Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict: Epitome of Erdogan’s Neo-Ottomanism

In October, French President Emmanuel Macron accused Turkey of sending “Syrian jihadists” to fight in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. One would least expect from a French president to candidly confess the heavily armed militants that had been touted as “moderate rebels” during nine years of Syria’s proxy war were actually “terrorists.”

Nevertheless, Armenia’s ambassador to Moscow also corroborated that Turkey had sent around 4,000 fighters from northern Syria to Azerbaijan. Armenia also alleged Turkish military experts were fighting alongside Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh, a mountainous breakaway region of Azerbaijan run by ethnic Armenians, and that Turkey had provided drones and warplanes.

Two Syrian fighters, from Turkish-backed rebel groups in areas of northern Syria under Turkish control, told Reuters [1] in October they were deploying to Azerbaijan in coordination with Ankara.

“I didn’t want to go, but I don’t have any money. Life is very hard and poor,” said a fighter who had fought in Syria for Ahrar al-Sham, a jihadist group that Turkey has supported.

Both men said they had been told by their Syrian brigade commanders they would earn around $1,500 a month – a substantial income for Syria, where the economy and currency have collapsed, thanks to Washington’s sanction and for squatting over vast oil and gas reserves in eastern Syria in collaboration with Kurds.

The fighter said he had arranged his assignment with an official from the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) in Afrin, a region of northwest Syria seized by Turkey and its Syrian rebel allies two years ago.

The other fighter, from the SNA-affiliated Jaish al-Nukhba militia, said he had been told nearly 1,000 Syrians were set to be deployed to Azerbaijan. Other rebels gave figures of between 700 and 1,000.

The irony is that almost all the militant groups that had fought against the Bashar al-Assad government for nine years were Sunni jihadists, whereas Azerbaijan is an ethnically Turkic, Shiite-majority country. So practically, these jihadist mercenaries fought in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict alongside their main rivals in Syria’s proxy war.

Rather than ideological convergence, Turkish support for Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, however, was about personal camaraderie between Erdogan and Ilham Aliyev, the longtime eccentric autocrat of Azerbaijan. Lacking grassroots support, Aliyev inherited the presidency from his father in 2003 and became a laughing stock when he appointed his trophy wife as the vice president of the country.

16% of Iran’s 83 million population is Azeri, which obviously sympathized with their co-religionists during the proxy war in Syria. Nevertheless, against the wishes and religious sentiments of the native Azeri people, Aliyev provided material support to jihadists in Syria at the behest of his Turkish patron Erdogan, which I will further elucidate later in this article, but first, let me draw the attention of the readers to Erdogan’s megalomania and militarism since the foiled coup plot in July 2016.

Firstly, the Turkish air force shot down a Russian Sukhoi Su-24 fighter jet on the border between Syria and Turkey on 24 November 2015 that brought the Turkish and Russian armed forces to the brink of a full-scale confrontation in Syria.

Secondly, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, was assassinated at an art exhibition in Ankara on the evening of 19 December 2016 by an off-duty Turkish police officer, Mevlut Mert Altintas, who was suspected of being an Islamic fundamentalist.

Thirdly, the Turkish military mounted the seven-month Operation Euphrates Shield in northern Syria, immediately after the attempted coup plot, from August 2016 to March 2017 that brought the Turkish military and its Syrian militant proxies head-to-head with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces and their American backers.

Fourthly, Ankara invaded Idlib in northwestern Syria in October 2017 on the pretext of enforcing a de-escalation zone between the Syrian militants and the Syrian government, despite official protest from Damascus that the Turkish armed forces were in violation of Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

Fifthly, Turkey mounted Operation Olive Branch in the Kurdish-held enclave Afrin in northwest Syria from January to March 2018.

Besides mounting three military incursions into northern Syria and Iraq, Erdogan has also sent thousands of Syrian jihadists, drones and military hardware in support of the Tripoli government against eastern Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar’s military campaign in western Libya lasting from April 2019 to June 2020. After defeating Haftar’s forces in Tripoli, Turkish proxies had set their sights on Sirte but a peace process involving international mediators has since begun.

Erdogan had been acting with impunity in regional conflicts because he had forged a personal bonhomie with Donald Trump, as Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was a business partner of Erdogan’s son-in-law and former finance minister of Turkey Berat Albayrak, who was summarily dismissed from the ministry as soon as Trump lost the US presidential election.

Nevertheless, the personal bond between Trump and Erdogan was such that the Trump administration had to comply with Erdogan’s longstanding demand to evacuate American forces from the Kurdish-held areas in northeast Syria in October 2019.

Immediately following the announcement of withdrawal of US forces from northeast Syria by the Trump administration on October 6, 2019, following a telephonic conversation between Trump and Erdogan, Turkey mounted Operation Peace Spring on October 9 in which the Turkish armed forces and their Syrian proxies invaded and occupied 120 kilometers wide and 32 kilometers deep stretch of Syrian territory between the northeastern towns of Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn.

The escalation of conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from September to November should also be viewed in the backdrop of the personal friendship between Erdogan and Trump. “Ottoman Caliph” Erdogan must have intimated his Azeri Turkic protégé Ilham Aliyev that the US presidential elections were due in November and Trump might not be re-elected for a second term. Therefore, if Aliyev wanted to reclaim the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave, then was the golden opportunity.

Besides, in the run-up to the US elections in November, almost all US administrations become “introverted” by September, consequently giving a free hand to regional powers to act with impunity and ruling out the possibility of international mediation efforts by global power-brokers, Washington in particular.

Regarding Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev’s material support to Turkey-backed militants in Syria’s proxy war, a Bulgarian investigative reporter Dilyana Gaytandzhieva authored a report [2] for Bulgaria’s national newspaper Trud News in August 2017 which found that an Azerbaijan state airline company, Silk Way Airlines, was regularly transporting weapons to Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Turkey under diplomatic cover as part of the CIA covert program to supply weapons to militant groups in Syria. Gaytandzhieva documented 350 such “diplomatic flights” and was subsequently sacked from her job for uncovering the story.

Similarly, a report by the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) on the Islamic State’s weapons found in Iraq and Syria was prominently featured in the news in 2018. Before the story was picked up by the mainstream media, it was first published [3] in the Wired News in December 2017.

The Britain-based Conflict Armament Research (CAR) used to be a relatively unknown company of less than twenty employees. Its one-man Iraq and Syria division was headed by a 33-year-old Belgian researcher Damien Spleeters.

The main theme of Spleeters’ investigation was to discover the Islamic State’s homegrown armaments industry and how the jihadist group’s technicians had adapted the East European munitions to be used in the weapons available to the Islamic State. Spleeters had listed 1,832 weapons and 40,984 pieces of ammunition recovered in Iraq and Syria in the CAR’s database.

But Spleeters had only tangentially touched upon the subject of the Islamic State’s weapons supply chain, documenting only a single PG-9 rocket found at Tal Afar in Iraq bearing a lot number of 9,252 rocket-propelled grenades which were supplied by Romania to the US military, and mentioning only a single shipment of 12 tons of munitions which was diverted from Saudi Arabia to Jordan in his supposedly “comprehensive report.”

In fact, the CAR’s report was so misleading that of thousands of pieces of munitions investigated by Spleeters, less than 10% were found to be compatible with NATO’s weapons and more than 90% were found to have originated from Russia, China and the East European countries, Romania and Bulgaria, in particular.

