By Stephen Lendman
Pointing the finger hypocritically and with total impunity at other nations’ election processes is made possible by the totalitarian and pervasive power of American media. In all critical topics for the health and survival of the nation and the world, the US corporate media function as a colossal engine of omission, escapism and disinformation, a huge criminal enterprise, a consciousness plague, by any reasonable standard.—Eds.

 

RIA Novosti said Medvedev/Putin’s United Russia party won 238 seats, falling slightly below a majority with 49.67% of the vote.

It added that it’s “a far cry from the commanding two-thirds constitutional majority the party held in the State Duma for the past four years” based on tabulated results so far.

United Russia is the nation’s dominant party. In December 2001, it was founded by merging the Unity and Fatherland-All Russia parties. 

Vladimir Putin served as acting President after Boris Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999. From May 7, 2000 – May 7, 2008, he was President. Dmitry Medvedev succeeded him. Putin now serves as Prime Minister. He’s United Russia 2012 presidential candidate. On March 4, presidential elections will be held.

After a decade in power, it’s common for incumbent parties to lose strength. Nonetheless, despite likely coalition agreements on some issues, United Russia remains dominant. Moreover, Putin’s heavily favored to win in 2012.

With near final Duma votes counted, results were:

• United Russia – 49.67%

• the Communist Party – 19.15%

• Just Russia – 13.16%

• the Liberal Democratic Party – 11.67% 

• Yabloko – 3.21%, and 

• two small parties getting under 1% each.

Under Russian electoral laws, Duma seats are proportionally distributed to parties getting at least 7% of the vote.

Because several didn’t qualify, United Russia maintains a ruling majority. Nonetheless, President Medvedev expressed willingness to have coalition partners, saying: 

“We will have to take into account the more complex configuration of the Duma and for some issues we will have to join coalition bloc agreements.”

Ballots were cast in 94,000 domestic polling stations across Russia and about 370 overseas locations in over 140 foreign countries.

CEC officials said irregularities disqualified 1% of electoral ballots.

Major Media Bashing

On December 4, New York Times writers David Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry headlined, “Majority for Putin’s Party Narrows in Rebuke From Voters,” saying:

United Russia “suffered surprisingly steep losses in parliamentary elections on Sunday….The three minority parties….all made strong gains….”

“Critics of the government have said for weeks that they expected widespread campaign abuses, and reports of electoral violations streamed into online social networks during the early morning hours….”

On December 5, Russia Today (RT.com) reported that on election day, a Russian Internet site claimed an alleged United Russia scheme “to conduct an illegal throw-in of ballots at one of the polling stations in Moscow.”

It said “some obscure political specialists had gathered a group of about 40 people, described as ‘drunks and low-lifes,’ and handed them special secret pockets and packs of filled ballots, marked United Russia.”

In fact, three of the 40 were undercover reporters. When the alleged group arrived, they claimed fraud. Other reports about throw-in ballots also surfaced. A top Central Election Commission (CEC) official admitted some violations occurred. 

CEC’s Leonid Ivlev mentioned “invisible ink, illegal propaganda, and the so-called ‘merry-go-round’ false voting” by especially prepared people.

However, the invisible ink scheme was uncovered and stopped.  “Merry-go-round” fraud was grossly exaggerated. Only minor violations occurred. They’re common everywhere in contrast to major US electoral fraud.

Notably in 2000 and 2004, Democrats Gore and Kerry won popular and electoral college victories, but George Bush became president for eight years illegitimately. 

In addition, key Senate and House elections were also tainted. No wonder under a system where corporate-controlled machines vote, not citizens. 

Ivlev said “many reports (about alleged Russian electoral fraud) simply showed a lack of understanding of the election procedure.”

Moreover, Deputy Interior Minister Aleksander Gorovoi said police registered 2050 violations all day. However, none compromised final results. Most “concerned illegal propaganda and the police had started administrative cases into these matters.”

Independent (CEC-invited) international monitors checked voting in over 30 Russian regions. They concluded the process was calm and orderly. Polish monitor Mateus Piskorski said, “All complaints are about technical issues and not about violations of election law.”

