Ukraine Intervention: How NATO Stirred Resting Bear into Action?

Quoting acclaimed Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy before the Biden-Putin summit at Geneva last June, the Russian leader uttered an ominous warning: “There is no true happiness in life, only flashes, a mirage of it is on the horizon — cherish those.” But the establishment media mocked the stark warning as nothing more than rants and raves of a deranged mind.

At the time, the British Royal Navy Defender had breached Russia’s territorial waters [1] in the Black Sea and as many as 20 Russian aircraft conducted “unsafe maneuvers” merely 500 feet above the warship and Britain also lamented shots had been fired in the path of the ship.

“British Prime Minister Boris Johnson would not say whether he had personally approved the Defender’s voyage but suggested the Royal Navy was making a point by taking that route,” a Politico report [2] alleged in June.

Boris Johnson didn’t explicitly acknowledge the naval incursion into Russia’s territorial waters was done on his orders. Something a lot more sinister happened behind the scenes that could have ended up in a false flag naval engagement like the Gulf of Tonkin incident before the Vietnam War in 1964, and given the NATO powers a pretext to start a war over and above the heads of elected politicians.

While the responsibility to recklessly provoke Russia ultimately rested with the entire British cabinet, there was a catch. A Telegraph report noted [3] that former Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had raised concerns about the mission, proposed by defense chiefs, and that Boris Johnson was ultimately called in to settle the dispute.

Therefore, what Johnson actually did was to play the role of a mediator in the dispute between the civilian cabinet and the UK’s military. The provocation was clearly planned and executed by the UK’s deep state in collaboration with its partners in the transatlantic NATO military alliance led by the Pentagon.

It’s noteworthy that all the militaries of the NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command.  

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed during the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down [4] to over 100,000 after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

During the last year, the United States has substantially ramped up the US military footprint in the Eastern Europe by deploying thousands of NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and the NATO forces alongside regional clients have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

Excluding the self-styled global hegemon, the imperial United States, the rest of the Western powers might have been colonial powers before the Second World War but they are no longer “powers” in global politics. In fact, they can more aptly be described as Western regimes that serve no other purpose than act as Washington’s client states via the framework of transatlantic NATO military alliance to maintain the charade of multilateralism.

The national security and defense policies of modern nation states are formulated by civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed as the deep state. Whereas trade and economic policies are determined by corporate interests and business cartels within the framework of neocolonial economic order imposed on the post-colonial world by corporate America following the signing of the Bretton Woods Accords at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Purportedly democratic governments, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process, are reduced to performing ceremonial gimmicks and are meant only to serve as showpieces to legitimize militarist and capitalist exploitation.

Fomenting crisis in Ukraine by audaciously intruding into Russia’s territorial waters isn’t the only instance when the deep state flagrantly interfered into the US foreign policy. It went to the extent of discrediting and, at times, even brazenly assassinating American presidents who dared to refuse to toe the national security policy formulated by the high-command of the world’s most powerful military force.

It’s worth recalling that at the height of the Cold War in the sixties when the US domestic politics was infested with the McCarthyite paranoia and communists were persecuted all over the country, Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of John F. Kennedy, 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 a pacifist and non-interventionist American president was obviously perpetrated by a professional sniper trained expert marksmanship by the deep state.

It was not a coincidence that Kennedy was murdered in November 1963, and months later, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized his successor 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 raging Cold War.

Besides the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, another reason the Kennedy administration fell from the grace of the deep state was the botched Bay of Pigs invasion by the CIA operatives and the Cuban exiles in April 1961 to topple the government of Fidel Castro that JFK approved but later severely castigated the CIA for the fiasco and sacked CIA director Allen Dulles and several employees. The Pentagon wanted Kennedy to immediately invade Cuba following the foiled plot but he “vacillated” and let a golden opportunity to dismantle a security threat close to the US soil slip by.  

Similarly, JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was a leading Democratic candidate for the presidential office when he was shot dead by a Palestinian Christian Sirhan Sirhan in June 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 principal 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 77 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. He was due to be released on parole last August but California Governor Gavin Newsom decided against setting him free in January.

Likewise, the US security agencies turned against Richard Nixon after the deep state helped him get elected in the 1968 elections by eliminating his formidable Democratic opponent Robert F. Kennedy and felt betrayed after Nixon decided to end the Vietnam War.

The Watergate scandal was clearly orchestrated by the deep state, as Nixon was responsible for the Fall of Saigon and the humiliating defeat of the US in Vietnam at the hands of communists. Despite the allegation of illegal wiretapping, nothing was actually recorded at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters.

An additional charge was brought against Nixon that he had installed voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office, which is a customary practice for all the presidents before and after him, as all the offices in the White House and the Capitol are known to be bugged, though only a handful security officials have access to recorded conversations.

Not surprisingly, the perpetrators of clumsy wiretapping attempt at the DNC headquarters turned out to be former FBI and CIA agents. All 48 Republican campaign officials who threw Nixon under the bus by becoming approvers and testifying against him were found guilty, but were handed down light sentences, ranging from fines and several months in prison, excluding Gordon Liddy who served four and a half years in the penitentiary and later became a celebrity anchor.

To his credit, despite being a reviled politician in the American political discourse, Nixon ended the US involvement in the Vietnam War in 1973. He also ended the military draft the same year. Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972, the first ever by an American president, eventually led to the establishing of diplomatic relations between the two nations. Buttressing his pacifist credentials further, he signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the former Soviet Union the same year.  

On October 10, 1972, the “October Surprise” on the eve of elections on Nov. 3, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, relying on an anonymous source “Deep Throat” (likely a Freudian slip implicating the deep state or could be a double entendre even more sinister), subsequently revealed to be an FBI director, reported that the FBI had determined that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the Nixon re-election committee.

Although venerated as credible “investigative journalists” by mainstream audience, both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein were formerly rogue reporters for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post before becoming best-selling author, and are known to be unapologetic deep state shills.

In 2019, the Trump administration awarded the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract JEDI [5] to Microsoft over its rival Amazon’s bid. Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos contested the decision in federal court, which ordered the Pentagon to reconsider certain aspects of the contract. The contract was subsequently scrapped by the Pentagon last July due to the controversy.

It’s worth recalling the reason the corporate media took morbid interest in the gory details of the grisly assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 was that Khashoggi was a columnist for the Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest man with $200 billion net worth and the owner of Amazon.

Bezos had a score to settle [6] with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Mohammad bin Salman hacked Bezos’ phone in May 2018 and sent the details of Bezos’ extramarital affair to the National Enquirer in January 2019, leading to Bezos’ wife MacKenzie Scott divorcing him and taking a significant portion, $35.6 billion, of Bezos’ obscene wealth as alimony.

Nevertheless, the Washington Post, with its vast network of NATSEC shills having access to insider accounts of the deep state sources, has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA, as Bezos won a $600 million contract [7] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

Citations:

[1] Britain says don’t get carried away by warship spat with Russia:

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/britain-says-dont-get-carried-away-by-warship-spat-with-russia-2021-06-24/

[2] Russia says next time it may fire to hit intruding warships:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/24/russia-says-next-time-it-may-fire-to-hit-intruding-warships-496011

[3] British PM Boris Johnson ignored warnings of his foreign secretary:

https://www.rt.com/russia/527563-johnson-order-warship-crimea-waters/

[4] What the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/16/world/trump-military-role-treaties-allies-nato-asia-persian-gulf.html

[5] Jeff Bezos contests the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI contract:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/technology/amazon-jedi-defense-department.html

[6] The Saudi heir and the alleged plot to undermine Jeff Bezos:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/21/revealed-the-saudi-heir-and-the-alleged-plot-to-undermine-jeff-bezos

[7] Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA, While Keeping His Washington Post Readers in the Dark:

http://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark 

Ukraine Crisis: How Perfidious Oligarchs Sold the Nation Out?

In a long overdue decision, Russian President Putin after consulting with the National Security Council officially recognized the two breakaway republics of Ukraine, Donetsk and Luhansk. Subsequently, the Russian parliament unanimously approved the decision and authorized deployment of Russian peace-keeping forces in the Donbas region.