In comparison, a joint investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) uncovered [4] the Pentagon’s $2.2 billion arms pipeline to the Syrian militants.

It bears mentioning that $2.2 billion was earmarked only by Washington for training and arming the Syrian militants, and tens of billions of dollars worth [5] weapons and ammunition that the oil-rich Gulf States pumped into Syria’s proxy war have not been documented by anybody so far.

Damien Spleeters of the Conflict Armament Research (CAR) authored another report [6] in November 2018, in which he exposed that South Sudan’s neighbors, Uganda in particular, had breached an arms embargo by funneling East European weapons into the South Sudan conflict, but expectedly whitewashed the crimes of Western powers in creating the conflict.

South Sudan is the world’s youngest nation which gained independence from Sudan in 2011. The United States is often said to have midwived South Sudan by leading the negotiations for its independence from Sudan, because Sudan was then ruled by Washington’s longtime foe Omar al-Bashir and also because South Sudan is an oil-rich country and produces about half a million barrels crude oil per day.

But in 2013, only two years after gaining independence, a civil war erupted in multi-ethnic South Sudan between Dinka tribal group of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir and Nuer rebels led by warlord and former Vice President Riek Machar, and triggered one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises. Millions of South Sudanese sought refuge in displacement camps in South Sudan and neighboring countries, after purportedly “being liberated” from Sudanese oppression and tyranny by the neocolonial powers.

Footnotes:

[1] Turkey deploying Syrian fighters to help ally Azerbaijan:

https://in.reuters.com/article/armenia-azerbaijan-turkey-syria-int-idUSKBN26J258

[2] Journalist Interrogated, Fired For Story Linking CIA And Syria Weapons Flights:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-28/journalist-interrogated-fired-story-linking-cia-and-syria-weapons-flights

[3] Tracing Islamic State’s weapons supply chain:

https://www.wired.com/story/terror-industrial-complex-isis-munitions-supply-chain/

[4] The Pentagon’s $2.2 billion Soviet arms pipeline to Syria:

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/the-pentagon-s-2-2-billion-soviet-arms-pipeline-flooding-syria-09-12-2017

[5] Mark Curtis’ book review, Secret Affairs: How Britain Colluded with Radical Islam?

http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/how-britain-engaged-covert-operation-overthrow-assad-1437573498

[6] Uganda breached arms embargo in funneling European weapons to South Sudan:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/11/29/uganda-funneled-european-weapons-south-sudan-breaching-arms-embargo-report/ 

How Nehru Midwifed Vivisection of India

Celebrated Indian historian and former minister for external affairs and finance in the Atal Bihari Vajpaee government Jaswant Singh passed away on September 27. Among many stellar accomplishments as an illustrious academic and a dignified politician with a political career spanning well over three decades, he was also credited with setting the historical record straight regarding the partition of Indo-Pak subcontinent in 1947.

In a trailblazing historical treatise: “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence” published in August 2009, he praised Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah for his political acumen and for being an apostle of Hindu-Muslim unity, and claimed that the centralized policy of Indian National Congress leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel was responsible for the partition of India.

His magnum opus caused such a furor that it cost Jaswant Singh his political career, as he found himself marginalized within the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. In the elections of 2014, his party decided not to field him from any constituency. He decided to contest anyway as an independent from his native constituency of Barmer in Rajasthan. He was expelled from the BJP in March 2014 when he did not withdraw his independent candidature, and went on to lose the election.

Though it might sound paradoxical, it’s a historically proven fact that on the eve of the independence, the Congress leadership willingly acceded to the partition of India because it wanted independence and withdrawal of the British colonists to take place in an orderly manner.

Except for the British rule, India was never a unified country, not even during the Mughal rule, as myriads of ethnic groups and assorted princely states comprising motley India were practically autonomous while accepting the nominal suzerainty of the Mughal rulers.

Leaving Mahatma Gandhi’s utopian consternation regarding “the vivisection of Mother India” aside, the pragmatic Congress leaders, Nehru and Patel, preferred centralized control over post-independence India and were worried more about keeping heterogeneous India, with countless ethnic groups and 500+ princely states, united following independence, as became obvious while forcibly integrating Hyderabad Deccan in September 1948 and the ensuing civil war claiming 200,000 lives.

On the eve of the independence in 1947, the All-India Muslim League under the guidance of Jinnah readily accepted the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946, envisioning three separate groups of autonomous provinces with minimal central control including foreign affairs, defense, currency and communications, whereas the Congress’ leadership summarily rejected the plan while opportunistically welcoming British Viceroy Lord Wavell’s proposal to form a Congress-led interim government, forcing Jinnah to resort to “direct action.”

Although secularism, pluralism and multiculturalism are the accepted social axioms of the modern worldview, the demand for separate nationhood on the basis of ethno-linguistic identity is accepted in the Western discourse; and it cannot simply be dismissed on the premise that since pluralism and multiculturalism are the accepted principles, therefore the creation of a nation state on the basis of ethno-linguistic identity becomes redundant. The agreed-upon principles of pluralism and multiculturalism become operative after the creation of a nation state and not before it.

Similarly, even though secularism is an accepted principle in the Western discourse, an ethno-religious group cannot be denied its right to claim separate nationhood on the basis of religious identity; in this case too, the principle of inclusive secularism becomes functional after the creation of a state and not prior to it.

Before joining the All-India Muslim League, Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah was one of the leading proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity. He attended the meetings of the inner circle of the Indian National Congress, and reached a well-considered conclusion that the outwardly liberal and secular Congress was nothing more than a barely disguised Hindu nationalist party.

Even today, 73 years after the independence, Muslims constitute 15% of India’s 1.2 billion population, that amounts to more than 180 million Muslims in India today. Although we do find a few showpiece Muslims in ceremonial positions, most of all in the Indian film industry, I would like to know what is the representation of Muslims in India’s state institutions, their proportion in bureaucracy, judiciary, police and the armed forces, and their presence and participation in India’s civic and political life?

The fact is that just like the Indian National Congress, the Republic of India is also nothing more than a barely disguised Hindu nationalist state. Politically and socioeconomically, the Indian Muslims have lagged so far behind and have been disenfranchised to such an extent that they need some kind of an “affirmative action,” like the one carried out in the US in the sixties to improve the downtrodden lot of Afro-American communities.

Before generalizing and drawing simplistic conclusions, we must try to understand the attitudes and mindsets of the British Indian leaders that why they favored certain rallying calls and disapproved the rest. In my opinion, this preferential treatment had to do with personal inclinations and ambitions of the British Indian leaders and the interests of their respective communities as perceived by the leaders in heterogeneous and multi-ethnic societies like the British India.

A leader whose ambitions were limited only to his own ethnic group would rally his followers around their shared ethno-linguistic identity, but politicians who had larger ambitions would look for common factors that unite diverse ethnic groups, that’s where the role of religion becomes politically relevant in traditional societies.

It suited the personal ambitions of the Muslim League leadership to rally their supporters around the cause of shared Islamic identity, and it benefited the political agenda of the Congress’ leadership to unite all Indians under the banner of a more inclusive and secular Indian national identity in order to keep India united under the permanent yoke of numerical Hindu majority.

