“…live goats were stabbed, had their organs yanked out, and had their limbs broken and cut off with tree trimmers during a military training drill, all while the animals moaned and kicked…”

there’s always this massive, taken for granted crime, the tyrannization of animals by humans in scales so massive and with a violence so staggering as to defy comprehension and stunt the senses.

Many more people have to join this cause—which is, incidentally, inextricably bound up with the salvation of the planet—if humanity is ever to emerge from the moral swamp in which superstition, Speciesism, and misleadership have sunk it. Please take a moment to read the PETA report on this important subject and take action. Incidentally, we naturally support any and all campaigns to help the animals, but we are not formal members of nor affiliated with PETA in any fashion.
Thank you.—Patrice Greanville

 

[PETA Communiqué]

Our years of campaigning for the use of more humane and effective training methods recently pinnacled when President Barack Obama signed a bill requiring the Department of Defense to submit to Congress, by this-coming Friday, a detailed strategy and timeline for the phase-out of these deadly exercises. This is the first time in history that Congress has passed a bill that seeks to protect animals from being abused in military training exercises.

As The Washington Post story discusses, this effort was bolstered last year when PETA released disturbing, never-before-seen undercover footage showing live goats as they were stabbed, had their organs yanked out, and had their limbs broken and cut off with tree trimmers during a military training drill, all while the animals moaned and kicked. The video prompted action by federal authorities and Congress and led to an international outcry from compassionate people like you, including high-profile military veterans Oliver Stone, Bob Barker, and Gideon Raff as well as current and former military doctors and medics.

On top of that, PETA researchers and military doctors published a first-of-its-kind study in the military’s own medical journal showing that the U.S. is shamefully one of the last NATO nations that still maims and torments animals for medical training.

In recent years, we’ve convinced the Army and Navy to replace cruel training laboratories involving monkeys, cats, and ferrets in favor of human-like simulators. Now we’re close to ending the abuse of the animals most frequently and violently killed by the military.

Thank you for supporting these efforts. We urge you now to take a moment towrite to the Department of Defense so that it hears loud and clear that the public wants an immediate switch from cruel animal laboratories to modern and humane simulation tools.

Sincerely,

Justin Goodman
Director
Laboratory Investigations Department
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

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The moral ambiguity of Homeland or Argo is a fitting tribute to the reality of US Middle East policy

Rachel Shabi
The Guardian, Monday 14 January 2013

America’s Middle East policy has been enthusiastically endorsed. Not at the UN or Arab League, however, but by the powerbrokers of Hollywood. At the Golden Globes, there were gongs for a heroically bearded CIA spook saving hostages and American face in Iran (the film Argo); a heroically struggling agent tracking down Bin Laden (Zero Dark Thirty) and heroically flawed CIA operatives protecting America from mindless, perpetual terror (TV series Homeland).

The three winners have all been sold as complex, nuanced productions that don’t shy away from hard truths about US foreign policy. And liberal audiences can’t get enough of them. Perhaps it’s because, alongside the odd bit of self-criticism, they are all so reassuringly insistent that, in an increasingly complicated world, America just keeps on doing the right thing. And even when it does the wrong thing – such as, I don’t know, torture and drone strikes and deadly invasions – it is to combat far greater evil, and therefore OK.

When I saw Argo in London with a Turkish friend, we were the only ones not clapping at the end. Instead, we were wondering why every Iranian in this horribly superior film was so angry and shouty. It was a tense, meticulously styled depiction of America’s giant, perpetual, wailing question mark over the Middle East: “Why do they hate us?” Iranians are so irked by the historically flimsy retelling of the hostage crisis that their government has commissioned its own version in response.

Zero Dark Thirty, another blanked-out, glossed-up portrayal of US policy, seems to imply that America’s use of torture – sorry, “enhanced interrogation” – is legitimate because it led to the capture of Osama bin Laden (something that John McCain and others have pointed out is not even true). Adding insult to moral bankruptcy, the movie has been cast as a feminist film, because it has a smart female lead. This is cinematic fraud: a device used to extort our approval.

Homeland was no better. It is the story of an American marine taken captive by a top al-Qaida terrorist who turns out, wouldn’t you know, to be Palestinian. Tortured while detained (though I’m guessing this would be bad torture, not the good kind used in Zero Dark Thirty), the marine turns to Islam and, coincidentally, to terror. Meanwhile, all the Arab and Muslim characters in Homeland – however successful, integrated, clever, whatever – are all somehow signed up to the global terror network. As Laila Al-Arian, a journalist and co-author of Collateral Damage: America’s War against Iraqi Civilians, puts it: “Viewers are left to believe that Muslims/Arabs participate in terrorist networks like Americans send holiday cards.” She describes this celebrated Golden Globe winner as “TV’s most Islamophobic show”.

When challenged, the creators of these travesties respond with pat dismissal: the director Kathryn Bigelow pointed out that Zero Dark Thirty is “just a movie”. Ben Affleck has spoken touchingly of his concern that Argo might be politicised.