Putin could have recognized the sovereignty of the breakaway republics as soon as Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014. But being a pacifist, he kept waiting for eight years in the futile hope that better sense would ultimately prevail in Kiev.

After it became evident, however, that Volodymyr Zelensky and his predecessor Petro Poroshenko have struck an irrevocable Faustian pact with the NATO devil, he was left with no other choice than to protect Russia’s paramount security interests at any cost, specifically from the existential threat emanating along Russia’s western borders after the deployment of the NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons in the Eastern Europe aimed at Russia, and the NATO forces alongside its regional clients provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

Although being dubbed “an invasion” by the corporate media, the majority population of the breakaway Donbas region speaks Russian and cheered the deployment of peace-keeping forces in the hope of restoring peace and stability following the turmoil and violence claiming 14,000 lives during the eight-year conflict.

Nevertheless, the Ukraine crisis is only a sequel to the most momentous event of the twentieth century: the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, rebellions in the Eastern Europe and the subsequent break-up and massacres in the former Yugoslavia. Therefore, a succinct description of the nefarious plot to destabilize the Cold War rival by the NATO powers wouldn’t be out of place.

Many erudite Eurasian historiographers I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with were under the misconception that the alleged economic collapse in the former Soviet Republics in the late-eighties due to presumed intrinsic flaws in the Marxist-Leninist ideology precipitated the dissolution of the Soviet Union in Dec. 1991. Nothing could be more asinine than favoring exploitative capitalism with its supposed intrinsic strengths over egalitarian communism in the backdrop of the Soviet dissolution debacle.

The Soviet Union, with vast natural resources, territorial possessions spanning almost the entire northern landmass of Eurasia and technologically innovative workforce, stood the ground despite waging the over 70-year Cold War from 1917 to 1991 against the neocolonial powers.

With the vast oil and gas reserves, Russia and several former constituent republics of the Soviet Union, including Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, are the top exporters of energy to the industrialized world alongside the Gulf States. Without the Russian natural gas, European would freeze to death in harsh winters, or as Putin facetiously quipped: “They’d soon be gathering firewood to keep themselves warm.”

Even if Russia dismantled its cutting-edge industrial sector on a whim and stopped producing value-added goods, the exportable raw materials produced in the Eurasian behemoth would be enough to sustain the population for many centuries. Recently announced economic sanctions on Russia and halting the certification of Nord Stream 2 is going to hurt Washington’s European allies more than having any marked effect on Russia’s thriving economy.

Any external force, no matter how resourceful, could never have unraveled the super power of the era, but it succumbed to subversive internal threats, first due to destabilizing force of ostensibly popular and democratic rebellions in the Baltic and East European states in the late eighties, then due to fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent reunification of Germany in Oct. 1990, effectively placing the East German communists under the neocolonial tutelage of capitalist exploiters, and the last nail in the coffin was struck after Boris Yeltsin was elected the president of the constituent Russian Republic in the June 1991 elections, precipitating a power struggle between communist leadership at the center and nationalist leadership in the republic.

In the ensuing cataclysmic events, on August 19, 1991, a cabal of Soviet apparatchik, including Mikhail Gorbachev’s vice president, prime minister, defense minister and KGB chief, organized a coup plot and placed Gorbachev under house arrest. The coup organizers expected some popular support but the public sympathy in large metropolitan cities was against them.

The coup attempt was thwarted after three days and Gorbachev returned as the president of the Soviet Union. But not only the power of the presidency was compromised but also the vulnerability of the central leadership was exposed in the eyes of the public following the foiled coup plot. That was the point of no return. It became obvious the status quo could not be sustained in the crumbling Soviet Union.

The Glasnost and Perestroika liberalizing policies initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev were especially significant because they shine light on the impact of new technology on the social and political life of a country. The late-eighties was the era of the advent of satellite television in the developing world and it coincided with the political developments in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet masses, which until then were acquainted with news and information only from national media, were exposed to pernicious influence of imperialist media. The foreign-funded corporate media, including CNN, VOA, BBC and host of other television channels, radio stations and print media, capitalized on the opportunity to sow the seeds of discontentment among viewers, specifically among non-Russian ethnicities of the former Soviet Republics, by insidiously depicting contrasting lifestyles among the extravagant Western bourgeoisie and the frugality and egalitarianism typically favored in socialist communities.

As with the leadership of the rest of Baltic and East European states conniving with NATO powers and stabbing the former patron in the back, the imperialist stooges, Volodymyr Zelensky and his equally treacherous predecessor Petro Poroshenko, elected presidents through sham electoral process in the bourgeois democracy called Ukraine, represent nobody but the avaricious and exploitative entrepreneurial oligarchs wanting to expand business empires and attract foreign investments by pandering to the corporate interests of the Western Europe and North America.

Centralized governments across the world are run by behemoth state bureaucracies. Politicians are merely show pieces meant to lend legitimacy to supposedly “elected governments” and to cater to interests of business elites which they really represent. Disenfranchised masses are least bothered whether government is being run by autocrats or by “elected representatives” of the bourgeoisie, though the political and business elites often get restless and mobilize their support base to demand a share in the power pie.

The national security and defense policies of modern nation states are formulated by civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed as the deep state. Whereas trade and economic policies are determined by corporate interests and business cartels within the framework of neocolonial economic order imposed on the post-colonial world by corporate America following the signing of the Bretton Woods Accords at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Purportedly democratic governments, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process, are reduced to performing ceremonial gimmicks and are meant only to serve as showpieces to legitimize militarist and capitalist exploitation.

Not only the disenfranchised masses of Ukraine but underprivileged proletariats of all the former Soviet constituent republics and allied states in Eastern Europe share historical, political and cultural bonds with Russia. Ensuring the collective security of Eurasian nations is Russia’s responsibility as a successor to the former Soviet Union.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, the East European states didn’t become democracies overnight as projected in the parallel reality of media narratives constructed by spin-doctors, instead they became capitalist oligarchies ruled by ultra-rich business elites having stakes in the global economy and depositing lucrative profits from flourishing business enterprises into Western financial institutions.

The worst thing capitalist exploitation and neoliberal developmentalism do to organic societies is that they breed parasitic consumerist classes of filthy rich bourgeois hungry for foreign investment, particularly from the deep pockets of the multinational corporations based in the financial districts of North America and Western Europe, and wanting to expand their business empires at any cost, even if they have to sell their nations out to highest bidder for personal ambitions.

Such comprador bourgeois erode nations from within. They are wary of egalitarian socialist ideologies emphasizing equitable distribution of wealth, hence undermining financial stakes of oligarchs. In order to scuttle political ideologies favoring the interests of disenfranchised masses, they generously provide funds to pernicious media organizations and political forces insidiously promoting so-called economic liberalization, free trade and globalization, even if entire nations have to bear the cost of such market fundamentalism.

It was not a coincidence that the Soviet Union was dissolved in December 1991 and the Maastricht Treaty that consolidated the European Community and laid the groundwork for the European Union was signed in February 1992. The basic purpose of the EU has been nothing more than to entice the former communist states of the Eastern Europe into the folds of the Western capitalist bloc by offering financial incentives and inducements.

Even the Ukraine crisis was stoked by oligarchs in November 2013 by staging Euromaidan protests against the incumbent government after Viktor Yanukovych suspended the preparations for the implementation of an association agreement with the European Union and threatened to take Ukraine back into the folds of the Russian sphere of influence by accepting billions of dollars loan package offered by Vladimir Putin.

All the grandstanding and moral posturing of unity and equality aside, the hopelessly neoliberal institution, the EU, in effect, is nothing more than the civilian counterpart of the trans-Atlantic military alliance against the former Soviet Union, the NATO, that employs a much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare to win over political allies and to isolate adversaries that dare to sidestep from the global trade and economic policies as laid down by the Western capitalist bloc.

Nazi Invasion of Russia and ‘Ukraine Crisis’ Hysteria

In retrospect, Hitler’s worst strategic debacle that ultimately cost the Nazi Germany the Second World War was invading Russia before crushing the British peril following the precipitous rout of the French military in June 1940. The only reason the megalomaniac Fuhrer didn’t initially commit enough military resources into crossing the English Channel and dismantling the Anglo-American Empire once and for all was that ruling elites of the two nations were tied together by blood relations.