Institute for Democracy and Cooperation director of studies John Laughland called electoral procedures “absolutely excellent.” He added that polling station workers were “extremely competent.”

Nonetheless, The Times said cellphone video footage showed “heavy-handed politicking, including attempts at bribery, campaign law violations and other manipulation.”

It added that throughout the day, scattered reports cited “voting irregularities, a smattering of protests and some arrests.”

Times and other major media writers, commentators and editorials notoriously bash electoral results in non-US client states. 

In contrast, when the Supreme Court reversed America’s 2000 popular vote (and electoral one learned months late) to install its own favorite, a Times editorial supported Bush’s illegitimacy and “unusual” post-election “gracious(ness).”

Electoral fraud wasn’t mentioned nor was cheating John Kerry in 2004. Moreover, America’s corrupted duopoly power gets no coverage whatever.  

Instead, reports claim model US democratic governance when, in fact, it’s not tolerated, never was, and on December 1 lost all legitimacy. 

Following last May’s House vote, the Senate followed suit. They authorized detaining uncharged US citizens indefinitely in military dungeons, based on spurious allegations of supporting terrorism.

Media scoundrels don’t object, including Washington Post writers, commentators, and editorial writers.

On December 3, its editorial headlined, “The farce of Russian elections,” saying:

 “Russia’s hermetic political system – a parody of democracy that begrudges dissent and bristles at independent voices – is growing even less tolerant.”

“Vladimir Putin has turned from glowering at the country’s only independent elections watchdog to outright intimidation. In the process, he has reverted to Cold War rhetoric and cemented the Kremlin’s reputation for thuggery in high places.”

Fact check

Money power in private hands controls America’s media. They’re a platform for managed and junk food news. Dissent in America is an endangered species. On US television, it’s entirely absent, and little appears in corporate controlled print. 

In contrast, Iran’s Press TV, Russia Today and Voice of Russia air diverse discussions and opinions on major global issues. US viewers can access them online to stay current and well-informed, free of [the] Western propaganda tainting America’s media.

Putin is one of the few world leaders with backbone enough to challenge US lawlessness. As a result, America’s media pillory him instead of explaining destructive US policies threatening humanity’s survival.

Russian officials “turn(ed) up the heat on Golos (Russian for ‘voice’), an independent group of election monitors largely funded by US and other Western groups.” 

Fact check

Golos gets National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funding. It supports “regime change” in Venezuela, Syria, Iran and other non-US client states. It backs opposition groups, conducts propaganda campaigns, and does openly what CIA operative do covertly to destabilize sitting governments. 

Its mission is subverting, not promoting democracy. It operates with State Department funding and direction. It serves US imperial interests destructively against targeted countries.

So do USAID and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). They meddle internally against sitting governments. One way is by funding Golos. It calls itself a Russian NGO established in 2000 to defend democratic rights and civil liberties. It’s Russia’s only allegedly “independent” electoral watchdog.

The UK Telegraph calls it “one of the few organizations able to catalogue and publicize (Kremlin) attempts at fraud and intimidation.” 

In fact, Russian electoral authorities found it violated election laws by publishing polls during a prohibited “quiet period” preceding voting. Of course, taking US funding with strings corrupts its independence entirely and violates Russian law.

Fact check 

America has well over 1,000 global military bases. Many encircle Russia and China. No nation threatens America. Yet it spends more on “defense” than the rest of the world combined.

To achieve unchallenged global dominance, perpetual wars are waged. Alleged missile defense weapons and tracking radar are for offense. Russia and China are targeted, not Iran or other Middle East countries. 

Nuclear-armed Aegis class warships patrol the Eastern Mediterranean, equipped with SM-3 ballistic missiles and anti-satellite interceptors. Upgraded versions are being developed. 

Instead of abandoning Bush’s scheme, Obama plans more extensive, sophisticated, flexible, mobile systems to be developed through 2020. Doubling the number of Aegis class warships to 38 will be completed by 2015. They’ll be equipped with state-of-the art missile interceptors for offensive first-strike capability.