But why would these renditions of US policy be seen in the Middle East as anything other than attempts to seize the moral high ground? It’s all supposed to be a massive stride forward in the portrayal of complexity, made to challenge American audience preconceptions – and a far cry from the bad old days depicted in Reel Bad Arabs, a documentary that shows how Hollywood caricatures Arabs as “belly dancers, billionaire sheikhs and bombers”, according to one reviewer.

But such slick, award-winning cinema isn’t about nuance, it’s just self-serving moral ambiguity – and in this sense it is a fitting cultural reflection of actual US policy in the Middle East.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rachel Shabi has written extensively on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Middle East. Her award-winning book, Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands, was published in 2009. She received the Anna Lindh Journalism Award for reporting across cultures in 2011 and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize the same year. She tweets @rachshabi

By David Vine

TomDispatch.com

“Are you monitoring the construction?” asked the middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his dog.

“Ah, sì,” I replied in my barely passable Italian.

“Bene,” he answered. Good.

In front of us, a backhoe’s guttural engine whined into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention with the metallic whirring of drills and saws ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes spread across the landscape, with the foothills of Italy’s Southern Alps in the background. More than 100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers, and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon would be 34 new buildings.

We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a “little America” rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relocation of as many as 2,000 soldiers from Germany in 2013.

Since 1955, Vicenza has also been home to another major U.S. base, Camp Ederle. They’re among the more than 1,000 bases the United States uses to ring the globe (with about 4,000 more in the 50 states and Washington, D.C.). This complex of military installations, unprecedented in history, has been a major, if little noticed, aspect of U.S. power since World War II.

During the Cold War, such bases became the foundation for a “forward strategy” meant to surround the Soviet Union and push U.S. military power as close to its borders as possible. These days, despite the absence of a superpower rival, the Pentagon has been intent on dotting the globe with scores of relatively small “lily pad” bases, while continuing to build and maintain some large bases like Dal Molin.

Americans rarely think about these bases, let alone how much of their tax money — and debt — is going to build and maintain them. For Dal Molin and related construction nearby, including a brigade headquarters, two sets of barracks, a natural-gas-powered energy plant, a hospital, two schools, a fitness center, dining facilities, and a mini-mall, taxpayers are likely to shell out at least half a billion dollars. (All the while, a majority of locals passionately and vocally oppose the new base.)

How much does the United States spend each year occupying the planet with its bases and troops? How much does it spend on its global presence? Forced by Congress to account for its spending overseas, the Pentagon has put that figure at $22.1 billion a year. It turns out that even a conservative estimate of the true costs of garrisoning the globe comes to an annual total of about $170 billion. In fact, it may be considerably higher. Since the onset of “the Global War on Terror” in 2001, the total cost for our garrisoning policies, for our presence abroad, has probably reached $1.8 trillion to $2.1 trillion.

How Much Do We Spend?

By law, the Pentagon must produce an annual “Overseas Cost Summary” (OCS) putting a price on the military’s activities abroad, from bases to embassies and beyond. This means calculating all the costs of military construction, regular facility repairs, and maintenance, plus the costs of maintaining one million U.S. military and Defense Department personnel and their families abroad — the pay checks, housing, schools, vehicles, equipment, and the transportation of personnel and materials overseas and back, and far, far more.

The latest OCS, for the 2012 fiscal year ending September 30th, documented $22.1 billion in spending, although, at Congress’s direction, this doesn’t include any of the more than $118 billion spent that year on the wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the globe.

While $22.1 billion is a considerable sum, representing about as much as the budgets for the Departments of Justice and Agriculture and about half the State Department’s 2012 budget, it contrasts sharply with economist Anita Dancs’s estimate of $250 billion. She included war spending in her total, but even without it, her figure comes to around $140 billion — still $120 billion more than the Pentagon suggests.

Wanting to figure out the real costs of garrisoning the planet myself, for more than three years, as part of a global investigation of bases abroad, I’ve talked to budget experts, current and former Pentagon officials, and base budget officers. Many politely suggested that this was a fool’s errand given the number of bases involved, the complexity of distinguishing overseas from domestic spending, the secrecy of Pentagon budgets, and the “frequently fictional” nature of Pentagon figures. (The Department of Defense remains the only federal agency unable to pass a financial audit.)

Ever the fool and armed only with the power of searchable PDFs, I nonetheless plunged into the bizarro world of Pentagon accounting, where ledgers are sometimes still handwritten and $1 billion can be a rounding error. I reviewed thousands of pages of budget documents, government and independent reports, and hundreds of line items for everything from shopping malls to military intelligence to postal subsidies.

Wanting to err on the conservative side, I decided to follow the methodology Congress mandated for the OCS, while also looking for overseas costs the Pentagon or Congress might have ignored. It hardly made sense to exclude, for example, the health-care costs the Department of Defense pays for troops on overseas bases, spending for personnel in Kosovo, or the price tag for supporting the 550 bases we have in Afghanistan.

In the spirit of “monitoring the construction,” let me lead you on an abbreviated account of my quest to come up with the real costs of occupying planet Earth.

Missing Costs

Although the Overseas Cost Summary initially might seem quite thorough, you’ll soon notice that countries well known to host U.S. bases have gone missing-in-action. In fact, at least 18 countries and foreign territories on the Pentagon’s own list of overseas bases go unnamed.

