.

A couple of nights ago, author and economist Jeff Gates and I along with Editor Raja Mujtaba of Opinion Maker, the controversial open forum where academics, military leaders and political dissidents from that region fight it out daily on the internet, met with Pakistani political leader, Imran Khan.

Meeting Khan was important to us because he is the only political figure in Pakistan that is widely respected in Afghanistan, a nation that could, potentially, bog American down for years in a bizarre and indefinable combination of “counter-terrorism” and traditional tribal warfare. Only Khan is respected on both sides of the border, Khan and General Aslam Beg, former Army Chief of Staff in Pakistan.

That there is suspicion between Pakistan and Afghanistan is an understatement. Millions of Afghanis and Pakistanis are, not only ethnically identical, but members of the same tribes, even families. Today, up to 4 million refugees from Afghanistan live in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These refugees combined with elements of a Pakistani Taliban have created a drain on Pakistan’s resources, a breeding ground for religious extremism and provided safe havens for Taliban sects that are clearly extremist, terrorist and criminal in nature.

With as many as 50 million people considering themselves “Taliban,” most non-extremist, differentiating between good and bad “Taliban” has been difficult and, in the case of American efforts, something approached with questionable intent.

Not that many years ago, the United States and Pakistan trained and armed the Mujahedeen, both Afghan and foreign fighters to overthrow Soviet dominance in Afghanistan. A generation later, our failure to demilitarize and rehabilitate these elements and the region has led to untold instability, world terrorism and a war against Pakistan supported by terrorist elements aided by massive funding and sophisticated weaponry and training whose origin can be traced with little difficulty to India and Israel.

Man or legend.

If a man describes “controversy” it is Imran Khan. Few people define the hopes of Islamic moderates as does Khan. This “Khan’s” empire, a “superstar” athlete of the cricket world, a sport unknown to most Americans, consists of that huge portion of the world our maps used to color pink, the regions we used to call the British Empire, a region covering 40% of the globe. When the British conquered the world they took their most beloved sport with them, cricket.

What if an American baseball pitcher won 30 games a year with an ERA of 2.0 and batted .400? Then surround him with controversy, a Muslim with a Jewish ex-wife, looks and charm and a reputed “way with the ladies” that keeps the tabloids stalking him and, oh, I forgot to mention this, make him the head of a political party. You will now begin to understand the enigma of Imran Khan

It gets worse.

He is Pashtun, one of the same ethnic group Americans know as the Taliban, a group well out of the mainstream in Pakistani politics. In a country ruled by the “Europeanized” Punjabi and Sindh, a Pashtu political leader makes Barak Hussein Obama seem “mainstream.”

It gets worse till.

Khan is not only a controversial celebrity, but an outspoken reformer fighting government corruption. Khan is a friend of Americans but strong enemy of American influence in Pakistan and very critical for the west for its mistrust of Islam. He believes the west doesn’t know the difference between a Taliban extremist and a moderate Sufi cleric but can pick out a Methodist from a Lutheran in seconds.

Imagine an American sports hero who is an Oxford trained economist, sponsored the nation’s largest cancer center and is now building a university for those who would never otherwise see a higher education.

We had to meet this guy.

His political offices were moderate. We had visited political parties in Pakistan that looked more like Ivy League campuses. Khan’s party was used furniture, peeling paint and the sound of work, footsteps up and down stairs and a lot of noise. It was an election night in Rawalpindi. A seat in the national assembly was up for grabs and charges of election fraud had charged the air.

I almost felt I was back in America. For the office of a man whose very mention that I planned to meet him had a flight attendant asking for my autograph, it was unexpected. Khan wasn’t a dilettante or elitist, he is a fighter, capable of holding his own in any political arena. The language was easy to understand. He believed what he said and knew what he was talking about.

We weren’t used to that.

If you ignored the TV crews outside, you noticed a few things. There were no lights, power had been cut, a result of terrorism’s costs to Pakistan. Khan had a small rechargeable lantern on his desk; he turned it so we could find out way and had us sit down. It was clear that we hadn’t entered the corridors of power. This was something else entirely.