However, mere rhetoric is never a substitute for tangible actions, no matter how noble and superficially appealing it may sound. The Indian National Congress right from its inception was a thinly veiled Hindu nationalist party that only had a pretense of inclusive secularism, that’s why some of the most vocal proponents of Hindu-Muslim unity, like Jinnah and Iqbal, later became its vocal critics, especially after Gandhi and his protégé Nehru took over the leadership of Congress in 1921.

Although Orientalist historians generally give credit to Jinnah, as an individual, for single-handedly realizing the dream of Pakistan, in fact the Pakistan Movement was the logical conclusion of the Aligarh Movement. This fact elucidates that how much difference a single educational institution can make in the history of nations. Aligarh Muslim University bred entire generations of educated Muslims who were acutely aware of decadent state of Muslims in British India, and most of them later joined the Muslim League to make the dream of Pakistan a reality.

Regarding the allegation that the Muslim League leaders were imperialist collaborators, until Lord Wavell, the British viceroys used to take a reasonably neutral approach toward communal issues in British India, but on the eve of the independence of India and Pakistan, the Indian leaders Gandhi and Nehru specifically implored Clement Attlee’s government in the UK to appoint Lord Louis Mountbatten as the viceroy of British India.

More importantly, the independence of India and Pakistan was originally scheduled for June 1948, but once again the Indian National Congress leadership beseeched the British Empire to bring the date of independence forward to August 1947. It was not a coincidence that on both critically important occasions, Her Majesty’s government obliged the Congress leadership because the British wanted to keep the Dominion of India within the folds of the British Commonwealth after the independence.

Had the British Raj in India not brought forward the date of independence by almost an year, the nascent Indian and Pakistani armed forces and border guards could have had an opportunity to avert the carnage that took place during the division of Punjab on the eve of independence.

Furthermore, Lord Mountbatten served as India’s first governor general and he helped Jawaharlal Nehru’s government consolidate the Indian dominion by forcefully integrating more than 500 princely states. Mountbatten also made a similar offer to Jinnah to serve as Pakistan’s governor general, too, and when the latter refused, Mountbatten threatened Jinnah in so many words: “It will cost you and the dominion of Pakistan more than just tables and chairs.”

No wonder then it was the collusion between the Congress leadership, Radcliffe and Mountbatten that eventually culminated in the Indian troops’ successful invasion of the princely state of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir by using the Gurdaspur-Pathankot corridor that was provided to India by the Radcliffe boundary commission. Thus, creating a permanent territorial dispute between the two neighbors that has not been resolved 73 years after the independence despite several United Nations resolutions and mediation efforts.

What does Biden’s ‘Deliberate Ambiguity’ on Iran Sanctions Imply?

Iran is misinterpreting Western intentions that they care about its nuclear program. There are already several undeclared nuclear powers in the world, including India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. A few more nuclear powers with limited arsenals won’t bother Western capitals.

Thus, Tehran cannot use nuclear enrichment as leverage in negotiations. The “clear and present danger” that the Western powers are wary of is the threat Iran’s proxies pose to Western “strategic interests” in the volatile region.

In the run-up to the US presidential elections in October, the Trump administration tightened the noose further around Iran’s beleaguered economy, announcing a fresh round of sanctions that effectively shut the country out of the global financial system.

The Trump administration imposed sanctions on eighteen major Iranian banks in one of the most extensive such moves by Washington against Tehran in months. The order also penalized non-Iranian institutions trading with them, effectively cutting the banks off from the international financial system.

Significantly, the sanctions also target foreign companies that do business with the banks, giving them 45 days to cease such activities or face “third-party sanctions.”

“The United States expects all UN member states to fully comply with their obligations to implement these measures,” Mike Pompeo announced in September. “If UN member states fail to fulfill their obligations to implement these sanctions, the United States is prepared to use our domestic authorities to impose consequences for those failures and ensure that Iran does not reap the benefits of UN-prohibited activity.”

It’s noteworthy that the Iran sanctions that were lifted in 2015 after the signing of JCPOA were “third-party sanctions,” implying that any state or business organization doing business with Iran wouldn’t be able to engage in commercial activities with the US government and commercial enterprises based in the US.

Democratic President-elect Joe Biden has kept his statements deliberately ambiguous in order to fill the gaps in his Iran policy. On the one hand, he made an electoral promise to consider restoring the Iran nuclear deal if elected, but on the other, he tweeted in June last year: “Make no mistake: Iran continues to be a bad actor that abuses human rights and supports terrorist activities throughout the region.

“What we need is presidential leadership that will take strategic action to counter the Iranian threat, restore America's standing in the world, recognize the value of principled diplomacy, and strengthen our nation and our security by working strategically with our allies.”

Nevertheless, even if we assume Biden is sincere in restoring the nuclear pact, considering the influence of Zionist lobbies in Washington, that forced Trump to abandon the deal in May 2018, Biden would find it impossible to follow through on his bombastic electoral rhetoric with tangible policy decisions.

Donald Trump had repeatedly said in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential elections and during the four years of his presidency that the Iran nuclear deal, signed by the Obama administration in 2015, was an “unfair deal” that gave concessions to Iran without giving anything in return to the US.

Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s statements because the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in July 2015 under pressure, as Washington had bungled in its Middle East policy and it wanted Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to get a face-saving.

In order to understand how the Obama administration bungled in Syria and Iraq, we should bear the background of Washington’s Middle East policy during the recent years in mind. The nine-year conflict in Syria that gave birth to myriads of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian resistance axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iran-allied forces worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the jihadists’ cause, hence they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the horrific Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015.

Then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017, and then another truck-ramming atrocity occurred in Lower Manhattan in October 2017 that was also claimed by the Islamic State.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Obama administration desperately needed Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to salvage its botched policy of training and arming jihadists to topple the government Bashar al-Assad in Syria that backfired and gave birth to the Islamic State that carried out some of the most audacious terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Thus, Washington signed JCPOA in July 2015 that gave some concessions to Iran, and in return, former hardliner Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki was forced out of power in September 2014 with Iran’s tacit approval and moderate former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was appointed in his stead who gave permission to the US Air Force and ground troops to assist the Iraqi Armed Forces and allied militias to beat back the Islamic State from Mosul and Anbar.

The Iran nuclear deal, however, was neither an international treaty under the American laws nor even an executive agreement. It was simply categorized as a “political commitment.” Due to the influence of Zionist lobbies in Washington, the opposition to the JCPOA in the American political discourse was so vehement that forget about having it passed through the US Congress, the task the Obama administration faced was to muster enough votes of dissident Democrats to defeat a resolution of disapproval so that it couldn’t override a presidential veto.

The Trump administration, however, was not hampered by the legacy of Obama administration and since the objective of defeating the Islamic State had already been achieved in October 2017, therefore Washington felt safe to unilaterally annul the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s behest, and the crippling “third-party sanctions” have once again been put in place on Iran’s oil and financial sectors.

Another impediment to restoring the Iran nuclear deal is its ballistic missile technology. If Biden is to restore the Iran nuclear deal after being elected president, he would have to renegotiate the pact to also include Iran’s ballistic missile program alongside its nuclear program, which Tehran regards as a “strategic deterrence” against its regional foes and hence off the table.