Particularly surprising is the absence of Kosovo and Bosnia. The military has had large bases and hundreds of troops there for more than a decade, with another Pentagon report showing 2012 costs of $313.8 million. According to that report, the OCS also understates costs for bases in Honduras and Guantánamo Bay by about a third or $85 million.

And then other oddities appear: in places like Australia and Qatar, the Pentagon says it has funds to pay troops but no money for “operations and maintenance” to turn the lights on, feed people, or do regular repairs. Adjusting for these costs adds an estimated $36 million. As a start, I found:

$436 million for missing countries and costs.

That’s not much compared to $22 billion and chump change in the context of the whole Pentagon budget, but it’s just a beginning.

At Congress’s direction, the Pentagon also omits the costs of bases in the oft-forgotten U.S. territories — Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. This is strange because the Pentagon considers them “overseas.” More important, as economist Dancs says, “The United States retains territories… primarily for the purposes of the military and projecting military power.” Plus, they are, well, literally overseas.

Conservatively, this adds $3 billion in total military spending to the OCS.

However, there are more quasi-U.S. territories in the form of truly forgotten Pacific Ocean island nations in “compacts of free association” with the United States — the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and Palau. Ever since it controlled these islands as “strategic trust territories” after World War II, the U.S. has enjoyed the right to establish military facilities on them, including the nuclear test site on the Bikini Atoll and the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site elsewhere in the Marshalls.

This comes in exchange for yearly aid payments from the Office of Insular Affairs, adding another $571 million and yielding total costs of:

$3.6 billion for territories and Pacific island nations.

Speaking of the oceans, at Congress’s instruction, the Pentagon excludes the cost of maintaining naval vessels overseas. But Navy and Marine Corps vessels are essentially floating (and submersible) bases used to maintain a powerful military presence on (and under) the seas. A very conservative estimate for these costs adds another $3.8 billion.

Then there are the costs of Navy prepositioned ships at anchor around the world. Think of them as warehouse-bases at sea, stocked with weaponry, war materiel, and other supplies. And don’t forget Army prepositioned stocks. Together, they come to an estimated $604 million a year. In addition, the Pentagon appears to omit some $861 million for overseas “sealift” and “airlift” and “other mobilization” expenses. All told, the bill grows by:

$5.3 billion for Navy vessels and personnel plus seaborne and airborne assets.

Also strangely missing from the Cost Summary is that little matter of health-care costs. Overseas costs for the Defense Health Program and other benefits for personnel abroad add an estimated $11.7 billion yearly. And then there’s $538 million in military and family housing construction that the Pentagon also appears to overlook in its tally.

So too, we can’t forget about shopping on base, because we the taxpayers are subsidizing those iconic Walmart-like PX (Post Exchange) shopping malls on bases worldwide. Although the military is fond of saying that the PX system pays for itself because it helps fund on-base recreation programs, Pentagon leaders neglect to mention that the PXs get free buildings and land, free utilities, and free transportation of goods to overseas locations. They also operate tax-free.

While there’s no estimate for the value of the buildings, land, and utilities that taxpayers provide, the exchanges reported $267 million in various subsidies for 2011. (Foregone federal taxes might add $30 million or more to that figure.) Add in as well postal subsidies of at least $71 million and you have:

$12.6 billion for health care, military and family housing, shopping and postal subsidies.

Another Pentagon exclusion is rent paid to other countries for the land we garrison. Although a few countries like Japan, Kuwait, and South Korea actually pay the United States to subsidize our garrisons — to the tune of $1.1 billion in 2012 — far more common, according to base expert Kent Calder, “are the cases where the United States pays nations to host bases.”

Given the secretive nature of basing agreements and the complex economic and political trade-offs involved in base negotiations, precise figures are impossible to find. However, Pentagon-funded research indicates that 18% of total foreign military and economic aid goes toward buying base access. That swells our invoice by around $6.3 billion. Payments to NATO of $1.7 billion “for the acquisition and construction of military facilities and installations” and other purposes, brings us to:

$6.9 billion in net “rent” payments and NATO contributions.

Although the OCS must report the costs of all military operations abroad, the Pentagon omits $550 million for counternarcotics operations and $108 million for humanitarian and civic aid. Both have, as a budget document explains about humanitarian aid, helped “maintain a robust overseas presence,” while the military “obtains access to regions important to U.S. interests.” The Pentagon also spent $24 million on environmental projects abroad to monitor and reduce on-base pollution, dispose of hazardous and other waste, and for “initiatives…in support of global basing/operations.” So the bill now grows by:

$682 million for counternarcotics, humanitarian, and environmental programs.

The Pentagon tally of the price of occupying the planet also ignores the costs of secret bases and classified programs overseas. Out of a total Pentagon classified budget of $51 billion for 2012, I conservatively use only the estimated overseas portion of operations and maintenance spending, which adds $2.4 billion. Then there’s the $15.7 billion Military Intelligence Program. Given that U.S. law generally bars the military from engaging in domestic spying, I estimate that half this spending, $7.9 billion, took place overseas.