We had walked in on a crusade for political accountability and reform. If this were America, it would have been that “third party” we all dream of but never get.

Not what we expected.

When Khan called President Musharraf “George Bush’s poodle” and threatened protests when Bush visited Pakistan in 2006, he was placed under house arrest. When Musharraf declared a “national emergency” in 2007, Khan called for his immediate arrest and execution for treason. Khan was jailed for this, went on a hunger strike and was released.

You can’t help but love a guy like that!

Khan wasn’t a tabloid playboy, though he looked the part, that and more, nor was he much like anything we have seen in America in many years. Khan believed what he said and could more than hold his own on any subject from economics to foreign policy, depth, clarity and understanding, not only of economic theory but someone with solutions, not just “sound bites” but solid programs, economic reform, political justice.

All of this was steeped in a passion, a drive you could feel across the room. It was electric. Mostly, however, I could feel his frustration. Reforming politics is impossible, certainly in America, at the best of times. Pakistan is beset by enemies on all sides, terror attacks are daily across the country and the threats are far worse than debt and unemployment. People are fighting for their lives.
Interview turned around.

Khan asked us about everything. I was grilled about American veterans, how they were treated, how their families suffered during multiple deployments how much Americans sacrificed in a war he believes is being handled without adequate understanding of the factors involved and the solutions available.

Khan wanted to know everything about America, as we saw it, opinions on the war, 9/11 and why Americans believed what the press told them about Pakistan and moderate Islam. His point, of course, is that extremism in Pakistan’s tribal areas was the result, as it had been in Afghanistan, of lack of education.

The aftermath of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union had forgotten to rebuild the battleground of that war, Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan where the millions of refugees had settled, areas now subject to poverty and extremism as the “war on terror” had virtually collapsed Pakistan’s economy and destroyed much of its infrastructure, more than any western nation had imagined or bothered to look into.

Few European or American schools have soldiers, armoured personnel carriers and “TSA level” security at their children’s schools.

What we saw.

Pakistan’s current president, Zardari, may actually be less popular than “W” after either Katrina or the infamous “Bush financial crash” when real estimates of approval entered the single digit range. Being an “unsuccessful politician” in Pakistan and hated by “party line” newspapers is a clear sign of personal integrity.

Zardari actually passed a law making it a crime to tell jokes about him. This must be hard on a lot of people. Pakistan is a country of folks who know humor. Sometimes it is all that keeps them alive.

Meeting an honest politician, one willing to tell Bush, Israel or anyone else exactly how he feels, to the point of doing jail time for it is a bit of a shock. You could ask Khan something and he would simply tell you what he thinks, tell you the truth. Combining this with being educated, devoutly religious and with an established history for charity work and paying the price for standing up for what is right, even at great personal cost, Imran Khan is an enigma.

How would Americans view Khan?

Jeff and I looked at each other the second we left the door. Jeff remembering his years as Chief Counsel for Senate Finance hit on it immediately: “We could get this guy elected President of the United States in a flat minute.”

Thinking back at the last 40 years, there was nobody who could stand up to this guy, media, debate, programs, especially if women were voting.
What would Americans really do?

Khan would be crucified by the press. He would demand an end to corruption, end foreign influence in Washington, Israel, China, India, Saudi Arabia, everyone. The wars would end, we would begin addressing the root causes of terrorism, defense spending would plummet, and America would start working again.

He would be dead in a week.

Why think about a guy from Pakistan?

The information revolution has made the world small. Imran Khan is “out there,” YouTube, the internet, not so much in America but people know him. He isn’t perfect like some Americans, you know the ones we are talking about, all “goodness and light” on the outside and underneath it all, corruption, addiction, a life of failure reinvented by money, power and foreign lobbyists.

America is at war and Pakistan is the front lines. When you talk terrorism, Pakistan is the victim, not the US. They get it from every side, American papers, Islamic extremists along with India/Israel and games some of us can only imagine or talk of in whispers as “conspiracy theory.” When a school is blown up in Pakistan, the list of potential suspects often has some names that would surprise many Americans.