Washington’s principal objective in Syria’s proxy war was ensuring Israel’s regional security. The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report [1] of 2012 clearly spelled out the imminent rise of a Salafist principality in northeastern Syria – in Raqqa and Deir al-Zor which were occupied by the Islamic State until October 2017 – in the event of an outbreak of a civil war in Syria.

Under pressure from the Zionist lobbies in Washington, however, the Obama administration deliberately suppressed the report and also overlooked the view in general that a proxy war in Syria would give birth to radical Islamic jihadists.

The hawks in Washington were fully aware of the consequences of their actions in Syria, but they kept pursuing the ill-fated policy of nurturing militants in the training camps located in Syria’s border regions with Turkey and Jordan in order to weaken the anti-Zionist Bashar al-Assad government.

The single biggest threat to Israel’s regional security was posed by the Iranian resistance axis, which is comprised of Iran, Syria and their Lebanon-based surrogate, Hezbollah. During the course of 2006 Lebanon War, Hezbollah fired hundreds of rockets into northern Israel and Israel’s defense community realized for the first time the nature of threat that Hezbollah posed to Israel’s regional security.

Those were only unguided rockets but it was a wakeup call for Israel’s military strategists that what would happen if Iran passed the guided missile technology to Hezbollah whose area of operations lies very close to the northern borders of Israel. 

Therefore, the Zionist lobbies in Washington persuaded the Obama administration, of which Biden was the vice president, to orchestrate a proxy war against Damascus and its Lebanon-based surrogate Hezbollah in order to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis against Israel.

Over the years, Israel has not only provided medical aid and material support to the militant groups battling Damascus – particularly to various factions of the Free Syria Army (FSA) and al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate al-Nusra Front in Daraa and Quneitra bordering the Israel-occupied Golan Heights – but Israel’s air force has virtually played the role of the air force of Syrian militants and conducted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the nine-year conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [2] in January last year, Israel’s outgoing Chief of Staff Lt. General Gadi Eisenkot confessed that the Netanyahu government approved his recommendations in January 2017 to step up airstrikes in Syria. Consequently, more than 200 Israeli airstrikes were launched against the Syrian targets in 2017 and 2018, as revealed [3] by the Israeli Intelligence Minister Israel Katz in September 2018.

In 2018 alone, Israel's air force dropped 2,000 bombs in Syria. The purpose of Israeli airstrikes in Syria has been to degrade Iran’s guided missile technology provided to Damascus and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, which poses an existential threat to Israel’s regional security.

Citations:

[1] The United States Defense Intelligence Agency’s declassified report of 2012:

http://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-syrian-regime/

[2] An interview with Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, Israel’s chief of staff:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/opinion/gadi-eisenkot-israel-iran-syria.html

[3] Israel Katz: Israel conducted 200 airstrikes in Syria in 2017 and 2018:

https://www.thenational.ae/world/mena/benjamin-netanyahu-admits-israel-to-blame-for-damascus-strikes-1.812590 

Capitol Riots: Conspiracy to Forestall Trump’s Re-election Bid

Although detractors would refuse to acknowledge, Trump is a charismatic leader revered by conservative Americans and has remained a persistent thorn in the side of his adversaries. Despite losing the re-election bid, he won over 74 million popular votes and could stage a comeback anytime.

The storming of the Capitol on January 6 was clearly a conspiracy orchestrated by the shady hands of the US deep state [1] to undermine Trump’s leadership of the GOP and forestall his re-election bid in 2024. Following the riots and cold-blooded murder of four Trump supporters by police, he was unnerved to the extent that for the first time, he appeared to concede defeat and pledged “the transition would be smooth,” though he later recovered and got back to the trademark defiant attitude.

Apparently, the deep state has inserted moles inside the Trump campaign [2] who’ve been feeding false information to Trump. In all likelihood, they misled Trump that the outcome of the election was still far from settled and Veep Pence could refuse to certify the electors’ confirmation of Biden’s electoral victory.

Trump’s intention in motivating the crowd was that they would stage a protest in front of the Capitol to exert moral pressure on Veep Pence and the electors to refuse to certify Biden’s confirmation. But the Capitol’s security was overwhelmed by the size and passion of the crowd. The sacked police chief of the Capitol has acknowledged on the record that his repeated requests to send reinforcements were denied, not by the White house but by certain “other quarters.”

Reuters recently reported [3]: “’We are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue,’ President Donald Trump exhorted his screaming supporters before they marched on the US Capitol last week, saying he’d go with them.

“Trump had wanted to join the thousands of hardcore followers who assembled at Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. He told aides in the days leading up to the rally that he planned to accompany them to demonstrate his ire at Congress as it moved to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s November election victory.

“But the Secret Service kept warning him that agents could not guarantee his safety if he went ahead, according to two people familiar with the matter. Trump relented and instead hunkered down at the White House to watch television images of the mob rioting he is accused of triggering.”

Clearly, Trump’s intention wasn’t to storm the Capitol. He simply wanted his followers to go to Pennsylvania Avenue and register their protest outside the Capitol. Furthermore, Trump wanted to accompany the demonstrators, but was advised against it by the intelligence agencies. Had Trump accompanied the protesters, they would’ve remained peaceful. But in the absence of leadership, the frenzied mob became rudderless and stormed the building.

The obvious beneficiaries of the melee have clearly been Trump’s adversaries because the GOP has been divided following the storming of the Capitol. Ten Republican representatives lent their voice favoring the House resolution for Trump’s second impeachment bid and now he would find it hard to maintain his hold over the leadership of the GOP.

The US presidential contests are never smooth-sailing affairs. But this year’s presidential race was far more unpredictable and tumultuous even by the American standards.

From the bombshell New York Times report [4] in May 2019 detailing leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden’s son Hunter’s murky dealings in Ukraine to the impeachment proceedings against President Trump lasting from September 2019 through February, and now in an “unprecedented, epoch-making hoax,” the House has started impeachment proceedings against Trump for a second time, though without any tangible outcome because Democrats have only thin majority in the House and the Senate is still controlled by Republicans.

In fact, during this administration, impeachment proceedings have been used as the Senate’s infamous “filibuster,” intended to stop the functioning of the chamber and distract attention from substantive issues. I’d recommend that following this painful experience, impeachment resolution must also require two-third majority to pass.

Otherwise, compulsive attention-seekers, like Speaker Pelosi and the ilk holding personal grudge against Trump, would weaponize the constitutional proceedings for sinister motives. With a thin majority in the House and the Senate still controlled by Republicans, the new administration will find it hard to get confirmations for Biden’s cabinet picks, let alone impeach Trump with a two-third majority.

Clearly, both the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were nothing more than show trials. The Democrats initiated the impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019 as a diversionary tactic to cover up the sleazy dealings of Hunter Biden with Burisma Holdings of Ukraine, and consequent discrediting of leading Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden.

Although the Democrats had a thin majority in the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump, the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. Besides, convicting a president of impeachment requires two-third majority in the Senate that the Democrats never had. Then what was the purpose of initiating the proceedings if not to distract public attention away from the media trial of Hunter Biden, which was bringing damning press coverage not only to Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden but to the Democratic Party as a whole?

The Capitol riots and impeachment hoaxes aren’t the only instance when the national security establishment came to the rescue of Trump’s political rivals. It’s worth recalling that on the eve of the midterm elections in November, 2018, parcel bombs sent to the residences of George Soros, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, several other leading Democratic Congressmen and The New York Times New York office by Cesar Sayoc in October, 2018.