Kaiser Wilhelm, the last deposed emperor of the House of Hohenzollern that ruled Germany until the end of the First World War, was the eldest grandchild of British Queen Victoria. Wilhelm's first cousins included King George V of the United Kingdom and many princesses who, along with Wilhelm's sister Sophia, became European consorts. Similarly, the German social elites of the Second and Third Reich regarded the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy of the United Kingdoms as kinsmen not to be harmed.

In the Second World War, the Nazi air force did mount Luftwaffe attacks on a limited scale targeting Britain’s industrial infrastructure, but the tiny island boasting imperial legacy was simply not a match for the Third Reich’s military strength without the assistance of its trans-Atlantic ally, the United States, with vast natural resources, territorial possessions spanning the whole of the North American continent besides Canada, technologically innovative manpower and logistical difficulty of mounting an invasion. Thankfully, Britain was spared the pulverizing force of the Nazi Blitzkrieg experienced by France and Eastern Europe.

According to a 1978 essay by German historian Andreas Hillgruber, the Russia invasion plans drawn up by the German military elite were colored by hubris stemming from the rapid defeat of France at the hands of the invincible Wehrmacht and by traditional German stereotypes of Russia as a primitive, backward Asiatic country, having Turco-Mongol ancestry, a fallacious superiority complex predicated on the Nazi social Darwinism and the cherished myth of the German and Anglo-Saxon racial superiority.

Had Hitler skimmed through the European history as a major in high school and been aware of the Napoleonic army’s harrowing fate in its botched Russia campaign in 1812, he would never have committed the blunder of invading Russia to create so-called Lebensraum or “living space” for the German race.

Russia defeated the forces of Napoleon and Hitler through “strategic depth” of its vast territorial possessions spanning almost the entire northern landmass of Eurasia, by letting them advance into Russian territory, extending their supply lines, burdening logistics and mounting ferocious guerrilla warfare campaign that decimated the morale and military capabilities of the most invincible armies of their eras.

Russian fatalities during the Second World War ranged from 20 to 27 million, according to various estimates, including over 8 million military fatalities. In comparison, the United States lost 400,000 soldiers during the war. Clearly, Russia paid the most sacrifices and defeated Nazism while the United States misappropriated the credit for salvaging the world from the menace of fascism in the imagination of the subjects of the Anglo-American Empire.

Before the end of the Second World War, when Japan was about to fall in the hands of geographically adjacent Soviet Union, the Truman administration authorized the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to subjugate Japan and send a clear message to the leaders of the former Soviet Union, which had not developed its nuclear program at the time, to desist from encroaching upon Japan in the east and West Germany in Europe.

The Pentagon publicly confessed to over 30 Broken Arrows [1], serious nuclear accidents, including accidentally dropping atom bombs on populated areas in the US and Europe that thankfully didn’t explode, though the real number of such nuclear accidents is calculated to be in thousands, particularly at the height of the Cold War during the sixties when such apocalyptic “accidents” were everyday occurrence.

Thus, the United States came close to making the planet uninhabitable for the rest of humanity due to its unfettered nuclear arms race and the global domination agenda that subtly continues to this day, as is obvious from the escalation of hostilities against Russia and China and the current stand-off in Ukraine.

As for Ukraine’s aspirations for joining NATO and the alliance’s eastward expansion along Russia’s western borders, the ostensible cause of the escalation, it’s pertinent to mention that the trans-Atlantic military alliance NATO and its auxiliary economic alliance European Union were conceived during the Cold War to offset the influence of the former Soviet Union which was geographically adjacent to Europe.

Historically, the NATO military alliance, at least ostensibly, was conceived as a defensive alliance in 1949 during the Cold War in order to offset conventional warfare superiority of the former Soviet Union. The US forged collective defense pact with the Western European nations after the Soviet Union reached the threshold to build its first atomic bomb in 1949 and achieved nuclear parity with the US.

But the trans-Atlantic military alliance has outlived its purpose following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 and is now being used as an aggressive and expansionist military alliance meant to browbeat and coerce the former Soviet allies, the Central and Eastern European states, to join NATO and its corollary economic alliance, the European Union, or risk international economic isolation.

Regarding the mainstream media’s contention that Russia has amassed 100,000 troops along Ukraine’s borders, thus portending imminent invasion, the United States, too, has permanently deployed over 100,000 forces, not to mention strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons, in Europe since the end of the Second World War, including 50,000 troops at sprawling Ramstein Air Base [2] and several other military bases in Germany.

Does that mean the United States has invaded and occupied Europe? Of course, it has in the garb of establishing Pax Americana across the world. If the United States has purported “strategic interests” across the Atlantic Ocean in Europe, then is it too hard to imagine that Russia could also have vital security interests along its western borders in Ukraine?

In Europe, 400,000 US forces were deployed during the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down after European powers developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

During the last year, the United States has substantially ramped up US military footprint in the Eastern Europe, deploying strategic armaments aimed at Russia and provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and the South China Sea, veritable “territorial waters” of Russia and China, respectively.

Wouldn’t it be a cause of immense consternation for the US military strategists and policy-makers if Russia or China deployed intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear-capable strategic bombers and provocatively exercised “freedom of navigation” right by deploying nuclear submarines in the Gulf of Mexico straddling the US borders?

Ukraine is Russia’s backyard whereas the distance between New York and Kiev is over 7,500 kilometers. What’s the purpose of deploying thousands of US troops equipped with strategic armaments in the Eastern Europe if not to intimidate and insult Russia? Despite the obvious contradiction between tangible reality on the ground and parallel universe of media narratives, the corporate media would project Russia as an aggressor and the United States as a peace-maker.

Not only the disenfranchised masses of Ukraine but underprivileged proletariats of all the former Soviet constituent republics in Eastern Europe share historical, political and cultural bonds with Russia. The collective security of Eurasian nations is Russia’s responsibility as a successor to the former Soviet Union.

The imperialist stooge, Volodymyr Zelensky, elected president through sham electoral process in bourgeois democracy called Ukraine, represents nobody but the avaricious and exploitative entrepreneurial oligarchs wanting to expand family businesses and attract foreign investments by pandering to corporate interests of Western Europe and North America.

He is a figurehead beholden to the deep state, the top brass of the military trained and educated at premier Western military academies, the West Point and Sandhurst, and conducting joint military and naval exercises alongside NATO forces deployed in the Eastern Europe.

Centralized governments across the world are run by behemoth state bureaucracies. Politicians are merely show pieces meant to lend legitimacy to supposedly “elected governments” and to cater to interests of business elites which they really represent.

Disenfranchised masses are least bothered whether government is being run by autocrats or by “elected representatives” of the bourgeoisie, though the political and business elites often get restless and mobilize their support base to demand a share in the power pie.

The national security and defense policies of modern nation states are formulated by civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed as the deep state. Whereas trade and economic policies are determined by corporate interests and business cartels within the framework of neocolonial economic order imposed on the post-colonial world by corporate America following the signing of the Bretton Woods Accords at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Purportedly democratic governments, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process, are reduced to performing ceremonial gimmicks and are meant only to serve as showpieces to legitimize militarist and capitalist exploitation.

Excluding the self-styled global hegemon, the imperial United States, the rest of the Western powers might have been colonial powers before the Second World War but they are no longer “powers” in global politics.

In fact, they can more aptly be described as Western regimes that serve no other purpose than act as Washington’s client states via the framework of transatlantic NATO military alliance to maintain the charade of multilateralism. With the second largest army in NATO after United States, Turkey has more military power and political sovereignty than the servile lackeys of Washington: the United Kingdom, France and Germany.

After the Second World War, Washington embarked on the Marshall Plan to rebuild Western Europe with an economic assistance of $13 billion, equivalent to hundreds of billions of dollars in the current dollar value. Since then, Washington has maintained military and economic dominance over Western Europe.