Next, we have to add in the CIA’s paramilitary budget, funding activities including secret bases in places like Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere in the Middle East, and its drone assassination program, which has grown precipitously since the onset of the war on terror. With thousands dead (including hundreds of civilians), how can we not consider these military costs? In an email, John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, told me that “possibly a third” of the CIA’s estimated budget of $10 billion may now go to paramilitary costs, yielding:

$13.6 billion for classified programs, military intelligence, and CIA paramilitary activities.

Last but certainly not least comes the real biggie: the costs of the 550 bases the U.S. built in Afghanistan, as well as the last three months of life for our bases in Iraq, which once numbered 505 before the U.S. pullout from that country (that is, the first three months of fiscal year 2012). While the Pentagon and Congress exclude these costs, that’s like calculating the New York Yankees’ payroll while excluding salaries for each year’s huge free agent signings.

Conservatively following the OCS methodology used for other countries, but including costs for health care, military pay in the base budget, rent, and “other programs,” we add an estimated:

$104.9 billion for bases and military presence in Afghanistan and other war zones.

Having started with the OCS figure of $22.1 billion, the grand total now has reached:

$168 billion ($169,963,153,283 to be exact).

That’s nearly an extra $150 billion. Even if you exclude war costs — and I think the Yankees show why that’s a bad idea — the total still reaches $65.1 billion, or nearly three times the Pentagon’s calculation.

But don’t for a second think that that’s the end of our garrisoning costs. In addition to spending likely hidden in the nooks and crannies of its budget, there are other irregularities in the Pentagon’s accounting. Costs for 16 countries hosting U.S. bases but left out of the OCS entirely, including Colombia, El Salvador, and Norway, may total more than $350 million. The costs of the military presence in Colombia alone could reach into the tens of millions in the context of more than $8.5 billion in Plan Colombia funding since 2000. The Pentagon also reports costs of less than $5 million each for Yemen, Israel, Uganda, and the Seychelles Islands, which seems unlikely and could add millions more.

When it comes to the general U.S. presence abroad, other costs are too difficult to estimate reliably, including the price of Pentagon offices in the United States, embassies, and other government agencies that support bases and troops overseas. So, too, U.S. training facilities, depots, hospitals, and even cemeteries allow overseas bases to function. Other spending includes currency-exchange costs, attorneys’ fees and damages won in lawsuits against military personnel abroad, short-term “temporary duty assignments,” U.S.-based troops participating in exercises overseas, and perhaps even some of NASA’s military functions, space-based weapons, a percentage of recruiting costs required to staff bases abroad, interest paid on the debt attributable to the past costs of overseas bases, and Veterans Administration costs and other retirement spending for military personnel who served abroad.

Beyond my conservative estimate, the true bill for garrisoning the planet might be closer to $200 billion a year.

“Spillover Costs”

Those, by the way, are just the costs in the U.S. government’s budget. The total economic costs to the U.S. economy are higher still. Consider where the taxpayer-funded salaries of the troops at those bases go when they eat or drink at a local restaurant or bar, shop for clothing, rent a local home, or pay local sales taxes in Germany, Italy, or Japan. These are what economists call “spillover” or “multiplier effects.” When I visited Okinawa in 2010, for example, Marine Corps representatives bragged about how their presence contributes $1.9 billion annually to the local economy through base contracts, jobs, local purchases, and other spending. Although the figures may be overstated, it’s no wonder members of Congress like Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison have called for a new “Build in America” policy to protect “the fiscal health of our nation.”

And the costs are still broader when one considers the trade-offs, or opportunity costs, involved. Military spending creates fewer jobs per million dollars expended than the same million invested in education, health care, or energy efficiency — barely half as many as investing in schools. Even worse, while military spending clearly provides direct benefits to the Lockheed Martins and KBRs of the military-industrial complex, these investments don’t, as economist James Heintz says, boost the “long-run productivity of the rest of the private sector” the way infrastructure investments do.

To adapt a famous line from President Dwight Eisenhower: every base that is built signifies in the final sense a theft. Indeed, think about what Dal Molin’s half a billion dollars in infrastructure could have done if put to civilian uses. Again echoing Ike, the cost of one modern base is this: 260,000 low-income children getting health care for one year or 65,000 going to a year of Head Start or 65,000 veterans receiving VA care for a year.

A Different Kind of “Spillover”

Bases also create a different “spillover” in the financial and non-financial costs host countries bear. In 2004, for example, on top of direct “burden sharing” payments, host countries made in-kind contributions of $4.3 billion to support U.S. bases. In addition to agreeing to spend billions of dollars to move thousands of U.S. Marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam, the Japanese government has paid nearly $1 billion to soundproof civilian homes near U.S. air bases on Okinawa and millions in damages for successful noise pollution lawsuits. Similarly, as base expert Mark Gillem reports, between 1992 and 2003, the Korean and U.S. governments paid $27.3 million in damages because of crimes committed by U.S. troops stationed in Korea. In a single three-year period, U.S. personnel “committed 1,246 criminal acts, from misdemeanors to felonies.”