Russia’s justifiably furious. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, nuclear war was narrowly averted when cooler heads on both sides comprised. 

Obama’s no Jack Kennedy. He’s an imperial tool, ravaging the world one country at a time and challenging Russia menacingly with encroachment. 

A Final Comment 

Under Putin, Russia’s back, proud and re-assertive. It’s not about to roll over for America, especially in Eurasia. Washington’s gone back to the future with a new Cold War. This time it’s for much greater stakes and far larger threats to world peace. 

Instead of reporting it, America’s media cheerlead supportively. They blames victims, not Washington’s rogue policies threatening humanity.

In the 1930s, Roosevelt wanted war with Germany and Japan to end America’s Great Depression and achieve US global dominance. During today’s hard times, will Obama follow suit, no matter the potential catastrophe no legitimate leader would risk.

A possibility this frightening and real may be happening in real time as America lurches from one war to another and enacts police state laws quashing dissent.

Nonetheless, the Washington Post accuses Russia of Soviet era saber-rattling when it should be sounding the alarm. 

Responsible major media journalism was never America’s long suit. At a time of grave global dangers, they’re pointing fingers the wrong way. 

Senior Contributing Editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.  

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.     

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Editor’s Note: American foreign policy has many layers of duplicity, all designed to hide its true motives, and now that American power is aggressively on the move in many areas simultaneously, from the Middle East to Burma, Eastern Europe, and the larger Pacific, it’s critical for Americans to understand what is really going on. This piece goes a long way to explaining the actual situation.  As usual no such analysis will ever be found in the mainstream media.

Left: The April 6 Youth Movement emblem. The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. 

Originally posted on February, 5, 2011

http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/

Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as “creative destruction.”

The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US-backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.

Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.

No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life. No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. No one can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.

What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt’s Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda. 

To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians. He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the milder-sounding “New Middle East.”

The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller’s friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs. As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.

Egypt rising?

The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington’s long-term strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.

Washington ‘soft’ revolutions

The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia’s Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as “spontaneous” as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.

At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran’s Ahmedinejad in 2009. 

The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence. 

April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the Facebook site to support a workers’ call for a strike on April 6, 2008.

According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, “Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process.”

Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei’s National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood. 

Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood.

ElBaradei: political face of Egypt “revolution”?

ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Egyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists. Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

Kefaya-Pentagon ‘non-violent warfare’

Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei’s candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to “enough!”

Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means “enough!”

Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp’s misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as “non-violence as a method of warfare.”

The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.

The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood. Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

RAND and KefayaKefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.

No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was “sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.”

A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.

In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation to Egypt’s Kefaya:

“The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world, particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.

However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country.”

RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name “swarming,” the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.

Washington and the stable of “human rights” and “democracy” and “non-violence” NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated “spontaneous” nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:

“The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions.”

The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other “reform” movements:

“The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically. 

“Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers. ”

As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the “RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics.

The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes “research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements.”

In May 2009 just before Obama’s Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another “human rights” Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in US-sponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month “fellowship” organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.

Freedom House and Washington’s government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater Middle East Project to bring “democracy” and “liberal free market” economic reform to the Islamic countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.

Washington’s NED in a larger agenda

If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest movements since the Tunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush Presidency after 2001.

Washington’s NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to “spontaneous” popular regime-change uprisings.

The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.

The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order.

As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”

The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy head, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush’s Afghan invasion and later ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber, co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998.

The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.

NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”-the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce. 

The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that, “NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups operating in the United States.”

Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED.

In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse which equated “Islamic radicalism” with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a deliberately softer term “broader Middle East” for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused much distrust in the Islamic world, Bush stated,

“The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is a difficult and long-term project, yet there’s no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end…We’re encouraging our friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of their own people. We’re standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow…” 

The US Project for a ‘Greater Middle East’

The spreading regime change operations Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.

The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.

That policy recommendation was titled  A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in Lebanon. Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as being far too risky. 

By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the arch-warhawk neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.

Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.

In May 2009, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of “spreading democracy” to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant “the establishment of a US-Middle East free trade area within a decade.”

Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper, “G8-Greater Middle East Partnership.” Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was Washington’s dramatic call for “an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe.”

The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of microfinance where as the paper put it, “a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2 million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each.”

The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial afairs by new institutions ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate. 

Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, “besides the Arab countries, it covers Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western form is most rife.” It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of programs.

Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders-Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia-that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner. 

Will it work?

At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a US-dominated New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.

It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it, “The Israeli calculation today is that if ‘Mubarak goes’ (which is usually stated as ‘If America lets Mubarak go’), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a policy of military domination of the region.”

The Washington strategy of “creative destruction” is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and across Central Asia.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  F. William Engdahl is author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order.  His book, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order has just been reissued in a new edition. He may be contacted via his website, OilGeoPolitics.net.

Endnotes:

• DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.debka.com/weekly/480/” www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA is open about its good ties to Israeli intelligence and security agencies. While its writings must be read with that in mind, certain reports they publish often contain interesting leads for further investigation.
• Ibid.
• The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose Egyptian President Nasser, HYPERLINK “http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=
  western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0″ www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. According to the late Miles Copeland, a CIA official stationed in Egypt during the Nasser era, the CIA allied with the Muslim Brotherhood which was opposed to Nasser’s secular regime as well as his nationalist opposition to brotherhood pan-Islamic ideology.
• Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt’s April 6 Movement?, February 1, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm” http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/20110201/what-is-egypt-s-april-6-movement.htm
• Ibid.
• Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, January 31, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/3
  1/AR2011013103470_2.html?sid=ST2011013003319″
• National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africa-highlights” http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle-east-and-northern-africa/middle-east-and-north-africa-highlights.
• Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, March 1, 2007.
• Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren’t Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly, December 1997, pp. 3-9
• Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), accessed in HYPERLINK “http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya” http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment.org/2010/09/22/the-egyptian-movement-for-change-kifaya
• Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.
• Ibid.
• For a more detailed discussion of the RAND “swarming” techniques see F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.
• Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.
• Ibid., p. 50.
• Ibid., p. iii.
• Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: “Dictators” do not Dictate, They Obey Orders, January 29, 2011, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22993″ http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22993
• George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 January 1991. In the speech Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, “What is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea-a new world order…”
• Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.
• National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.ned.org/about/board” http://www.ned.org/about/board
• Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Foreign Policy Briefing No. 27, November 8, 1993, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html” http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html.
• National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report” http://www.ned.org/publications/annual-reports/2009-annual-report.
• George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, October 6, 2005, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html” http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/speeches/10.06.05.html.
• Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996, Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm” www.iasps.org/strat1.htm
• George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South Carolina, White House, 9 May 2003.
• Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn’t Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 4, 2004, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world” http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world
• Ibid.
• William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, accessed in HYPERLINK “http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/” http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/american-israeli_policy_tested_by_arab_uprisings_20110201/

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Creative Destruction Part III

ARCHIVES— Humanitarian Neo-colonialism: Framing Libya and Reframing War By F. William Engdahl