The European colonial powers were so utterly devastated following the Second World War that let alone keeping their Asian and African colonies, they was finding it hard to keep European countries united and economies running.

Thus, the age of colonialism didn’t end due to colonial powers voluntarily relinquishing control over colonial possessions, as peddled by Orientalist historians, rather they didn’t have the military and economic capacity to forcibly suppress liberation movements kicking off all over the colonial world.

In the medieval era, although monarchs were chosen by hereditary title, their throne rested on unequivocal support of military aristocracy. As kings didn’t have standing armies of their own beyond several legions of praetorian guards. Feudal barons provided the bulk of forces from private militias in times of wars and insurrections.

Thus, the deep state and its monopoly over politics, specifically in the domain of national security and defense policy, was in-built in the Western governance system since the time of the imperial rule, and insidiously continues in the neocolonial era.

Ironically, the first military dictator to establish a standing army of 50,000 men in Europe was none other than infamous Oliver Cromwell, who ruled England with an iron fist for a brief period of time from 1653 to ’58, albeit with far-reaching consequences. As his model of military autocracy was subsequently widely adopted across Europe and the United States, albeit in a barely disguised veneer of hereditary monarchy, military aristocracy and, at times, dubious parliamentary democracy.

In conclusion, military aristocracy held real power in the medieval times, as it provided foot soldiers and cavalry units to monarchs in times of war. With the advent of standing armies in 17^th century, the power transferred to generals, who were typically princes or belonged to the nobility.

The United States of America is credited with building the first plebian army, as it couldn’t trace a royal lineage so settler colonists, having the blood of indigenous Red Indians on their hands, were raised to higher ranks, who first wreaked havoc across Latin America in the 19^th century by invoking the Monroe Doctrine, and then unleashed a reign of terror in the wider world in the 20^th century by invoking the Truman Doctrine that enunciated raison d’etre of the American-led neocolonial world order as containment of the Soviet-led communism.

Citations:

[1] When the US Air Force accidentally dropped an atomic bomb on Mars Bluff South Carolina:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/when-the-us-air-force-accidentally-dropped-an-atomic-bomb-on-mars-bluff-south-carolina

[2] What the US Gets for Defending Its Allies and Interests Abroad?

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/16/world/trump-military-role-treaties-allies-nato-asia-persian-gulf.html 

How Russia’s Patronage Expedited Taliban’s Kabul Takeover?

The fate of Afghanistan was sealed as soon as the US forces evacuated Bagram airbase in the dead of the night on July 1, six weeks before the inevitable fall of Kabul on August 15. Bagram was the nerve center from where all the operations across Afghanistan were directed, specifically the vital air support to the US-backed Afghan security forces without which they were simply irregular militias waiting to be devoured by the wolves.

Evacuating Bagram was the watershed moment when the skipper switched the engines off and intimated sailors henceforth they’d have to use oars to float the ship ashore. Unsurprisingly, the doomed ship sank to the bottom of the ocean even before the crew could scramble over to the refuge of the safety boats.

In southern Afghanistan, the traditional stronghold of the Pashtun ethnic group from which the Taliban draws most of its support, the Taliban military offensive was spearheaded by Mullah Yaqoob, the son of the Taliban’s late founder Mullah Omar and the newly appointed defense minister of the Taliban government, as district after district in southwest Afghanistan, including the birthplace of the Taliban movement Kandahar and Helmand, fell in quick succession.

What has stunned military strategists and longtime observers of the Afghan war, though, was the Taliban’s northern blitz, occupying almost the whole of northern Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, as northern Afghanistan was the bastion of the Northern Alliance comprising the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups, which were known to have longstanding enmity with the Pashtun Taliban.

It’s an established fact that a grassroots insurgency anywhere cannot be sustained for long unless it draws some level of popular support from the local population. But if the leaders of the Northern Alliance were allied with the US occupation forces and waging a fierce battle against the Taliban, then which regional force instigated the Tajik and Uzbek ethnic groups to rebel against their leadership and join ranks with the Taliban in its holy war against the foreign occupation?

In an explosive investigative report [1] last July, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, a US government-funded organization, revealed: “When the Taliban captured a strategically important security checkpoint near Afghanistan's border with Tajikistan last month, it assigned a Tajik militant to raise the Taliban flag on the site.

“The militant goes by the alias Mahdi Arsalon and has a group of fighters from Tajikistan under his command, an eyewitness to the flag-raising and other sources told RFE-RL. The Taliban also put Arsalon and his group in charge of security in five districts the Taliban seized near the Tajik border in recent months.

“In Afghanistan, Arsalon and other Tajik militants are known as the Tajik Taliban. But in reality they are members of Jamaat Ansarullah, which is banned in Tajikistan as a terrorist group.

“Jamaat Ansarullah was founded by a rogue former Tajik opposition commander a decade ago with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the government in Dushanbe. Mahdi Arsalon’s real name is Muhammad Sharifov. Sharifov, 25, was born in the village of Sherbegiyon in Tajikistan’s eastern Rasht Valley.”

Although Tajikistan, led by President Emomali Rahmon, is the only Central Asian State still hostile to the Taliban, despite the Kremlin’s insistence it strike a more conciliatory tone with the new de facto power in Afghanistan, what the RFE-RL report failed to disclose is the fact that behind the back of the Emomali government, the Russian security agencies clandestinely nurtured not only Jamaat Ansarullah, led by Tajik militant leader Mahdi Arsalon, but also several other smaller groups and breakaway factions of Tajik and Uzbek militants and persuaded them to join ranks with the Taliban in its war against the US forces and the allied Northern Alliance collaborators in Afghanistan.

While providing a few “unnecessary details” at the bottom of the article, which the authors of the report were likely unaware of themselves, the RFE-RL report spilled the secret: “According to sources in Tajikistan, Sharifov aka Mahdi Arsalon joined Jamaat Ansarullah about seven years ago […] Sharifov was accepted into the seventh grade because of his age even though he had not ever attended state schools before.

“After graduating in 2015, he disappeared from the village and no one in Nurobod ever saw him again. Sharifov’s mother, Zulqada Yunusova, told RFE-RL that her son went to Russia as a migrant worker in 2015.

“RFE-RL also spoke with a former friend of Sharifov who claims Sharifov tried to convince him to join the jihad in Afghanistan. The Tajik man spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons. The man said he first met Sharifov when they worked in Russia and they stayed in contact on WhatsApp until about two months ago.”

Clearly, Sharifov and his band of militants were recruited by security agencies while he was searching for some menial job in Russia. Following the Ukraine crisis in 2014 and consequent souring of relations between the Kremlin and the Western powers, Russia militarily intervened in Syria in September 2015.

At the same time, Russian security agencies also began providing funds and weapons to the Afghan militants battling the NATO forces. Reportedly, Russia also offered bounties [2] to the Taliban to hunt down American soldiers.

In an August 2017 report [3] for the New York Times, Carlotta Gall described the killing of former Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mansour in a US drone strike in Pakistan’s western Balochistan province in May 2016 while he was on his way back from a secret meeting with Russian and Iranian officials in Iran.

According to the Times report, “Iran facilitated a meeting between Mullah Akhtar Mansour and Russian officials, Afghan officials said, securing funds and weapons from Moscow for the insurgents.”

It’s worth noting, however, that it wasn’t just Russia that was in bed with the Taliban. The allegations by regional power-brokers that Washington, too, had provided material support to splinter groups of the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as a tit-for-tat response to Pakistan’s security agencies’ double game of nurturing the Afghan Taliban are not entirely unfounded.

A news report leaked [4] in March 2018, during the trial of the widow of Orlando nightclub shooter, Omar Mateen, an ethnic Afghan residing in the US who had killed 49 people and wounded 53 others in a mass shooting at the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, on June 12, 2016, that his father, Seddique Mateen, was an FBI informant for eleven years.

In an email, the prosecution revealed to the defense attorney of Noor Salman, the widow of Omar Mateen, that Seddique Mateen was an FBI informant from January 2005 to June 2016 and had been sending money to Afghanistan and Turkey, likely to fund violent insurrection against the government of Pakistan.