With a world in the hands of folks like Bush or Obama, Gordon Brown or Tony Blair and the EU folks, Merkel and Sarrdoozie of France, anything with signs of human life and intelligence is always welcome. Italy’s prime minister spends more money on lesbian prostitutes than an American senator can steal in a lifetime. Imran Khan is a saint in comparison

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, grunt and 100% disabled vet. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. He is active in the financial industry and is a specialist on global trade. Gordon Duff acts as political and economic advisor to a number of governments in Africa and the Middle East.

Australia warns Israel over Dubai killing link

by Talek Harris Talek Harris

SYDNEY (AFP) - Australia summoned the Israeli ambassador on Thursday and delivered a stark warning on ties after three Australian passports were used by suspected Mossad assassins who murdered a top Hamas commander.

An image taken from hotel surveillance shows Hamas militant Mahmud al-Mabhuh (circled) checking into a Dubai hotel shortly before his murder in January 2010. Australia summoned the Israeli ambassador on Thursday and delivered a stark warning on ties after three Australian passports were used by suspected Mossad assassins who murdered the top Hamas commander.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Australia “will not be silent on the matter” after a woman and two men, holding apparently fake Australian passports, were named among 15 new suspects in the Cold War-style killing of Mahmud al-Mabhuh.

“If Australian passports are being used or forged by any state, let alone for the purpose of assassination, this is of the deepest concern and we are getting to the bottom of this now,” Rudd told public broadcaster ABC.

“We will not leave a single stone unturned.”

Foreign Minister Stephen Smith told ambassador Yuval Rotem that Australia’s friendly ties with Israel were at risk if investigations showed it was involved in tampering with the passports.

“We have made no conclusion about what to us — from our preliminary investigation — seems to be a serious abuse of three Australian passports either through forgery or identity fraud,” Smith told reporters.

“But I made it crystal clear to the ambassador that if the results of that investigation cause us to come to the conclusion that the abuse of Australian passports was in any way sponsored or condoned by Israeli officials, then Australia would not regard that as the act of a friend.”

The comments pile further pressure on Israel over the seemingly well-planned hit on al-Mabhuh, who was found dead in his luxury Dubai hotel room on January 20. He had been electrocuted and strangled, according to his brother.

Israeli ambassadors in four European countries have been summoned for talks and the European Union has also voiced outrage over the use of fake passports after an earlier list of 11 people was released.

Dubai police strongly suspect Mossad, Israel’s secret service, of carrying out the hit and have called for the arrest of the spy agency’s chief. Related article: Dubai hunts new Western suspects

The 15 new suspects range from people who provided logistical support to those who played a leading role.

Israel has sought to play down the row, saying there is no evidence of its involvement. It has rejected the calls for the arrest of Mossad’s chief as “baseless” and “absurd”.

One of the passport-holders, Australian-born Adam Korman, who works in a Tel Aviv shop, expressed shock at being named as a suspect and said he had been the victim of fraud.

“It’s identity theft — simply unbelievable,” Korman told the Ynetnews.com website.

The mother of Joshua Daniel Bruce, another suspect listed along with Nicole Sandra McCabe, said the photograph, signature and date of birth on the passport released by Dubai police were not those of her son.

Sarah Bruce said Joshua was “unaware of everything” when she spoke with him briefly by phone in Jerusalem, his home for the past seven years.

“I am fearful (for his safety), but hopefully everyone will see that it is fraud. It’s not his photo in the pictures they’re flashing around everywhere,” Sarah Bruce said.

Smith said Australian security officials were working round the clock on their probe and demanded cooperation from Israel, which he described as a “long-standing friend”. Australia officially recognised Israel in 1949.

Al-Mabhuh masterminded a number of attacks on Israeli targets including the kidnapping of two soldiers.

Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper, quoting unnamed sources, has reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu authorised the Mossad mission and met members of the hit squad shortly before their departure.