Global Research, May 4, 2011

engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/

A mafia hit or the work of the world neocolonialist gang? The Libya campaign represents the attempt to force application of a dangerous new concept into the norms of accepted international law. That concept is what is termed by its creators, “Responsibility to Protect.” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon has stated that the justification for the use of force in Libya was based on humanitarian grounds, and referred to the principle known as Responsibility to Protect, “a new international security and human rights norm to address the international community’s failure to prevent and stop genocides, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.”1 There has been no serious effort on the side of Washington or London or Paris to negotiate a ceasefire inside Libya, no effort to find a compromise as in other countries. This is the marvelous flexibility of the new doctrine of Responsibility to Protect. Washington gets to define who is responsible for what. National sovereignty becomes a relic. Back in 2004 George Soros authored a little-noted article in Foreign Policy magazine on the notion of national sovereignty. He wrote, Responsibility to Protect The coup represented by the NATO intervention into events in Libya has been years in assiduous preparation. The first to publicize the concept, “The Responsibility to Protect,” was Gareth Evans, a former Australian Foreign Minister and CEO of the International Crisis Group. In 2002, one year before the illegal US-UK aggression against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Evans published a seminal paper in Foreign Affairs, the elite foreign policy journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations.6 Framing as deliberate manipulation Those ever-present NGOs The steering organization for embedding the nebulous notion of responsibility to protect is another of the ever-present Non-Governmental Organizations, this one called the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect. It in turn, much like the famous wooden Russian dolls, was created by other human rights NGOs including by the International Crisis Group, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam International, Refugees International, typically financed by a small network of donors.9 Notes 1 Ban Ki-Moon, cited in Omri Ceren, “Responsibility To Protect,” Not Remotely New, March 20, 2011, Commentary. http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2011/03/28/obamas-libya-speech-the-highlights/. 3 Hillary Clinton, 2008 Presidential Aide Questionnaire, accessed in http://globalsolutions.org/08orbust/pcq/clinton.  4 Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and Hans Nichols, Samantha Power Brings Activist Role Inside to Help Persuade Obama on Libya, Bloomberg News, March 25, 2011.  http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2004/01/01/the_peoples_sovereignty. 6 Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun, The Responsibility to Protect, Foreign Affairs, Vol.81, no.6, November/December 2002. pp. 99-110. 7 Ibid.  8 S.T. Fiske, and S.E. Taylor,  Social Cognition (2nd ed.), 1991, New York, McGraw-Hill. 9  Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Who We Are, accessed in http://globalr2p.org/whoweare/index.php 10 F. William Engdahl, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, Wiesbaden, 2009, edition.engdahl.  11 Jan Oberg, The International Crisis Group: Who Pays the Piper?, The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, Press Info #219, 15 April 2005, accessed in http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/201.html 12 International Crisis Group Website, accessed in http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/about/board.aspx 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid.  [xv] Ibid. [xvi] Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect, Who We Are, accessed in http://globalr2p.org/whoweare/index.php. [xvii] Michael Barker, Stephen Zunes, Libya, and Seemingly Moral Imperatives, March 31, 2011, accessed inhttp://wagingnonviolence.org/2011/03/zunes-critiques-war-on-libya-offers-nonviolent-alternatives/comment-page-1/#comment-24720.

© Copyright F. William Engdahl, engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/, 2011  The url address of this article is: www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=24617

By William Blum

www.killinghope.org

Imagine Osama bin Laden or some other Islamic leader speaking of 9-11: “We came, we saw, 3,000 died … ha- ha.”

Clinton and her partners-in-crime in NATO can also have a good laugh at how they deceived the world. The destruction of Libya, the reduction of a modern welfare state to piles of rubble, to ghost towns, the murder of thousands … this tragedy was the culmination of a series of falsehoods spread by the Libyan rebels, the Western powers, and Qatar (through its television station, al-Jazeera) — from the declared imminence of a “bloodbath” in rebel-held Benghazi if the West didn’t intervene to stories of government helicopter-gunships and airplanes spraying gunfire onto large numbers of civilians to tales of Viagra-induced mass rapes by Gaddafi’s army. (This last fable was proclaimed at the United Nations by the American Ambassador, as if young soldiers needed Viagra to get it up!)¹

The New York Times (March 22) observed:

… the rebels feel no loyalty to the truth in shaping their propaganda, claiming nonexistent battlefield victories, asserting they were still fighting in a key city days after it fell to Qaddafi forces, and making vastly inflated claims of his barbaric behavior.

The Los Angeles Times (April 7) added this about the rebels’ media operation:

It’s not exactly fair and balanced media. In fact, as [its editor] helpfully pointed out, there are four inviolate rules of coverage on the two rebel radio stations, TV station and newspaper:

• No pro-[Qaddafi] reportage or commentary
• No mention of a civil war. (The Libyan people, east and west, are unified in a war against a totalitarian regime.)
• No discussion of tribes or tribalism. (There is only one tribe: Libya.)
• No references to Al Qaeda or Islamic extremism. (That’s [Qaddafi’s] propaganda.)