Although the suspect turned out to be a mentally ill Trump supporter, he was likely instigated by shady hands in the American deep state, which is wary of the anti-establishment rhetoric and non-interventionist tendencies of the so-called “alt-right” administration.

The prank of sending explosive packages to Democratic Congressmen, lasting from October 22 to November 1, 2018, days before the polling, clearly impacted the outcome of the midterm elections on November 6, 2018, as the Democrats got the sympathy vote following the news of suspicious packages sent to prominent Democrats made headlines.

Even though the Republicans retained their 51-seat majority in the Senate, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives following midterms by gaining 39 additional seats and brought impeachment charges against Donald Trump, though he was acquitted by the Republican majority in the Senate in February last year.

That the accused had a history of mental illness [5], childhood sexual abuse, substance abuse, including anabolic steroids, cognitive difficulties, including dyslexia, and was apprehended by police several times for grand theft auto and shoplifting doesn’t come as a surprise because it’s always easy to manipulate and trap such gullible patsies into perpetrating heinous crimes.

In fact, the case of Cesar Sayoc can be compared to another iconic “patsy” in the American political history, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, who was picked up as a scapegoat because he had visited Russia and Cuba before the hit-job in order to put the blame for the high-profile political assassination on the communists.

Not surprisingly, he was silenced by Jack Ruby before he could open his mouth and prove innocence in the courts of law. The cold-blooded murder of the only other non-interventionist president in American history, besides Donald Trump, was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper on the payroll of the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was killed in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized Lyndon B. Johnson to directly engage in the Vietnam conflict in August 1964 on the basis of a false flag naval engagement.

It’s obvious that the American national security establishment was the only beneficiary of the assassination of Kennedy. Most likely, the deep state turned against Kennedy after the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis and Kennedy’s pacifist rhetoric and conciliatory approach toward Washington’s arch-rival, the former Soviet Union, in the backdrop of the Cold War.

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert was a leading Democratic candidate for presidency when he was shot by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in 1968. Being a pacifist himself, Bobby Kennedy opposed the US involvement in the Vietnam War and wrote a book on the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 in which he credited his brother, JFK, for showing restraint and amicably resolving the crisis.

As the former attorney general of JFK, Bobby probably had good leads on the masterminds of the JFK assassination, and wanted to avenge his brother’s shocking murder by exposing the assassins after being elected president. This was the only reason he, too, was silenced before he could be elected president.

Though serving a life sentence at a California penitentiary, Bobby Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan, now 76 years old, is a suspicious and deranged character, who frequently backtracked on his testimonies and confession during and after the trial, had no recollection of the murder and subsequent events, and his defense team had pleaded for a retrial several times but the request was summarily denied.

Shortly before the murder of Bobby Kennedy, Sirhan joined the occult organization Ancient Mystical Order of the Rose Cross, commonly known as the Rosicrucians in 1966. In fact, Sirhan’s esoteric faith closely resembles a medieval cult “Hashishin,” from which the English word “assassin” has been derived.

The Order of the Assassins was a Nizari Isma'ili sect which lived in the mountains of Persia and Syria between 1090 A.D. and 1275. During that time, they founded a clandestine organization that orchestrated the assassinations of leading figures in the Middle East that were considered enemies of their medieval “deep state.”

The Nizari Isma'ili State was ruled by Hassan as-Sabbah from 1090 A.D. until his death in 1124. The Western world was introduced to the assassins by the works of Marco Polo who understood the name as deriving from the eponymous narcotic hashish, which indeed was used to put the assassins under a spell for political assassinations.

The more recent examples of such murderous cults are the Mujahideen-e-Khalq, a cultist political organization founded by the Rajavis of Iran that relocated first to Iraq and then to Albania, or the Fidayeen or suicide bombers of Islamic jihadist organizations who are promised paradise in return for mounting terrorist attacks against political adversaries.

Citations:

[1] Deep State orchestrated the Capitol riots:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/dc-guard-capitol-riots-william-walker-pentagon/2021/01/26/98879f44-5f69-11eb-ac8f-4ae05557196e_story.html 

[2] Hope Hicks: Femme Fatale who Infected Trump with COVID-19

http://petroimperialism.blogspot.com/2020/10/hope-hicks-femme-fatale-who-infected.html

[3] Inside Trump’s Final Days: Aides Struggle to Contain an Angry President

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-finale-insight/inside-trumps-final-days-aides-struggle-to-contain-an-angry-isolated-president-idUSKBN29J2J3

[4] Joe Biden faces conflict of interest questions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html

[5] The curious case of Cesar Sayoc:

https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/08/13/inside-the-mind-of-the-maga-bomber-the-trump-superfan-who-tried-to-wreak-havoc-on-the-last-national-election/ 

Impeachment Proceedings as 'Filibuster' to Settle Scores

In the run-up to the US presidential elections in September, George Packer wrote a review [1] of Andrew Weissmann’s book: “Where Law Ends: Inside the Mueller Investigation.” Weissmann was one of Robert Mueller’s top deputies in the special counsel’s investigation of the 2016 election, and he was then about to publish the first insider account of the Mueller Investigation.

In a peculiar sensationalist manner that characterized the news coverage of the Russiagate investigation of Robert Mueller, George Packer writes: “Only the Special Counsel’s Office—burrowing into the criminal matter of Russian interference in the 2016 election, a possible conspiracy with the Trump campaign, and the president’s subsequent attempts to block an investigation—offered the prospect of accountability for Trump.

“Suddenly, in March 2019, the Special Counsel’s Office completed its work. A report, hundreds of pages long, with many lines blacked out, was delivered to the attorney general. Before releasing it to the public, Attorney General William Barr pronounced the president innocent, in a brazen mix of elisions, distortions, and outright lies—for the report presented extensive evidence of cooperation between the Trump campaign and Russian assets, and of the president’s efforts to obstruct justice.

“Weissmann also came close to establishing a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. On August 2, 2016, Manafort dined in New York City with Konstantin Kilimnik, a Ukrainian-born business associate with ties to Russian intelligence and oligarchs.

“Manafort, a lavishly compensated hired gun for some of the oligarchs, had been sharing campaign strategy with Kilimnik, including sensitive polling data. Over dinner, Manafort described Trump’s strategy in four battleground states; Kilimnik in turn presented for Trump’s approval a Russian ‘peace plan’ that would amount to the annexation of eastern Ukraine.

“Last month’s Senate report, going further than the Mueller investigation, named Kilimnik as an actual Russian intelligence officer and revealed his likely connection to the 2016 election-interference operations. ‘This is what collusion looks like,’ the committee’s Democratic members wrote in an appendix.

“Weissmann and his colleagues were thwarted by chance—Manafort’s No. 2, Rick Gates, arrived late for the dinner with Kilimnik and was subsequently unable to tell investigators all that was discussed. They were hamstrung by Mueller’s decision not to look into Trump’s financial dealings with Russia, which might have established a source of Russian leverage over Trump, but which the president had declared a red line not to be crossed.”

It’s pertinent to point out here that not all Russians visiting the United States for traveling, education and business are “secret agents,” nevertheless even if we assume for the argument’s sake that Konstantin Kilimnik was an intelligence officer, he allegedly offered “a Russian ‘peace plan’ that would amount to the annexation of eastern Ukraine” for Trump’s approval in 2016. It’s been four years since Trump was elected president. Forget about letting Russia annex eastern Ukraine, he didn’t even recognize Russian annexation of Crimean peninsula in 2014.