As these crimes indicate, costs for local communities extend far beyond the economic. Okinawans have recently been outraged by what appears to be another in a long series of rapes committed by U.S. troops. Which is just one example of how, from Japan to Italy, there are what Anita Dancs calls the “costs of rising hostility” over bases. Environmental damage pushes the financial and non-financial toll even higher. The creation of a base on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean sent all of the local Chagossian people into exile.

So, too, U.S. troops and their families bear some of those nonfinancial costs due to frequent moves and separation during unaccompanied tours abroad, along with attendant high rates of divorce, domestic violence, substance abuse, sexual assault, and suicide.

“No one, no one likes it,” a stubbly-faced old man told me as I was leaving the construction site. He remembered the Americans arriving in 1955 and now lives within sight of the Dal Molin base. “If it were for the good of the people, okay, but it’s not for the good of the people.”

“Who pays? Who pays?” he asked. “Noi,” he said. We do.

Indeed, from that $170 billion to the costs we can’t quantify, we all do.

David Vine, a Tom Dispatch regular, is assistant professor of anthropology at American University, in Washington, DC. He is the author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press, 2009). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other places. He is currently completing a book about the more than 1,000 U.S. military bases located outside the United States. To read a detailed description of the calculations described in this article and view a chart of the costs of the U.S. military presence abroad, visit www.davidvine.net

Copyright 2012 David Vine

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gaitherstewart.com.

//

A World in Which Truth is a Dying Species
by GAITHER STEWART
Rome.

Hidden away somewhere within the labyrinth of the Pentagon there must be a top secret euphemism department engaged in the invention of the Orwellian surrogate words that have crept surreptitiously into the American English vocabulary and from there translated into many other languages. In my mind I see a unit of studiously serious executives, coffee mugs in their hands and their neckties awry, devising senseless terms for terrible things and used unthinkingly by people today from New York to California, from Maine to Texas. The goal of my imaginary secret unit is to render ugly terms meaningless or to transform them into their opposite. To quote the perceptive Scottish writer, Candia McWilliam, “plain words are always under threat.” There are words that don’t say what they mean and there are words that say what they don’t mean.

Intensified or enhanced interrogation sounds oh so much more genteel than the hideous word TORTURE. Collateral damage goes down quite well instead of the savage bombing and strafing of a funeral procession or a wedding party. Military leaders themselves have come to love the suggestive word “footprints” to indicate the evidence of America’s powerful presence throughout the world: “We were here and we leave this little sign with you.” A little footprint, maybe a fleet of super bombers or Predator drones.

The point to keep in mind is that the names of things, issues, objects of life change, but the substance of the object itself remains—torture will always be torture, no matter what the gnomes propose and the media parrot.

Today, though generally unknown among the public, the relatively new term, “lily pad”, is making its way forward to describe not that beautiful manifestation of nature but the new version of America’s over 1000 military bases and garrisons spreading across some 150 countries of planet Earth. You can always count on those Pentagon gnomes. They regularly come up with something new. It remains unclear however if they first invent the terms and the military executes their implications or if the military experiments with a new lethal strategy and the gnomes then give it a purified label.

In the case of the “lily pad”, this linguistic version of the sheep in wolf’s clothing, was allegedly conceived to spread the U.S. footprint into every corner of our planet and to make military bases more effective and comprehensive while giving the impression that the government is both protecting “our way of life”, while also saving taxpayer money—money then used for more weapons and the hiring of more mercenaries and for payoffs to eager satraps of the Empire’s vassal states; some nations, peoples, and even minor empires can be more easily bought than subdued militarily.

WHAT IS A MILITARY LILY PAD?

Nature’s lily pad is a floating leaf of the white water lily family. The scientific name of lily pad is nymphaea odorata. You might see a bullfrog sitting on a lily pad in a pond. The lily pad does not sink under its weight. The giant water lily, victoria amazonica, has the world’s biggest lily pad, up to four feet, which can support the weight of several people at once. The lily pad lies tranquilly on the surface of the pond, offering both refuge and camouflage for the frog, protecting it from predators. The lily pad fits in with its natural surroundings, as does the frog.

Some nature-loving gnome then had the genial idea of a military base-lily pad. Why? For what purpose? For it is not true that smaller, more mobile lily pad-like bases, remain hidden and much cheaper. Nor is it true that local people, even in the jungle of a Pacific island do not know about them, are blind to their presence. Soldiers in jungle clothing jogging through the bush are not invisible. That planes landing and taking off are unheard and unnoticed is absurd. The 1000 military bases today cost the U.S. taxpayer’s less? Not on your life, naïve taxpayer!

Is the U.S. objective to make less impact on local populations with a smaller presence, a less visible footprint and simultaneously perhaps offer employment to a few locals? Jamais de la vie! As if anyone in those secret Pentagon rooms gave one hoot in hell about those little brown people? Besides, just because a lily pad base appears to be the opposite of huge Ramstein or other city-like military bases in Germany and in the USA home territory itself doesn’t mean that what begins as a lily pad in Bulgaria will not quickly become small towns as well. Soldiers have to be offered comfortable living conditions, which means bars and shops and eating places and medical facilities and private rooms for many; it means no latrine cleaning and kitchen police jobs for soldiers; locals do that for low pay. Soldiers today demand to have their families with them, which means apartment blocks and private cars and schools and hospitals. Moreover, every job the lily pad gnomes remove from the USA and outsource abroad, means less jobs in America.