The Libyan government undoubtedly spouted its share of misinformation, but it was the rebels’ trail of lies, both of omission and commission, which was used by the UN Security Council to justify its vote for “humanitarian” intervention; followed in Act Three by unrelenting NATO/US bombs and drone missiles, day after day, week after week, month after month; you can’t get much more humanitarian than that. If the people of Libya prior to the NATO/US bombardment had been offered a referendum on it, can it be imagined that they would have endorsed it?

In fact, it appears rather likely that a majority of Libyans supported Gaddafi. How else could the government have held off the most powerful military forces in the world for more than seven months? Before NATO and the US laid waste to the land, Libya had the highest life expectancy, lowest infant mortality, and highest UN Human Development Index in Africa. During the first few months of the civil war, giant rallies were held in support of the Libyan leader.²

For further discussion of why Libyans may have been motivated to support Gaddafi, have a look at this video.

If Gaddafi had been less oppressive of his political opposition over the years and had made some gestures of accommodation to them during the Arab Spring, the benevolent side of his regime might still be keeping him in power, although the world has plentiful evidence making it plain that the Western powers are not particularly concerned about political oppression except to use as an excuse for intervention when they want to; indeed, government files seized in Tripoli during the fighting show that the CIA and British intelligence worked with the Libyan government in tracking down dissidents, turning them over to Libya, and taking part in interrogations.³

In any event, many of the rebels had a religious motive for opposing the government and played dominant roles within the rebel army; previously a number of them had fought against the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.⁴ The new Libyan regime promptly announced that Islamic sharia law would be the “basic source” of legislation, and laws that contradict “the teachings of Islam” would be nullified; there would also be a reinstitution of polygamy; the Muslim holy book, the Quran, allows men up to four wives.⁵

Thus, just as in Afghanistan in the 1980-90s, the United States has supported Islamic militants fighting against a secular government. The American government has imprisoned many people as “terrorists” in the United States for a lot less.

What began in Libya as “normal” civil war violence from both sides — repeated before and since by the governments of Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria without any Western military intervention at all (the US actually continues to arm the Bahrain and Yemen regimes) — was transformed by the Western propaganda machine into a serious Gaddafi genocide of innocent Libyans. Addressing the validity of this very key issue is another video, “Humanitarian War in Libya: There is no evidence“. The main feature of the film is an interview with Soliman Bouchuiguir, Secretary-General, and one of the founders in 1989, of the Libyan League for Human Rights, perhaps the leading Libyan dissident group, in exile in Switzerland.

Bouchuiguir is asked several times if he can document various charges made against the Libyan leader. Where is the proof of the many rapes? The many other alleged atrocities? The more than 6,000 civilians alleged killed by Gaddafi’s planes? Again and again Bouchuiguir cites the National Transitional Council as the source. Yes, that’s the rebels who carried out the civil war in conjunction with the NATO/US forces. At other times Bouchuiguir speaks of “eyewitnesses”: “little girls, boys who were there, whose families we know personally”. After awhile, he declares that “there is no way” to document these things. This is probably true to some extent, but why, then, the UN Security Council resolution for a military intervention in Libya? Why almost eight months of bombing?

Bouchuiguir also mentions his organization’s working with the National Endowment for Democracy in their effort against Gaddafi, and one has to wonder if the man has any idea that the NED was founded to be a front for the CIA. Literally.

Another source of charges against Gaddafi and his sons has been the International Criminal Court. The Court’s Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, is shown in this film at a news conference discussing the same question of proof of the charges. He refers to an ICC document of 77 pages which he says contains the evidence. The film displays the document’s Table of Contents, which shows that pages 17-71 are not available to the public; these pages, apparently the ones containing the testimony and evidence, are marked as “redacted”. In an appendix, the ICC report lists its news sources; these include Fox News, CNN, the CIA, Soliman Bouchuiguir, and the Libyan League for Human Rights. Earlier, the film had presented Bouchuiguir citing the ICC as one of his sources. The documentation is thus a closed circle.