Similarly, in November 2018, infighting between the main faction of the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Haibatullah Akhunzada and a breakaway faction led by Mullah Mohammad Rasul left scores of fighters dead in Afghanistan’s western Herat province.

Mullah Rasul was close to Taliban founder Mullah Mohammad Omar, and served as the governor of southwestern Nimroz province during the Taliban's rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001. After the news of the death of Mullah Omar was made public by the Afghan intelligence in 2015, Mullah Rasul broke ranks with the Taliban and formed his own faction.

Mullah Rasul's group was active in the provinces of Herat, Farah, Nimroz and Helmand, and was known to have received arms and support from the Afghan intelligence, as he had expressed willingness to recognize the Washington-backed Kabul government.

Regarding Washington’s motives for providing covert support to breakaway factions of the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani militants, the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack, and toppled the Taliban regime with the help of the Northern Alliance comprising ethnic Tajik and Uzbek warlords.

Since the beginning, however, Afghanistan was an area of lesser priority for the Bush administration. The number of US troops deployed in Afghanistan did not exceed beyond 30,000 during George Bush’s tenure as president, and soon after occupying Afghanistan, Washington invaded Iraq in March 2003 and American resources and focus shifted to Iraq.

It was the Obama administration that made the Afghanistan conflict the bedrock of its foreign policy in 2009 along with fulfilling then-President Obama’s electoral pledge of withdrawing American forces from Iraq in December 2011.

At the height of the surge of the US troops in Afghanistan in 2010, the American troops numbered around 100,000, with an additional 40,000 troops from the rest of the international coalition, but they still could not manage to have a lasting effect on the relentless Taliban insurgency.

The leadership and fighters of the Taliban found sanctuary in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and mounted an insurgency against the Washington-backed Kabul government. Throughout the occupation years, Washington kept pressuring Islamabad to mount military operations in the lawless tribal areas in order to deny safe havens to the Taliban.

However, Islamabad was reluctant to conduct military operations, which is a euphemism for all-out war, for the fear of alienating the Pashtun population of the tribal areas. After Pakistan’s security forces’ raid in July 2007 on a mosque (Lal Masjid) in the center of Islamabad, which also contained a religious seminary, scores of civilians, including students of the seminary, died.

The Pakistani Taliban made the incident a rallying call for waging a jihad against Pakistan’s military. Thereafter, terror attacks and suicide bombings against Pakistan’s state apparatus peaked following the July 2007 Lal Masjid incident. Eventually, under pressure from then-Obama administration, Pakistan’s military decided in 2009 to conduct military operations against militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The first military operation was mounted in the Swat valley in April 2009, the second in South Waziristan tribal agency in October the same year, and the third military operation was launched in North Waziristan and Khyber tribal agencies in June 2014. In the ensuing violence, tens of thousands of civilians, security personnel and militants lost their lives.

Although Pakistani political commentators often point fingers at the Washington-backed Kabul government in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s arch-foe India for providing money and arms to the Pakistani militants for waging a guerrilla war against Pakistan’s state apparatus, reportedly Washington, too, had provided covert support to the Pakistani Taliban in order to force Pakistan’s military to conduct military operations against militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Citations:

[1] Taliban Puts Tajik Militants Partially In Charge Of Afghanistan's Northern Border:

https://gandhara.rferl.org/a/taliban-tajik-militants-border/31380098.html

[2] Eric Schmitt: Russia offered bounties to Taliban for killing Americans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/us/politics/russian-bounties-warnings-trump.html

[3] Carlotta Gall: In Afghanistan, U.S. Exits, and Iran Comes In:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/world/asia/iran-afghanistan-taliban.html

[4] Pulse Nightclub Gunman's Father Was an FBI Informant:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/pulse-gunman-s-father-was-secret-fbi-informant-court-filing-n860116 

ISIS Prison Break: False Flag by Kurds to Keep US Forces in Syria

A fortnight before the killing of ISIS leader Abu Ibrahim al-Qurayshi in Syria’s northwest Idlib enclave in a Delta Force raid on Feb. 3, hundreds of heavily armed ISIS militants allegedly attempted an audacious prison break in the Kurdish-held northeastern city al-Hasakah on Jan. 20, ferociously freeing hundreds of prisoners.

High-security al-Sina’a prison is one of several detention centers in Syria’s northeast guarded by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The facility hosted 3,000 ISIS militants who were captured by the Kurds after the fall of the ISIS caliphate in 2019.

The ensuing ten-day manhunt to re-capture the escaped inmates and subdue the insurrection inside the prison lasted until Jan. 30, just two days before the killing of the ISIS leader. The death toll in the clearance operation was 500: 121 fatalities among the SDF, 374 suspected members of the Islamic State and four civilians, according to SDF sources.

Regarding the killing of the ISIS chief in the outskirts of Atmeh across the Turkish border, just 15 miles from Barisha village where his predecessor al-Baghdadi was killed in a similar Special Ops night raid in Oct. 2019, the Washington Post reported [1] on Feb. 10 that the hideout of the ISIS leader was disclosed on a tip-off from Kurdish sources of SDF, which President Biden effusively praised in the official announcement of the killing of al-Qurayshi following the raid.

The information regarding the whereabouts of the ISIS leader was obtained last fall, several months before the raid, the Delta Force commandos began preparing for the operation late Sept., and President Biden authorized the raid on Dec. 20.

The report notes: “The officials said Qurayshi — distinctive because of the leg, which CIA analysts think was amputated after injuries suffered in a 2015 airstrike — was sometimes spotted outside the house, or when taking brief strolls through the olive trees.

“Word eventually made its way to informants who work for the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mainly Kurdish militia group closely allied to the United States, current and former U.S. officials said. Intensive surveillance began immediately afterward, with Kurdish watchers following the arrivals and departures of armed men who trudged upstairs to meet with Qurayshi.”

Thus, the Kurdish leadership of SDF was frequently consulted by the US forces in Syria during the months-long manhunt for the ISIS chief and was kept informed of the movements of al-Qurayshi’s couriers.

A glaring contradiction in the Kurdish account of the events leading to the jailbreak in al-Hasakah is that if the US claims the ISIS leader remained in operational command via a network of couriers who were closely monitored and their communications intercepted by the CIA, then how is it possible that the fugitive ISIS chief staged a brazen prison break at al-Hasakah, hundreds of miles from his northwestern Idlib hideout, without the knowledge of the US forces tracking him down?

The report adds: “After a two-year manhunt, the elusive Qurayshi had been spotted, first by informants on the ground, and then that tip was confirmed by the drone’s telescopic lens. For U.S. officials involved in the search, two questions remained. One was how to kill or capture him while minimizing risk to U.S. forces and to the more than a dozen women and children who lived in the same building. The other: whether to strike quickly, or to wait and try to gather more information about Qurayshi’s far-flung network of underground terrorist cells.

“The waiting, which ultimately stretched over several months, proved to be worthwhile […] There was foot traffic: couriers and communication between cells,’ said a former senior intelligence official briefed on the events. ‘They milked it, to collect as much data as they could. They had to see who he was talking to.’

“The picture of Qurayshi that emerged from the surveillance is that of a hands-on commander who was firmly in charge of his organization and harbored ambitions for re-establishing the self-declared Islamist caliphate that once controlled a territory the size of England. His intensive involvement in operational planning made Qurayshi especially dangerous, officials said. But over time, it also made him more vulnerable.

“‘He was very much in command,’ a senior Biden administration official said of Qurayshi, a 45-year-old Iraqi who was born Amir Mohammed al-Mawli al-Salbi […] ‘His lieutenants and couriers were very active,’ the official said, in ‘making sure that his commands and orders were known.’”

Clearly, either there are inaccuracies in the Washington Post report pieced together from insider accounts of the details of operational planning of the raid revealed to the paper by “credible” Biden administration officials on the condition of anonymity and the fugitive ISIS leader wasn’t in command, or if he was actively directing the operational planning of the terrorist organization through a web of couriers tracked by the CIA, then how did the premier intelligence agency overlook his orders to mount an audacious jailbreak in al-Hasakah and didn’t give forewarning to the Kurdish SDF allies of imminent storming of the detention center by hundreds of heavily armed ISIS militants?