That 1000 lily pad bases across the world cost the American taxpayer less is thus an illusion, a false clue to the raison d’etre of the so-called lily pad bases. The law of the unstoppable growth of bureaucracy dictates that with enough time small bases will  become big bases. That is the way of the world. You build runways and training grounds and a few barracks and voila, the initially Spartan lily pad grows into another Ramstein. Meanwhile, military bases, whether lily pads or Ramsteins, continue to erode what remains of the U.S. image the world over, exacerbating hate for the USA wherever they are found.

So why? Why the string of America’s military bases. Why the already failed experiment of tiny lily pads when all they mean is expanded U.S. militarization of the world? The why lies in the answer: it is part and parcel of American occupation of the world. The New World Order. The American Century.

Of course U.S. world domination remains the ultimate goal but the explanation is insufficient. Though a great part of the globe is already under U.S. domination, whether of the direct military sort or purely economic, there are still some hurdles to achieve total dominion. Not only obstacles but America’s own manias and phobias to be overcome.

For there remains Russia and China to be dealt with. Touchy subjects indeed. Though total madness to consider, war with either is possible but in my estimation not probable. In any case, it is a mistake to lump the two great nations together or even to attempt to juxtapose the two. Russia is Russia; China is China. Russia is a much more immediate problem for U.S. aims than is China. As the astute student of international affairs and Presidential candidate Mitt Romney said in the third presidential debate “Russia is America’s greatest enemy.”

Here I have zeroed in on the Russian hurdle, wondering if the USA even has a legitimate Russian policy. In the mind of the mad planners, Russia is more than just a geopolitical problem. More than New World Order. The answer to the riddle to many like Romney is Russia. America rejects anything that can strengthen Russia. America fears Russia. America fears the revival of the Russian empire. The USA might prefer to bypass unbypassable Russia. But it cannot. Remember the old post-World War II quip that “the real role of NATO is to keep the Russians out (of Europe), the Americans in and the Germans down”?  Still valid today.

Ideologically Europe might agree with America even though it makes no economic sense because Europe’s real, long-term interests lie in Russia. It depends on its neighbor Russia. Russia is more European than America’s Neocons even imagine. Even Adolf Hitler knew that. Especially today, Europe depends on the natural gas of which Russia has the world’s greatest reserves.  Geopolitically, Russia was also the reason for America’s theft of the province of Kosovo from Serbia. It is not for oil. It is not to inch closer to Iran. It is Russia. Though Russia lost many lands after 1989, it still supported its brothers in Serbia, a nation which refused to embrace capitalism. America’s military establishment and their Neocon pals accused Serbia of genocide. But Serbs were no more criminal than Croats and Bosnians and Albanians … and Americans.

Like space shield bases in Czech Republic and military bases in Poland and the Baltic States, the encirclement of Russia lies at the heart of lily pad strategy, which means nothing more than more military bases. Crush the Russians so they never rise again. Russia and its Socialist messianism. Its mission to save the world! You cannot nuke Russia because they have the bomb too … and the possibility of delivering it. So encircle them. Then squeeze them.

Let me says a few words about the relationship between Russia and the U.S. theft of  the heart of Serbia. You might read entire studies that it was for protection of the oil pipelines. The Anglo-American alliance to dominate oil and gas routes and corridors from the Caspian to the Black Sea across the Balkans. The scramble for control of the national economies of the entire former Soviet bloc. The alliance between the U.S. Defense Department and oil cartels. OK! Granted, oil is a small part of the reason. Meanwhile all kinds of covert activities originate in Kosovo.CIA secret detention-torture centers. Drugs from Afghanistan and the recycling of drug money. Militarization along the strategic East-West corridors. Kosovo is a living footprint of American power moving steadily eastwards.Imposition of the sacred dollar over the euro. That is all part of it. But never forget the containment of Russia. Control of the Balkans starts in Russia’s friend, Serbia. To crush Russia, smash Serbia. That is the fundamental point. Behind every Serb, the saying goes, stands a Russian. Fucking Russian Commies anyway!  Let them drink themselves to death without ever ever regaining one centimeter of world control.

Think of U.S. policies toward Russia—“America’s great enemy!”—and remember that the old geopolitical encirclement philosophy is still on the table. Since 1917 when revolutionary Russia dared oppose capitalism encirclement of Russia has been right in the center of the table. Crush Russia and you crush Socialism. The final solution of the Russian-Socialism question. Crush any idea that smacks of Socialism, America’s eternal obsession.