Historical footnote: “Aerial bombing of civilians was pioneered by the Italians in Libya in 1911, perfected by the British in Iraq in 1920 and used by the French in 1925 to level whole quarters of Syrian cities. Home demolitions, collective punishment, summary execution, detention without trial, routine torture — these were the weapons of Europe’s takeover” in the Mideast.⁶

The worldwide eternal belief that American foreign policy has a good side that can be appealed to

On April 6, 2011 Moammar Gaddafi wrote a letter to President Obama, in which he said: “We have been hurt more morally than physically because of what had happened against us in both deeds and words by you. Despite all this you will always remain our son whatever happened. … Our dear son, Excellency, Baraka Hussein Abu Oubama, your intervention in the name of the U.S.A. is a must, so that Nato would withdraw finally from the Libyan affair.”⁷

Before the American invasion in March 2003, Iraq tried to negotiate a peace deal with the United States. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search; they also offered full support for any US plan in the Arab-Israeli peace process, and to hand over a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. If this is about oil, they added, they would also talk about US oil concessions.⁸ … Then came shock and awe!

In 2002, before the coup in Venezuela that briefly ousted Hugo Chávez, some of the plotters went to Washington to get a green light from the Bush administration. Chávez learned of this visit and was so distressed by it that he sent officials from his government to plead his own case in Washington. The success of this endeavor can be judged by the fact that the coup took place shortly thereafter.⁹

In 1994, it was reported that the leader of the Zapatista rebels in Mexico, Subcommander Marcos, said that “he expects the United States to support the Zapatistas once US intelligence agencies are convinced the movement is not influenced by Cubans or Russians.” “Finally,” Marcos said, “they are going to conclude that this is a Mexican problem, with just and true causes.”¹⁰ Yet for many years, the United States provided the Mexican military with all the training and tools needed to crush the Zapatistas.

The Guatemalan foreign minister in 1954, Cheddi Jagan of British Guiana in 1961, and Maurice Bishop of Grenada in 1983 all made their appeals to Washington to be left in peace.¹¹ The governments of all three countries were overthrown by the United States.

In 1945 and 1946, Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, a genuine admirer of America and the Declaration of Independence, wrote at least eight letters to President Harry Truman and the State Department asking for America’s help in winning Vietnamese independence from the French. He wrote that world peace was being endangered by French efforts to reconquer Indochina and he requested that “the four powers” (US, USSR, China, and Great Britain) intervene in order to mediate a fair settlement and bring the Indochinese issue before the United Nations.¹² Ho Chi Minh received no reply. He was, after all, some sort of communist.

America’s presstitutes

Imagine that the vicious police attack of October 25 on the Occupy Oakland encampment had taken place in Iran or Cuba or Venezuela or in any other ODE (Officially Designated Enemy) … Page One Righteous Indignation with Shocking Photos. But here’s the Washington Post the next day: A three-inch story on page three with a headline: “Protesters wearing out their welcome nationwide”; no mention of the Iraqi veteran left unconscious from a police projectile making contact with his head; as to photos: just one — an Oakland police officer petting a cat that was left behind by the protesters.

And here’s TV comedian Jay Leno the same night as the police attack in Oakland: “They say Moammar Gaddafi may have been one of the richest men in the world … 200 billion dollars. With all of the billions he had, he spent very little on education or health care for his country. So I guess he was a Republican.”¹³

The object of Leno’s humor was of course the Republicans, but it served the cause of further demonizing Gaddafi and thus adding to the “justification” of America’s murderous attack on Libya. If I had been one of Leno’s guests sitting there, I would have turned to the audience and said: “Listen people, under Gaddafi health care and education were completely free. Wouldn’t you like to have that here?”

I think that enough people in the audience would have applauded or shouted to force Leno to back off a bit from his indoctrinated, mindless remark.

And just for the record, the 200 billion dollars is not money found in Gaddafi’s personal bank accounts anywhere in the world, but money belonging to the Libyan state. But why quibble? There’s no business like show business.