Only two conclusions can be drawn from this fact: either Trump didn’t keep his end of the bargain, or there was no collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. The demonstrable fact is that when it comes to the rivalry between the Cold War-era foes, the Trump administration appears to be on the same page as the US national security establishment.

Lamenting the apparent absence of rule of law and checks and balances in the American so-called democracy, George Packer narrating the insider account of Andrew Weissmann further observes: “Where Law Ends describes numerous instances, large and small, when Mueller declined to pursue an aggressive course for fear of the reaction at the White House. For example, the special counsel shied away from subpoenaing Don Trump Jr. to testify about his notorious June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer offering dirt on Hillary Clinton.

“Mueller wanted, above all, to warn the American people about foreign subversion of our democracy, while the greater subversion gathered force here at home.”

The most revealing disclosure in these excerpts in not the Trump’s son meeting a Russian lawyer but the bottom line that while the American people have been indoctrinated to fear the foreign subversion of the American democracy, the greater subversion has gathered force at home. And that “subversive force” is certainly not the elected politicians but the deep state which the likes of Packer, Weissman and the rest of mainstream shills are paid to serve and defend.

Donald Trump’s unorthodox approach to the conduct of diplomatic relations has been a persistent thorn in the side of America’s national security establishment for the last four years, and mainstream pundits often wonder why Washington’s relations with traditional allies, including Britain, France, Germany and Canada, have soured during the tenure of the Trump administration.

The fact is that like a typical American, Trump regards America’s allies, including Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and Justin Trudeau, as subordinates beholden to him personally; whereas he treats adversaries, such as Russian President Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, as independent leaders deserving equal treatment and respect. Nevertheless, it’s an inconsequential matter of interpersonal attitude and etiquette than anything having diplomatic repercussions.

The conspiracy theories perpetuated by the establishment-controlled media that Trump is Putin’s “useful idiot” and alleged Russian interference in America’s domestic politics are sheer fabrications reminiscent of the McCarthyism of the fifties.

Russian netizens indeed lent moral support to the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2016 US presidential race but simply because they despised Hillary Clinton, who the Russians regarded as an interventionist hawk responsible for initiating proxy wars in Libya and Syria in 2011 as Obama’s secretary of state, and also because she was the wife of former Democratic President Bill Clinton who was responsible for the break-up of former Yugoslavia in the nineties.

Despite the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US elections, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary by a margin of 2.87 million votes. Had it not been for the archaic electoral college system and James Comey, then the director of FBI, opening last-minute investigation into Hillary Clinton using personal computers for official communications, she was the favorite to win the elections.

According to Washington’s own intelligence estimates, three powers were vying for interference in the US presidential elections. Two of those, China and Iran, favored Joe Biden because Trump initiated trade war with China and unilaterally annulled Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, whereas Russia allegedly supported Trump because Putin apparently has an unmistakable crush on Slovenian beauty pageant Melania.

Trump is reputed to be a staunch conservative, and it’s a known empirical observation that conservatives typically are considerably more patriotic than liberals. Collaborating with foreign powers to undermine one’s national interest doesn’t appeal to the conservative mindset.

Throughout its four-year tenure, the Trump administration has continued with the policy of its predecessors. If anything, diplomatic relations between Washington and Moscow have significantly worsened during Trump’s tumultuous four-year tenure and a New Cold War has begun between the arch-rivals.

Lastly, the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump were nothing more than a show trial. One of the reasons the Democrats initiated the impeachment inquiry against Trump in September 2019 was that after Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation failed to establish collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign in March 2019, therefore the Democrats came up with a new hoax to discredit a Republican president in the election year.

Although the Democrats had the requisite majority in the House of Representatives to impeach Donald Trump, the Senate was clearly controlled by the Republicans. Besides, convicting a president of impeachment required two-third majority in the Senate that the Democrats never had. Then what was the purpose of initiating the proceedings if not to discredit an incumbent president in the election year

Leaving partisan interpretations of the US Constitution aside, an accused is presumed innocent until proved guilty, according to a fundamental axiom of modern jurisprudence. Then how can it be said that Trump is an “impeached president”? By such paradoxical legal interpretations, if a mala fide litigator maliciously accuses an innocent person of murder, could it be said that the person is a murderer simply because he was indicted of the offense but was never convicted of having committed a murder?

Ironically, while three US presidents have been accused of impeaching the Constitution for relatively insignificant offenses, including Bill Clinton for perjury and Donald Trump for using political influence to discredit opponents, no US president has ever been charged, let alone convicted, of waging devastating wars of aggression.

Unless impeachment proceedings are initiated against war criminals, including George Bush for invading Afghanistan and Iraq and Barack Obama for waging proxy wars in Libya and Syria, the impeachment provisions in the US Constitution would serve as nothing more than a convenient tool for settling political scores.

Citation:

[1] The Inside Story of the Mueller Probe’s Mistakes:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/andrew-weissmann-mueller-book-where-law-ends/616395/ 

Trump Presidency and the Neocolonial World Order?

Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released an extraordinary statement in the run-up to the November elections, decrying a political scene he said “has moved away from spirited debate to a vile, vituperative, hate-filled morass, that is unbecoming of any free nation.” “The world is watching America with abject horror,” he added.

Romney tweeted his statement under the title “My thoughts on the current state of our politics.” “I have stayed quiet,” he said, “with the approach of the election.” “But I’m troubled by our politics,” the sole Republican to vote to impeach Trump added in his statement.

“The president calls the Democratic vice-presidential candidate ‘a monster’. He repeatedly labels the Speaker of the House ‘crazy.’ He calls for the justice department to put the prior president in jail. He attacks the governor of Michigan on the very day a plot is discovered to kidnap her. Democrats launch blistering attacks of their own, though their presidential nominee refuses to stoop as low as others,” Romney, a Utah senator who was the 2012 Republican nominee for president, complained in the statement.

Though superficially trying to appear “fair and balanced” in the didactic sermon patronizingly delivered by the only adult in the room full of political upstarts, Romney’s perceptible bias in the polemical diatribe was hard not to be noticed.

It defies explanation if he didn’t watch the presidential debate or consciously elided over the sordid episode where the Democratic presidential nominee contemptuously sneered at his political rival with derogatory epithets such as "a clown, a racist and Putin's puppy."

I’m not sure if Biden was high on meth during the debate, as Trump had repeatedly been insinuating, or he lacks basic etiquette to act like a dignified statesman, but only amphetamines could make a person take leave of his senses and insolently yell at the president of the US, “Will you shut up, man,” while ironically complaining, “This is so unpresidential.”

Though a longtime Republican senator, Mitt Romney’s loyalty to the GOP was compromised due to a personal spat with Trump. In the Republican primaries of the 2016 US presidential elections, Romney severely castigated Trump, calling him “a phony and a fraud.”

After Trump was elected president, he dangled the carrot of the secretary of state appointment to Romney, invited him to a dinner in a swanky New York restaurant, made him eat his words and fawn all over Trump like a servile toady. But later, he gave one of the most coveted appointments in the US bureaucratic hierarchy to oil executive Rex Tillerson.