According to Syrian sources who refused to divulge identities due to fear of repercussions, what really transpired at the high-security al-Sina’a prison was that the Kurdish guards of the penitentiary incited an insurrection on the night of Jan. 20 and let hundreds of prisoners escape. Then the SDF forces mounted a ten-day manhunt for the fugitives and killed hundreds of unarmed prisoners who were hiding in adjacent areas.

US air support was occasionally requested to mount random airstrikes on indiscriminate targets often hosting the escaped ISIS militants and sometimes civilians. The whole orchestrated show was led by irregular SDF militias while a handful Special Ops units assisting the Kurds were kept at safe distance to avoid unnecessary loss of precious American lives.

Although the SDF might have suffered negligible casualties in skirmishes with the fugitives, majority of the death toll was among the prisoners, which the SDF refused to host in the first place and was asking third countries for their repatriation.

Biden’s abrupt withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan last August and consequent overrunning of the country by the Taliban is indicative of his inclination to disengage from myriad conflicts of the Middle East and bring troops back to the US.

The false-flag prison break by the SDF was a desperate attempt by the Kurds to keep the specter of the ISIS resurgence alive after the fall of the militant group’s caliphate in 2019 and the killing of both the caliphs, and to keep the US forces engaged in the Syrian conflict, the Kurds’ only assurance against overrunning of their newly acquired territories in eastern Syria by organized and well-armed Turkish and Syrian security forces.

After the liberation of the ISIS-held territories in Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in Syria in 2017 and the clearance operations at the Iraq-Syria border that lasted until 2019, the remnants of the militant group are on the run and the rest have already joined the ranks of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), led by al-Qaeda’s formidable Syrian franchise al-Nusra Front, in Syria’s northwest Idlib enclave controlled by the regional US ally, Turkey.

Thus, the principal rationale for keeping the US forces in Syria is no longer valid. Biden would’ve withdrawn troops long ago, not only from Syria but also from Iraq, whose legislators passed a parliamentary resolution asking the US to withdraw its forces from the country following the killing of venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

Following the dismantling of the ISIS caliphate in 2019, Biden would’ve withdrawn US forces from Iraq, which have repeatedly come under rocket fire from Iran-backed Iraqi militias, as soon as he was inaugurated president in Jan. 2021. The only reason he cannot withdraw troops from Iraq is because the US forces in Iraq have been deployed in support of contingents of American troops stationed across the border in Kurdish-held regions in eastern Syria and at al-Tanf.

Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and straddles a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained thousands of Syrian militants at the sprawling military base.

Rather than battling the Islamic State, the foremost purpose of continued presence of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel’s security concerns regarding the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Nevertheless, it’s worth pointing out that the orchestrated jailbreak wasn’t the only incident when the Kurdish-led SDF has shown utter disregard for civilian casualties in its all-out war on Syrian Arabs.

Five years following a potentially catastrophic incident that could’ve inundated Islamic State’s former capital Raqqa and many towns downstream Euphrates River in eastern Syria and caused more deaths than the deployment of any weapon of mass destruction, the New York Times reported last month [2] that at the height of US-led international coalition’s war against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, US B-52 bombers struck Tabqa Dam with 2,000-pound bombs, including at least one bunker-busting bomb that fortunately didn’t explode.

In March 2017, alternative media was abuzz with reports that the dam was about to collapse and entire civilian population downstream Euphrates River needed to be urgently evacuated to prevent the inevitable catastrophe. But Washington issued a gag order to the corporate media “not to sensationalize the issue.”

The explosive report noted that the dam was contested between the US-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian government and the Islamic State. A firefight broke out in which SDF incurred heavy casualties. It was then that a top secret US special operations unit Task Force 9 called for airstrikes on the dam after repeated requests from the Kurdish leadership of the SDF.

“The explosions on March 26, 2017, knocked dam workers to the ground. A fire spread and crucial equipment failed. The flow of the Euphrates River suddenly had no way through, the reservoir began to rise and authorities used loudspeakers to warn people downstream to flee.

“The Islamic State group, the Syrian government and Russia blamed the United States, but the dam was on the US military’s ‘no-strike list’ of protected civilian sites, and the commander of the US offensive at the time, then-Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, said allegations of US involvement were based on ‘crazy reporting.’”

Citations:

[1] With watchers on the ground and spy drones overhead, U.S. zeroed in on Islamic State leader’s hideout:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/02/10/isis-qurayshi-raid/

[2] A dam in Syria was on a ‘no-strike’ list. The US bombed it anyway:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/20/us/airstrike-us-isis-dam.html   

Will Iran Strike at Global Oil Supply if Russia Invades Ukraine?

Following Russia’s troop build-up along Ukraine’s borders portending imminent invasion, Houthi rebels in Yemen backed by Iran, which is Russia’s most dependable regional ally in the decade-long Syrian conflict, have significantly escalated missile strikes on the oil-rich Gulf States with a nod of approval from the Kremlin in order to take pressure off Russia in the Ukraine stand-off by opening a second front in the veritable Achilles’ heel of the energy-dependent industrialized world.

To buttress the defenses in the Gulf, US F-22 fighter jets arrived in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on Saturday, Feb. 12, as part of an American defense response to recent missile attacks by Yemen’s Houthi rebels targeting the country. The Raptors landed at Al-Dhafra Air Base in Abu Dhabi, which hosts 2,000 US troops. American soldiers there launched Patriot interceptor missiles and briefly had to take shelter after the missiles exploded in the airspace above the military base last month.

The deployment came after the Houthi rebels launched three attacks targeting Abu Dhabi last month, including one targeting a fuel depot that killed three people and wounded six. The attacks coincided with visits by presidents from South Korea and Israel to the UAE. Though overshadowed by the Ukraine crisis, the missile strikes targeting the Emirates has sparked a major US response. The American military has sent the USS Cole on a mission to Abu Dhabi.

To return the favor of opening a second front in the Gulf and acknowledging Russia’s steadfast strategic alliance with Iran in the region, the Kremlin issued rare condemnation [1] of recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria as “crude violation” of Syria's sovereignty on Thursday, Feb. 10, that up until now were tacitly tolerated by the Russian forces based in Syria’s Tartus naval base and Khmeimim airbase southeast of Latakia, and also pledged last month that the Russian Air Force would conduct joint air patrols alongside the Syrian Air Force that would pre-empt the likelihood of further Israeli airstrikes in the future.

“Israel’s continuing strikes against targets inside Syria cause deep concern,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said. “They are a crude violation of Syria’s sovereignty and may trigger a sharp escalation of tensions. Also, such actions pose serious risks to international passenger flights.”

Although Israel claims its air campaign in Syria is meant to target Iran-backed militias, the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers. Syrian state media said one soldier was killed and five more were wounded in the latest Israeli attack at Damascus, which occurred Wednesday, Feb. 9.

Russia has held talks with Israel on Syria, and said last month it would begin joint air patrols with Syria. The patrols will include areas near the Golan Heights in southern Syria bordering Israel, a frequent site of the Israeli airstrikes, and Israel is said to be considering discontinuing the strikes altogether or slowing them down significantly.

The Times of Israel noted that this marked a momentous change in policy for Russia: “Following the patrol, Ynet reported that Israeli military officials were holding talks with Russian army officers to calm tensions.”

The report added, “Israeli officials were struggling to understand why Russia, which announced that such joint patrols were expected to be a regular occurrence moving forward, had apparently changed its policy toward Israel.” The report claimed that Israel might limit its air campaign in Syria as a result of Russia’s “mystifying” change in the Syria policy.

Over the years, Israel has not only provided material support to 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 the terrorists and mounted hundreds of airstrikes in Syria during the decade-long conflict.

In an interview to New York Times [2] in January 2019, Israel’s former 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 on 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 purported rationale of the 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.

Nevertheless, Israeli military strategists’ “concerns” aside, it’s worth recalling that a joint American-Israeli program [4], involving a series of short-of-war clandestine strikes, aimed at taking out the most prominent generals of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and targeting Iran’s power stations, industrial infrastructure, and missile and nuclear facilities has been going on since early 2020 after the commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani was assassinated in an American airstrike at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020.