The Iraqi Lullabye

On February 17, 2003, a month before the US bombing of Iraq began, I posted to the Internet an essay entitled “What Do the Imperial Mafia Really Want?” concerning the expected war. Included in this were the words of Michael Ledeen, former Reagan official, then at the American Enterprise Institute, which was one of the leading drum-beaters for attacking Iraq:

If we just let our own vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely, and we don’t try to be clever and piece together clever diplomatic solutions to this thing, but just wage a total war against these tyrants, I think we will do very well, and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

After a year of the tragic farce that was the American intervention in Iraq I could not resist. I sent Mr. Ledeen an email reminding him of his words and saying simply: “I’d like to ask you what songs your children are singing these days.”

I received no reply.

Has there ever been an empire that didn’t tell itself and the world that it was unlike all other empires, that its mission was not to plunder and control but to enlighten and liberate?

The United Nations vote on the Cuba embargo — 20 years in a row

For years American political leaders and media were fond of labeling Cuba an “international pariah”. We don’t hear that any more. Perhaps one reason is the annual vote in the United Nations General Assembly on the resolution which reads: “Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”. This is how the vote has gone (not including abstentions):

Year	Votes (Yes-No)	No Votes
1992	59-2	US, Israel
1993	88-4	US, Israel, Albania, Paraguay
1994	101-2	US, Israel
1995	117-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1996	138-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1997	143-3	US, Israel, Uzbekistan
1998	157-2	US, Israel
1999	155-2	US, Israel
2000	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2001	167-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2002	173-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2003	179-3	US, Israel, Marshall Islands
2004	179-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2005	182-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2006	183-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2007	184-4	US, Israel, Marshall Islands, Palau
2008	185-3	US, Israel, Palau
2009	187-3	US, Israel, Palau
2010	187-2	US, Israel
2011	186-2	US, Israel

Each fall the UN vote is a welcome reminder that the world has not completely lost its senses and that the American empire does not completely control the opinion of other governments.

How it began: On April 6, 1960, Lester D. Mallory, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, wrote in an internal memorandum: “The majority of Cubans support Castro … The only foreseeable means of alienating internal support is through disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship. … every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba.” Mallory proposed “a line of action which … makes the greatest inroads in denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”¹⁴ Later that year, the Eisenhower administration instituted the suffocating embargo against its eternally-declared enemy.

Notes

1. Viagra: Reuters, April 29, 2011 ^↩
2. See, for example, “Million Man, Woman and Child March in Tripoli, Libya”, June 20, 2011^↩
3. The Guardian (London), September 3, 2011 ^↩
4. Washington Post, September 15, 2011, “Islamists rise to fore in new Libya” ^↩
5. USA Today, October 24, 2011 ^↩
6. Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab studies, Columbia University, Washington Post, November 11, 2007^↩
7. Associated Press, April 6, 2011, some obvious errors in the original have been corrected ^↩
8. New York Times, November 6, 2003 ^↩
9. New York Times, April 16, 2002 ^↩
10. Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1994, p.7 ^↩
11. Guatemala: Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Untold Story of the American Coup in Guatemala (1982), p.183; Jagan: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (1965), p.774-9; Bishop: Associated Press, May 29, 1983, “Leftist Government Officials Visit United States” ^↩
12. The Pentagon Papers (NY Times edition, 1971), pp.4, 5, 8, 26; William Blum, Killing Hope, p.123) ^↩
13. Washington Post, October 26, 2011 ^↩
14. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958-1960, Volume VI, Cuba (1991), p.885 ^↩

–

William Blum is the author of:

• Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War 2
• Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
• West-Bloc Dissident: A Cold War Memoir
• Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire

Portions of the books can be read, and signed copies purchased, at www.killinghope.org

Previous Anti-Empire Reports can be read at this website.

To add yourself to this mailing list simply send an email to bblum6 [at] aol.com with “add” in the subject line. I’d like your name and city in the message, but that’s optional. I ask for your city only in case I’ll be speaking in your area.

(Or put “remove” in the subject line to do the opposite.)

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