Romney felt humiliated to the extent that in Trump’s vulnerable moment, after impeachment proceedings were initiated against him in the Senate in February, Romney became the only US senator in the American political history who voted against his own Republican Party president.

Though lacking intellect and often ridiculed for frequent spelling errors on his Twitter timeline, such as “unpresidented” and “covfefe,” implying he gets his news feed from television talk shows and rarely reads book and articles, Donald Trump is street smart and his anti-globalization agenda and down-to-earth attitude appeal to the American working classes.

Nevertheless, it’s quite easy for the neuroscientists on the payroll of the national security establishment to manipulate the minds of such impressionable politicians and lead them by the nose to toe the line of the deep state, particularly on foreign policy matters. No wonder national security shills disparagingly sneer at the president as the “toddler-in-chief.”

In 2017, a couple of caricatures went viral on social media. In one of those caricatures, Donald Trump was depicted as a child sitting on a chair and Vladimir Putin was shown whispering something into Trump’s ears from behind. In the other, Trump was portrayed sitting in Steve Bannon’s lap and the latter was shown mumbling into Trump’s ears, “Who is the big boy now?” And Trump was shown replying, “I am the big boy.”

The meaning conveyed by those cunningly crafted caricatures was to illustrate that Trump lacks the intelligence to think for himself and that he was being manipulated and played around by Putin and Bannon. Those caricatures must have affronted the vanity of Donald Trump to an extent that after the publication of those caricatures, he became ill-disposed toward Putin and sacked Bannon from his job as the White House Chief Strategist in August 2017, only seven months into the first year of the Trump presidency.

Bannon was the principal ideologue of the American alt-right movement. Though the alt-right agenda of the Trump presidency has been scuttled by the deep state, Trump’s views regarding global politics and economics are starkly different from the establishment Democrats and Republicans pursuing neocolonial world order masqueraded as globalization and free trade.

Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment against free trade and globalization. The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements in Germany and across Europe are a manifestation of a paradigm shift in the global economic order in which nationalist and protectionist slogans have replaced the free trade and globalization mantra of the nineties.

Donald Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade agreements and initiating a trade war against China are meant to redress, at least cosmetically, the legitimate grievances of the American working classes against the wealth disparity created by laissez-faire capitalism and market fundamentalism.

Michael Crowley reported for the New York Times [1] in September that American allies and former US Officials fear Trump could seek NATO exit in a second term. According to the report, “This summer, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser John R. Bolton published a book that described the president as repeatedly saying he wanted to quit the NATO alliance. Last month, Mr. Bolton speculated to a Spanish newspaper that Mr. Trump might even spring an ‘October surprise’ shortly before the election by declaring his intention to leave the alliance in a second term.”

The report notes, “In a book published this week, Michael S. Schmidt, a New York Times reporter, wrote that Mr. Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, told others that ‘one of the most difficult tasks he faced with Trump was trying to stop him from pulling out of NATO.’ One person who has heard Mr. Kelly speak in private settings confirmed that he had made such remarks.”

Crowley adds, “Donald Trump now relies on ‘a team of inexperienced bureaucrats’ and has grown more confident and assertive, as he has already sacked seasoned national security advisers, including John F. Kelly; Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general and Trump’s first defense secretary; and H.R. McMaster, a retired three-star Army general and Trump’s former national security adviser.”

In fact, the Trump administration announced plans in July to withdraw 12,000 American troops from Germany and sought to cut funding for the Pentagon’s European Deterrence Initiative. About half of the troops withdrawn from Germany were re-deployed in Europe, mainly in Italy and Poland, and the rest returned to the US.

Similarly, although full withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan was originally scheduled for April next year, according to terms of peace deal reached with the Taliban on February 29, President Trump hastened the withdrawal process by making an electoral pledge this week that all troops should be "home by Christmas." "We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas," he tweeted last week.

Even the arch-foes of the US in Afghanistan effusively praised President Trump’s peace overtures. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told CBS News [2] in a phone interview in October, "We hope he will win the election and wind up US military presence in Afghanistan."

The militant group also expressed concern about President Trump's bout with the coronavirus. "When we heard about Trump being COVID-19 positive, we got worried for his health, but it seems he is getting better," another Taliban senior leader confided to reporter Sami Yousafzai.

Moreover, in the run-up to the presidential elections, Iran-backed militias announced [3] “conditional” cease-fire against the US forces in Iraq on the condition that Washington present a timetable for the withdrawal of its troops. The US-led coalition has already departed from smaller bases across Iraq and promised to reduce its troop presence to 2,500 by January 15, though Iraq’s parliament passed a resolution urging the full withdrawal of US troops in January last year.

There is no denying the fact that the four years of the Trump presidency have been unusually tumultuous in the American political history, but if one takes a cursory look at the list of all the Trump aides who resigned or were otherwise sacked, almost all of them were national security officials.

In fact, during the electoral campaign, scores of former Republican national security officials made their preference public that they would vote in the US presidential elections for Democrat Joe Biden instead of Republican Donald Trump against party lines.

What does that imply? It is an incontrovertible proof that the latent conflict between the deep state and the elected representatives of the American people has come to a head during the Trump presidency.

Although far from being a vocal critic of the deep state himself, the working-class constituency that Trump represents has had enough with the global domination agenda of the national security establishment. The American electorate wants the US troops returned home, and wants to focus on national economy and redress wealth disparity instead of acting as global police waging “endless wars” thousands of miles away from the US territorial borders.

Addressing a convention of conservatives last year, Trump publicly castigated his own generals, much to the dismay of neoliberal chauvinists upholding American exceptionalism and militarism, by revealing: “I learn more sometimes from soldiers what’s going on, than I do from generals. I do. I hate to say it. I tell the generals all the time.”

At another occasion, he ruffled more feathers by telling the reporters: “I’m not saying the military’s in love with me. The soldiers are. The top people in the Pentagon probably aren’t because they want to do nothing but fight wars so all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”

Citations:

[1] Allies and Former U.S. Officials Fear Trump Could Seek NATO Exit in a Second Term:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/03/us/politics/trump-nato-withdraw.html

[2] The Taliban on Trump: "We hope he will win the election":

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taliban-on-trump-we-hope-he-will-win-the-election-withdraw-us-troops/

[3] Iran-backed militias announce ‘conditional’ cease-fire against U.S. in Iraq:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/iran-backed-militias-announce-conditional-cease-fire-against-us-in-iraq/2020/10/11/7a64f624-0bbd-11eb-b404-8d1e675ec701_story.html 

Neo-McCarthyism and Russophobic Hysteria in Western Media

Instead of investigating the incriminating contents of Hunter Biden’s emails, obtained by the New York Post in the run-up to the November elections, the US national security establishment and the mainstream media deployed a shrewd diversionary tactic of calling into question the source of emails by dubbing it “Russian disinformation campaign.”

Natasha Bertrand reported for the Politico [1] in an October 19 article that more than fifty former senior intelligence officials had signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son “had all the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.”

What “classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation” the former intelligence officials were referring to? Did the emails carry the signatures of Russian President Vladimir Putin? Propagating baseless rumors without a shred of evidence merely on the basis of speculations and hearsay calls into question the very eligibility of such “intelligence officials” to the meticulous job of intelligence gathering. No wonder they were superseded in the intelligence community.