As the US presidential race heated up in the election year, the pace and sophistication of the subversive attacks in Iran picked up simultaneously. In the summer of 2020, “mysterious explosions” were reported at a missile and explosives storage facility at Parchin military base on June 26, at power stations in the cities of Shiraz and Ahvaz, a “mysterious fire” at Bushehr port on July 15 destroying seven ships, and a massive explosion at the Natanz nuclear site on July 2, 2020 that reportedly set back Iran’s nuclear program by at least two years.

Besides wooing the Zionist lobbies in the run-up to the US presidential election, another purpose of the subversive attacks appeared to be to avenge a string of audacious attacks mounted by the Iran-backed forces against the US strategic interests in the Persian Gulf that brought the US and Iran to the brink of a full-scale war in September 2019.

In addition to planting limpet mines on oil tankers off the coast of UAE in May 2019 and the subsequent downing of the American Global Hawk surveillance drone in the Persian Gulf by Iran, the brazen attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia on September 14, 2019, was the third major attack in the Persian Gulf against the assets of Washington and its regional allies.

That the UAE had the forewarning of the imminent attacks was proved by the fact that weeks before the attacks, it recalled forces from Yemen battling the Houthi rebels and redeployed them to defend the UAE’s territorial borders.

The September 14, 2019, attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility in eastern Saudi Arabia was an apocalypse for the global oil industry because it processed five million barrels crude oil per day, almost half of Saudi Arabia’s total oil production.

The subversive attack sent jitters across the global markets and the oil price surged 15%, the largest spike witnessed in three decades since the First Gulf War after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, though the oil price was eased within weeks after industrialized nations released their strategic oil reserves.

It bears mentioning that alongside deploying several thousand American troops, additional aircraft squadrons and Patriot missile batteries in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the Abqaiq attack, several interventionist hawks in Washington invoked the Carter Doctrine of 1980 as a ground for mounting retaliatory strikes against Iran, which states:

“Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Although the Houthi rebels based in Yemen claimed the responsibility for the September 2019 complex attack involving drones and cruise missiles on the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, Washington dismissed the possibility. Instead, it accused Tehran of mounting the complex attack from Iran’s territory.

Nevertheless, puerile pranks like planting limpet mines on oil tankers and downing a $200-million surveillance aircraft can be overlooked but the major provocation of mounting a drone and missile attack on the Abqaiq petroleum facility that crippled its oil-processing functions for weeks was nothing short of showing red rag to the bull.

Unless Iran got the green light to go ahead with the attacks from a major military power that equals Washington’s firepower, such confrontation would have amounted to a suicidal approach.

Considering such a co-ordinated escalation in the Gulf by Iran and Russia, it seems a forgone conclusion that if Kremlin decided to invade Ukraine, Iran, too, would mobilize its forces in the critically important volatile region to disrupt the global oil supply and put pressure on the energy-dependent industrialized powers to carefully consider their retaliatory measures against the Russia-Iran military alliance.

In fact, this was the precise message conveyed to Washington’s military strategists by the last month’s audacious Houthi attacks on targets in UAE, specifically the one targeting al-Dhafra airbase hosting US forces.

Regardless, the acts of subversion in the Persian Gulf in 2019 culminating in the “sacrilegious assault” on the veritable mecca of the oil production industry in Sept. 2019 should be viewed in the broader backdrop of the New Cold War that has begun following the Ukraine crisis in 2014 after Russia occupied the Crimean peninsula and Washington imposed sanctions on the Kremlin.

In addition, Russia’s membership in the G8 forum was suspended by the Western powers in March 2014 and Russian President Vladimir Putin was snubbed at international summits by the Western leaders, by then-President Obama in particular, an insult that the Russian strongman took rather personally.

The Kremlin’s immediate response to the escalation by Washington was that it jumped into the fray in Syria in September 2015, after a clandestine visit to Moscow by General Qassem Soleimani, the slain commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force.

When Russia deployed its forces and military hardware to Syria in September 2015, the militant proxies of Washington and its regional clients were on the verge of drawing a wedge between Damascus and the Alawite heartland of coastal Latakia, which could have led to the imminent downfall of the Bashar al-Assad government.

With the help of the Russian air power, the Syrian government has since reclaimed most of Syria’s territory from the insurgents, excluding Idlib in the northwest occupied by the Turkish-backed militants and Deir al-Zor and the Kurdish-held areas in the east, thus inflicting a humiliating defeat on Washington and its regional allies.

Finally, a word about the venerated commander of IRGC’s Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani who was assassinated in an American airstrike on a tip-off from the Israeli intelligence at the Baghdad airport on January 3, 2020. Soleimani was the most trusted aide of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his main liaison for holding consultations with Russia.

Not only did he convince Kremlin with his diplomatic skills to strike at Washington’s vulnerability in the Syrian conflict but he was also the chief architect of the audacious September 2019 attacks at the Abqaiq petroleum facility and the Khurais oil field in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.

Reportedly, Trump initially rejected [5] the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani on December 28, 2019, due to apprehensions over full-scale confrontation with Iran, and authorized airstrikes on Iran-backed militia groups in Iraq instead.

But after one of frequent rocket attacks at the US embassy in Baghdad claimed by Iran-backed forces, Trump succumbed to pressure from the American deep state, led by the powerful top brass of the Pentagon, which had a score to settle with General Soleimani for giving the global power a bloody nose in Syria’s war.

Citations:

[1] Russia cites ‘deep concern’ over ongoing Israeli strikes in Syria:

https://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-cites-deep-concern-over-ongoing-israeli-strikes-in-syria/   

[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

[4] Long-Planned and Bigger Than Thought: Strike on Iran’s Nuclear Program:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/10/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-trump.html

[5] Trump initially rejected the Pentagon’s option to assassinate General Soleimani:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/04/us/politics/trump-suleimani.html 

Is Trump Campaign Funded by Subversive Anti-China Group?

In the heyday of the Cold War during the seventies and eighties, Western corporate media insidiously mounted a smear campaign against communists, maliciously branding them “infidels and heathens” having the nefarious agenda of forcibly converting pious Muslims to “Satanic atheism” in order to create a rift between devoutly religious and traditionalist Islamic World and the progressive communist bloc, despite being aware of the clear distinction that Marxism is simply an egalitarian economic theory having nothing, whatsoever, to do with religio-cultural affairs.

Then Western security establishments alongside their Middle Eastern client regimes nurtured Islamic fundamentalists as regional proxies, generously providing funds, training and weapons to Islamic jihadists while internationally legitimizing them as “freedom fighters” battling Soviet hegemony, and encouraged them to mount a holy jihad against “Godless communists” all the way from Afghanistan in the Central Asia to Chechnya in the North Caucasus and Bosnia and Kosovo in the Balkans.

Similarly, following the rise of China as a major economic power in the 21^st century, the mainstream media has once again been tasked by the security establishments to demonize the global rival by blowing out of proportions the sheer fabrication of alleged “genocide and ethnic cleansing” of Uyghur Muslim’s in China’s western Xinjiang province in order to drive a wedge between the rising industrial power and the Islamic World.

Unlike several hapless Islamic countries in the Middle East, such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, that went through US military occupation or intervention through regional proxies and where countless large-scale massacres have taken place creating millions of refugees, no such massacre or forced displacement of ethnic Uyghurs has ever been recorded in China’s Xinjiang, not even by the corporate media, the foremost purveyor of presumed Uyghur persecution in China.

After the deadly Urumqi riots in July 2009 between the Han and Uyghur ethnic groups in Xinjiang’s provincial capital in which scores of rioters on both sides were killed, China went through a series of violent terror attacks that rocked Xinjiang and the rest of China in the following years.

Dozens of civilians were hacked to death at a busy train station in China’s south. A Uyghur drove a car into crowds at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Forty-three died when militants threw bombs from two sports utility vehicles plowing through a busy market street in Urumqi. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Xinjiang in 2014, bombs tore through an Urumqi train station, killing three and injuring 79.