For American planners Communism is always a threat and old habits of containment of Great Russia are hard to break. Russians believe U.S. hostility toward them derives from something buried in America’s puritanical genetic make-up. That Americans consider them barbarians they have to contain … as ancient Rome did the barbarians in the wild north. That America has to encircle and circumscribe them and dictate and preach to them and look down on them … just as one Adolf Hitler did. Maybe there is also jealousy, Russians suspect. Envy of Russia’s vast lands. Envy of its great culture. Russia has something that America lacks. Ignorant cynics might say that it has to do with the great natural gas reserves in Siberia. In any case, though the source of the perceived Russian threat is a mystery, the memory of competition with Russia for world domination during the Cold War remains alive in the West, especially across the Atlantic. Russia has something to do with the existence of the soul. That famous Russian soul that prompted the esoteric thinker Rudolf Steiner to predict that the “cultural epoch” after the present one dominated by Europe and the USA would be led by spiritual, messianic Russia.

Time lends transparency to events that are jumbled when they happen but which turn out to be historical landmarks. Post-communist Russia was defenseless. The USA could do as it liked in the world. Attack Iraq to get back at Russia. Establish lily pad bases along Russia borders to threaten Russia. Get Serbia to get Russia.

Despite Castro and Chavez and victories by left-leaning leaders in a handful of nations to the South, Latin America remains pretty much a great American colony. The Arab world and the Middle East are under attack and one nation after the other has already fallen. The little publicized U.S. penetration in Africa is practically unopposed. America controls Asia from Australia, Japan, Hawaii, the Guam military island and power economic influences in Southeast Asia. But there remain Russia and China. I believe Russia is truly American enemy number 1. I believe the attack on China is to be an economic-dominated one of accommodation in which the rest of the world becomes Coolies.

In any case, for now the lily pad bases spread from West to East along the belly of Russia. Step by step. From base to base. A new language of conquest. Creeping, creeping inexorably from West to East. Along the underbelly of deep, deep Russia, lying in wait.

For Russia is back. Russia is not about to roll over like a poodle for America. If Washington is pointing toward another Cold War—this time with even greater stakes and threats to world peace—Russia too is getting ready. Russia feels targeted by America. Russia asks which countries are targets for America’s space shields in East Europe? The U.S. answer is silence. What country has the type of missiles America aims at intercepting? The answer is Russia. Therefore Russia assumes the U.S. space shield is aimed at it. Now American-led NATO land forces have passed the River Oder into Poland—just as Hitler once did—and deployed its lily pads near Russia’s borders. This is much more menacing than another Cold War.

Russia, in American eyes the enemy of progressive mankind. Russia, guilty of the Great October Revolution of 1917. Russia, a threat to the New World Order. Communist Russia chose a new direction of social evolution, qualitatively different from the Western direction, and it achieved certain successes. Communist Russia’s solutions to fundamental social problems and its quickly developed scientific, intellectual and creative potential in such a short time frightened the West no less than Russia’s military potential and its messianism. For many nations of the world the experience of Socialist Russia became an infectious prototype, a paradigm for the poor of the world. The post-war Soviet Union imposed its social order on the countries of Eastern Europe, immensely increasing its influence in the rest of the world while the Communist idea expanded over the planet.

At that point Capitalism faced the threat of decline or historical death while Soviet Russia became the second Superpower. That meant Cold War. Cold because both sides had enough nuclear power to destroy the planet. For many decades the West feared the Russian threat because it realized that in an open military confrontation between the USA and Soviet Russia, the victory of world Communism might have become real. Under the influence of Russian Communism the West itself had to adopt socialist features for a short time—the profit motive was cut short, an antiracist movement was born in the West, working people insisted on social rights, social security was established, colonialism declined, a kind of popular democracy seemed to be developing; social democracy flourished.

Such is the accusation against Russia. The threat to “our way of life”. Thus the Russian nation is the heart of evil, the propaganda gnomes preached, guilty of crimes against humanity. We must inculcate in people the truth that Russia is the Empire of Evil, the Soviet period a black hole in the history of mankind, and Socialism a crime against human progress. Russia itself must be destroyed for the sake of the salvation of the Western world and its values.

For Russia the growing number of U.S. bases near their borders threaten to set off new Cold Wars. Great Britain, like empires before it, had to close most of its foreign bases in the midst of an economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States is headed in that direction. For surely it is only a question of time before America is forced to do the same—its mountainous national debt ought to be crippling it. But it seems to have discovered the capacity to live on virtual money—at everyone else’s expense.

The USA is again facing the same old conundrum. The US military believes that America must maintain its advantage as Russia and China start to expand their own military. Both are starting from a base a tenth the size of the US military without all the overhead of the cold war infrastructure. But America can’t afford the military machine it maintains today. Meanwhile Neocon gnomes have convinced Americans that they have a divine right to protect their selfishly affluent lifestyle and the global corporate interests on which it depends—but that Russia, spiritual, messianic Russia, stands in the way to freedom and “our way of life”, the never-ending American dream, which must be preserved at any cost. “Freedom”, “democracy” and “our way of life” (selfish and unsustainable)—all lies in the service of American Empire.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior editor Gaither Stewart lives in Rome and serves as European correspondent for The Greanville Post,  His latest novel, Lily Pad Roll, was just published by Punto Press. Lily Pad Roll is volume two of Stewart’s Europe Trilogy, dealing with post Cold War espionage, the encirclement of Russia, and the maintenance of a global strategy of tension.