Natasha Bertrand alleges: “While the letter’s signatories presented no new evidence, they said their national security experience had made them ‘deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case’ and cited several elements of the story that suggested the Kremlin’s hand at work.”

First of all, “no new evidence” implies that prior evidence of alleged Russian disinformation campaign is available, which the readers are utterly unaware of. Secondly, purported “national security experience” of paranoid spooks makes them suspicious about acquaintances and activities of their wives, too, does that imply they are being cuckolded by their wives merely on the basis of a hunch?

What could be more emphatic rebuttal of lamestream media’s conspiracist, Russophobic approach than former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s statement that Hunter Biden’s laptop “is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” amid claims from Adam Schiff and other Democrats glossing over the Biden family’s illicit financial dealings with foreign nationals and leveling baseless counter-allegations.

“Let me be clear: the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports that. And we have shared no intelligence with Adam Schiff, or any member of Congress,” Ratcliffe added.

Without falling for the Machiavellian circumlocution, President Trump demanded following the revelations that former Attorney General William Barr needed to act and appoint somebody after nearly a dozen House Republicans urged him to tap a special counsel to investigate revelations coming from Hunter Biden’s laptop on the lines of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s infamous “Russiagate” witch-hunt.

During an exclusive interview [2] with “Fox & Friends” in October, Trump said: “This is the laptop from hell.” “Even if he didn’t get all of this money, you can’t go to China and have the son walk out with $1.5 billion. ... You can’t go to Ukraine with $83,000 a month. ... You can’t get $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow’s wife.”

“And you didn’t have a job before your father was vice president,” Trump continued. “You can’t go and go with your father and every stop you make, you pick up $1 billion.” He added: “The vice president got a kickback, and everybody knows it, and they’ve known it a long time.”

Trump was referring to an email allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden, and obtained by Fox News. The email, dated May 13, 2017, includes a discussion of “remuneration packages” for six people in a business deal with a Chinese energy firm. The email appeared to identify Hunter Biden as “Chair/Vice Chair depending on an agreement with CEFC,” an apparent reference to now-bankrupt CEFC China Energy Co.

The email includes a note that “Hunter has some office expectations he will elaborate.” A proposed equity split references “20” for “H” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” with no further details.

Fox News spoke to one of the people who was copied on the email, who confirmed its authenticity. Sources also told Fox News that “the big guy” was a reference to the former vice president.

“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Trump said. “He’s gotta act, and he’s gotta act fast, and he’s gotta appoint somebody.” The president added: “This is major corruption, and we have to know about this before the election. The attorney general has to act.”

The sense of urgency in Trump’s statements was palpable. Because the incriminating evidence adduced in Hunter’s emails called into question if Joe Biden as a sleazy politician—treating the dignified office of the vice president as a for-profit Biden Inc.—was even eligible to contest the presidential election.

Echoing the trite canard of a Russia hoax peddled by Natasha Bertrand for the Politico, Jeffrey Goldberg, the spin-doctor-in-chief of the weaponized neoliberal publication The Atlantic, wrote an article in September titled Trump is Putin’s ‘Useful Idiot’ [3].

The entire write-up was a prosaic screed extolling the virtues of patriotism and loyalty to “American democracy” and striving desperately hard to expose imaginary plots hatched by “vile dictators,” notably Russian President Vladimir Putin, to take undue advantage of “gullible patsies” like Donald Trump.

After sufficiently proving his loyalty to the “American democracy” and the US-led “benevolent imperialism” that has ended “the age of darkness” in the post-colonial world and ushered it into “the age of enlightenment” under Washington’s neocolonial tutelage, Goldberg went on to draw the attention of the readers to the momentous telephonic conversation that prompted impeachment show trial against Trump lasting through September 2019 to February.

“On July 25, 2019, Alexander Vindman, who, as the National Security Council’s director for European affairs, organized the call, listened, with other officials, to a conversation between Trump and the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

“I would like you to do us a favor,’ Trump told Zelensky, working his way to the subject of Joe Biden: ‘There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution, and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it …’

“Vindman was surprised by Trump’s approach, and by its implications. Like other American specialists in the successor states of the former Soviet Union, he was invested in the US-Ukraine relationship. And like most national-security professionals, he was interested in countering Russia’s malign influence—along its borders, in places like Ukraine and Belarus and the Baltic states; across Europe; and in American elections.

“Vindman’s first day at the National Security Council, July 16, 2018, was also the day that President Trump, meeting Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, told a press conference that he trusted Putin no less than he trusted US intelligence agencies. ‘I have confidence in both parties,’ Trump said, to the dismay of the intelligence chiefs who report to him.”

It’s worth pointing out here that either the neoliberal mediocrities like Jeffrey Goldberg really can’t distinguish between exchanging casual diplomatic courtesies and substantive policy decisions or he astutely elided over the clear distinction to whip up Russophobic hysteria among his credulous readers by uncovering imaginary plots and subversive collusion between purported “rogue executives” and “sworn enemies” of the neocolonial empire.

If you thought Goldberg couldn’t possibly get any more preposterous, wait until you hear out the last few paragraphs of the sanctimonious diatribe and the intimately patriotic conversation between the self-styled champions of “American democracy” and discernibly chauvinistic “liberal values.”

“Vindman came to find that Trump’s desire to impress Putin, and to shape American policy in ways that please Putin, has caused many former US intelligence officials, and even some officials who have worked directly for him, to suspect that he has been compromised by Russia.

“In his new book, Rage, Bob Woodward writes that Dan Coats, the former director of national intelligence, ‘continued to harbor the secret belief, one that had grown rather than lessened, although unsupported by intelligence proof, that Putin had something on Trump.’”

Without furnishing a shred of evidence albeit tacitly acknowledging “unsupported by intelligence proof,” the “credible columnist” of a widely circulated news publication lays bare his unsubstantiated hunch that “Putin has something on Trump.”

It could be anything, ranging from illicit financial kickbacks to extramarital affairs, or maybe something more sinister, such as the mainstream media’s favorite “QAnon conspiracy” that nobody read or heard about until the news media created the hype in the run-up to the US presidential elections.

“I ask Vindman the key question: ‘Does he believe that Trump is an asset of Russian intelligence?’

“Vindman replied: ‘President Trump should be considered to be a useful idiot and a fellow traveler, which makes him an unwitting agent of Putin.’

“Useful idiot is a term commonly used to describe dupes of authoritarian regimes; fellow traveler, in Vindman’s description, is a person who shares Putin’s loathing for democratic norms.”

After perusing these risible excerpts, it become abundantly clear that not only is the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief an authority on the domestic American politics but he is equally abreast of the history and culture of “authoritarian regimes” harboring malice against the only beacon of hope and light in the age of “benevolent imperialism.”

Despite the end of the Cold War three decades ago, this Russophobic paranoia, of which Natasha Bertrand and Jeffrey Goldberg are the embodiments, has infiltrated the establishment-controlled media so deep into the subconscious that it would require an enormous conscious effort to revert the American society back to the normal state.

Citations:

[1] Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinfo-430276

[2] Trump urges Barr to 'act fast,' 'appoint somebody' to probe Hunter Biden’s business dealings:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-william-barr-act-hunter-biden-business-dealings

[3] Alexander Vindman: Trump is Putin’s ‘Useful Idiot.’

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/alexander-vindman-trump-putin-useful-idiot/616341/