After experiencing the spate of Islamist-inspired terror attacks, Chinese authorities initiated de-radicalization programs in Xinjiang in which Uyghurs were encouraged to participate, as in the Western countries where Muslim immigrants were kept under surveillance and suspects with history of violent crimes were asked to attend de-radicalization programs in the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attack when anti-Muslim paranoia was at the peak.

Most of the aforementioned terror attacks in China were claimed by East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), a formidable transnational terrorist organization of Uyghurs that has taken part in Islamist insurgencies as far away as Afghanistan and Syria. The militant group has been declared a proscribed terrorist outfit by China, the United Nations and many regional countries, though the Trump administration removed its terrorist designation in 2020.

Much like the Uyghur diaspora in the Western countries being patronized by the security agencies and the corporate media to malign a global rival, there is another clandestine organization of Chinese dissidents based in the US that until the November 2020 presidential election enjoyed the protection of the US security establishment and was used as a trump card to mount psychological warfare against the Chinese government.

Falun Gong was founded by its leader Li Hongzhi in China in the early 1990s. Today, Falun Gong maintains an informal headquarters, Dragon Springs, a 400-acre compound in upstate New York, located near the current residence of Li Hongzhi. Falun Gong's performance arts extension, Shen Yun, and two closely connected schools, Fei Tian College and Fei Tian Academy of the Arts, also operate in and around Dragon Springs.

Since 1998, Li Hongzhi has settled as a permanent resident in the United States and maintains high-level contacts not only in the governments of the US and China but also enjoys immense political clout among Chinese diaspora across the world, thanks to the deep pockets of several billionaire Chinese oligarchs that Falun Gong boasts in its ranks, who generously contribute to finance the clandestine organization’s anti-China propaganda operations.

Forget about criticizing the secretive society, up until the elections it wasn’t even permitted to mention the name of Falun Gong on mainstream news outlets. It was simply described as “a religious and spiritual movement” that teaches “meditation techniques” to its members in all the information available in the public domain about the objectives and activities of the religio-political cult.

But in an explosive article [1] for the New York Times in October 2020 to dispel a flurry of reports about the “Chinagate scandal” implicating the Biden campaign in the run-up to the US presidential election, Kevin Roose blew the lid off on the subversive organization and its media outlet The Epoch Times, widely followed by Trump supporters, and alleged:

“For years, The Epoch Times was a small, low-budget newspaper with an anti-China slant that was handed out free on New York street corners. But in 2016 and 2017, the paper made two changes that transformed it into one of the country’s most powerful digital publishers.

“The changes also paved the way for the publication, which is affiliated with the secretive and relatively obscure Chinese spiritual movement Falun Gong, to become a leading purveyor of right-wing misinformation.

“First, it embraced President Trump, treating him as an ally in Falun Gong’s scorched-earth fight against China’s ruling Communist Party, which banned the group two decades ago and has persecuted its members ever since. Its relatively staid coverage of U.S. politics became more partisan, with more articles explicitly supporting Mr. Trump and criticizing his opponents.

“As the 2016 election neared, reporters noticed that the paper’s political coverage took on a more partisan tone. ‘They seemed to have this almost messianic way of viewing Trump as the anti-communist leader who would bring about the end of the Chinese Communist Party,’ Steve Klett, who covered the 2016 campaign for the paper, said.

“Where the paper’s money comes from is something of a mystery. Former employees said they had been told that The Epoch Times was financed by a combination of subscriptions, ads and donations from wealthy Falun Gong practitioners.

“Steve Bannon, the former chief strategist of the White House, is among those who have noticed The Epoch Times’s deep pockets. Last year, he produced a documentary about China with NTD. When he talked with the outlet about other projects, he said, money never seemed to be an issue. ‘I’d give them a number,’ Mr. Bannon said. ‘And they’d come back and say, We’re good for that number.’”

The Times report wasn’t the first instance of the mainstream media implicating Chinese dissidents in the electoral politics of the US. In a tit-for-tat response to the pro-Trump New York Post’s bombshell report exposing Hunter Biden’s murky financial dealings with Ukrainian and Chinese oligarchs in the run-up to the US presidential elections, the Daily Beast came up with a scoop [2] in October 2020 that the hard disks on which Hunter’s emails were found were provided to Rudy Giuliani by a Chinese billionaire Guo Wengui on behalf of dissident members of the Chinese Communist Party.

According to the report: “Weeks before the New York Post began publishing what it claimed were the contents of Hunter Biden’s hard drive, a Sept. 25 segment on a YouTube channel run by a Chinese dissident streamer, who is linked to billionaire and Steve Bannon-backer Guo Wengui, broadcast a bizarre conspiracy theory.

“According to the streamer, Chinese politburo officials had ‘sent three hard disks of evidence’ to the Justice Department and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi containing damaging information about Joe Biden as well as the origins of the coronavirus in a bid to undermine the rule of Chinese President Xi Jinping …

“While Guo’s ties to Steve Bannon have long been known—Bannon was arrested for defrauding donors in August on a 152-foot-long yacht reportedly owned by Guo—the billionaire appears to have also joined forces with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani in the former New York mayor’s relentless anti-Biden dirt-digging crusade.

“Guo Wengui has been in the Trumpworld orbit pretty much from the beginning, paying the $200,000 initiation fee to become a member of the president’s Florida golf resort Mar-a-Lago, which Trump has dubbed the ‘Southern White House.’ But Guo’s membership soon became a headache for the administration in the run-up to Trump’s first summit meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017, due to Guo’s fugitive status in China.

“At one point, Trump had reportedly considered deporting Guo after the Chinese government called for his extradition in a letter delivered to Trump by casino mogul Steve Wynn in 2017. After presenting the letter during a policy meeting, the president reportedly said, ‘We need to get this criminal out of the country,’ only for aides to remind him that Guo was a Mar-a-Lago member, eventually talking him out of the decision and ensuring the deportation was scuttled …

“Guo has framed himself as a stalwart critic of the CCP and China’s corrupt elite, but his efforts have divided China’s exile community. Guo has enthusiastically attacked other critics of Beijing as jealous poseurs, including most recently a Texas Christian pastor and Tiananmen protester named Bob Fu—who was imprisoned in China for his faith before escaping to the U.S.—whom Guo accuses of being a secret agent for the CCP. Fu has lobbed the same charge back at Guo and his followers.”

Although the Daily Beast article didn’t even once mention the name of the clandestine organization Falun Gong, Guo Wengui is known to be a trusted associate of Li Hongzhi, the founder and veritable prophet of the religio-political cult presumed to be having “supernatural powers” by brainwashed followers.

Regardless, it’s noteworthy that it wasn’t just financial inducements offered by billionaire Chinese oligarchs that lured the Trump campaign into the Falun Gong orbit, but also the political mileage that could be obtained by initiating a trade war against China.

In order to understand the real and perceived grievances of Donald Trump’s “alt-right” electoral base, it would be pertinent to point out that during the last decade, all the manufacturing has outsourced to China. Although the bankers and executives of multinational corporations are the beneficiaries of outsourcing, the middle and working classes that constituted Trump’s electoral base are finding it hard to make ends meet.

Besides the Trump supporters in the United States, the far-right populist leaders in Europe are also exploiting popular resentment against market fundamentalism. The Brexiteers in the United Kingdom, the Yellow Vest protesters in France and the far-right movements across Europe are manifestations 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.

Trump withdrawing the United States from multilateral treaties, restructuring trade agreements, bringing investments and employments back to the US and initiating a trade war against China were some of the salient features of the “alt-right” economic reforms agenda that appealed to the working class constituency he represented, and won over 74 million popular votes, likely the largest number of votes won in the US history by a losing presidential candidate.

Citations:

[1] How The Epoch Times Created a Giant Influence Machine:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/24/technology/epoch-times-influence-falun-gong.html

[2] Chinese Billionaire’s Network Hyped Hunter Biden Dirt Weeks Before Rudy:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/chinese-billionaires-network-hyped-hunter-biden-dirt-weeks-before-rudy?ref=home

About the author:

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and the Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of meticulously researched and credibly sourced investigative reports to alternative news media.

11 Feb 2022.