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LILY PAD ROLL IS AVAILABLE AT AMAZON AND OTHER MAJOR VENDORS WORLDWIDE
$12.45
Paperback: 344 pages
 

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By Julie Lévesque
Global Research, October 17, 2012
Region: Europe
Theme: US NATO War Agenda

The Nobel Committee did it again. The essence of its highest award, the Nobel Peace Prize, has been perverted. It’s been turned into a propaganda tool, a form of institutionalized revisionism, for which war is upheld as a peaceful endeavour, creeping alongside power struggles called “humanitarian interventions” in a fantasy tale we call history.

Neither Henry Kissinger, nor Barack Obama and the European Union (EU) deserved a peace prize. How can the EU deserve a peace prize when it’s been using its military might in the Middle East and Africa for over a decade? As David Swanson notes:

“Europe […] has not during the past year — which is the requirement — or even during the past several decades done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations.  Ask Libya.  Ask Syria.  Check with Afghanistan.  See what Iraq thinks.  Far from doing the best work to abolish or reduce standing armies, Europe has joined with the United States in developing an armed global force aggressively imposing its will on the world.  There were good nominees and potential nominees available, even great ones […]

The West is so in love with itself that many will imagine this award a success.  Surely Europe not going to war with itself is more important that Europe going to war with the rest of the world!”  (David Swanson, Why Europe Did Not Deserve a Nobel Peace Prize)

In addition to waging war with murderous weapons, the EU also uses “economic weaponry” directed against civilians, such as the sanctions it imposes on Iran. Unlike the EU, Iran has not invaded or attacked any country and the reasons justifying the economic sanctions are pure fantasy. Kourosh Ziabari explains:

[T]his union has aggressively declared an all-out, bloodless war on Iran, affecting millions of innocent civilians in my country who can’t understand for what crime they are being targeted and punished in such a belligerent and unfair manner.

The European Union began to impose an inclusive oil embargo against Iran since July 1 as a result of direct pressure and lobbying by the United States and in an effort aimed at paralyzing Iran’s nuclear program which they claim is not aimed at civilian purposes, and finally breaking the back of Iran’s economy and pressuring it into making political concessions […]

Sensitive medicine and pharmaceutical products which were previously imported from the foreign countries cannot find their way to Iran’s markets anymore and thousands of patients badly in need of medicines for such diseases as thalassemia, hepatitis, diabetes, different types of cancer, heart diseases and psychiatric disorders are facing serious problems with finding their medicines.

Waging wars does not take place simply by means of bombarding cities or dropping nuclear bombs on other nations. What the European Union has been doing with Iran is the unmistakable representation of an all-out war in which the ordinary citizens are the silent victims. (Kourosh Ziabari The Nobel Peace Prize for Those Who Declared War on My Country)

And as if that was not enough, European peacemaking also includes fighting Iran’s freedom of speech as Danny Schechter reports: “European satellite company Eutelsat says it’s pulled the plug on several Iranian satellite channels following an order by the European Commission.” (Danny Schechter, Tell Me Lies: European Satellites Ordered To Drop Iranian Channels In Disregard of Free Speech)

The odd Nobel Laureate is waging a financial war on its own members as well as the cases of Greece and Spain illustrate:

How can you award of a Peace Prize – of all things! – to an entity that systematically supports the economic and social destruction of Greece; imposes extreme hardship on Spaniards and Italians whilst it supports greedy mega-bankers; has an undemocratically elected president (Herman van Rompuy) and, through its NATO war machine, continues bombing and destroying Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and is now poised for unilateral attack against Syria and Iran? Indeed, “Peace” should be made of sterner stuff!! (Adrian Salbuchi, The European Union Grabs the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize)

But in addition to its internal economic warfare and its plea of moral duty to promote war abroad and assert its position on the global chessboard, the EU is not an eligible candidate for this prize. According to Michel Chossudovsky:

While the EU’s contribution to peace is debatable, the key issue is whether a union of nation states, which constitutes a political, economic, monetary and fiscal entity is an “eligible candidate” for the Peace Prize, in accordance with the mandate of the Norwegian Committee.

The Olympic Games are “granted” to countries. But the Nobel Peace Prize cannot under any stretch of the imagination be granted to a nation-state, let alone a union of nation states. (Michel Chossudovsky The EU is not a “Person”: Granting the Nobel Prize to the European Union is in Violation of Alfred Nobel’s Will)

Has the Norwegian Nobel Committee become Orwell’s worst nightmare, where war is peace? To understand their nonsensical choices over the years and what to expect in the future, one has to wonder who and what does the Nobel Committee represent?

Expect anything from Nobel Committee members. They represent wealth, power, privilege, imperial lawlessness, and war, not peace. Perhaps they believe war is peace. They’ll have to explain why scoundrels regularly win their highest award. (Stephen Lendman Nobel Hypocrisy Wins Again)

If the Nobel Peace Prize is delusional, the victims of the EU’s warfare will tell you the horror of war is real.

Global Research offers its readers a list of selected articles on this topic.

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