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Merkel Sells Out For 5 Eyes Access
President Obama allegedly claims (German report) that he did not know about the 10+ years long NSA wiretap on the German chancellor Merkel's cellphones. I do not believe that. He will have been briefed about Merkel, her thoughts and positions each and every time he was calling or meeting her. Did he never ask where the information he got in those briefings was coming from?
(If he indeed did not know that Merkal was tapped by the NSA he should chop off not only the heads of the NSA and the DNI but also of his National Security Adviser who is supposed to know and explain such stuff.)
But I assume there is deal behind Obama's "I did not know" assertions. Merkel does not want to get rid of the "collect it all" spying on Germans and other people. She, who some believe was herself an nonofficial associate (IM) of the infamous East German state security service (Stasi), does not mind the violation of German citizens' rights to privacy. She wants to be, against German public opinion, part of the club that does the spying. She wants to have Germany accepted in the 5 eyes club which consists of the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those countries have pledged not to spy on each other but to share everything they have. But in effect the secret services of these countries are just NSA appendages. The NSA even pays for many of the other services efforts.
To make a deal Merkel will have to claim that she can trust Obama. His claim that he did not know about the wiretap on her is supposed to make that possible.
I doubt that such a deal will happen. Neither the UK nor the United States ever really trust Germany especially over its relatively good relation with China, Russia and Iran. They do not want to share with its services. They will probably offer some 5-eyes-light agreement that will give them more information from the German services but will not allow full access to the 5-eyes secrets. Merkel may even fall for that.
As Swoop remarks this week:
The first instinct of many members of the Intelligence Community is to dismiss the French and German complaints as naïve and hypocritical. However, a more conciliatory attitude is developing, motivated in part to prevent the Europeans from developing alternative Internet infrastructure that would be impermeable to US monitoring. With German intelligence officials due to visit Washington soon for talks on this issue, we expect a modus vivendi to be reached.
The problem with ANZAC, Rowan, is that it is already used to signify something different. How about CANZUK?
Greatly recommended, to students of these matters,(who abound in these threads) is the current New Left Review (83) in which Perry Anderson gives a masterful summary of modern US foreign policy.
Here are a couple of brief out-takes:
…To be effective, an ideology must reflect as well as distort, or conceal, reality. At the outset, as at the conclusion, of the Cold War, the United States possessed few colonies, was indeed an electoral democracy, did confront a socio-political system that was not, and as in the past enjoyed extraordinary natural advantages of size, location and endowments. All these could be, and were, synthesized into an imperial ideology commanding popular consensus, if never unanimity, at home, and power of attraction, if never ubiquitous, abroad. But the ultimately determinant instance in the formation of American foreign policy lay elsewhere, and could receive only circumspect articulation until the Cold War was won. So long as communism was a threat, capitalism was all but a taboo term in the vocabulary of the West. In the US itself, the virtues of free enterprise were certainly always prominent in the national liturgy, but even in this idiom were rarely projected as leitmotifs of the global defense of liberty against the totalitarian danger. The managers of the empire were aware that it would be counter-productive to foreground them. Early drafts of the Presidential speech that would become the Truman Doctrine, prepared by his aides Clifford and Elsey, presented Greece as a strategic line of defence for access to oil in the Middle East and, noting that ‘there has been a world-wide trend away from the system of free enterprise’, warned that ‘if, by default, we permit free enterprise to disappear in the other nations of the world, the very existence of our own economy and our own democracy will be gravely threatened’. This was speaking too plainly. Truman objected that it ‘made the whole thing sound like an investment prospectus’, and Acheson made sure such cats were not let out of the bag.[58] Even free trade, however essential to a Pax Americana, was not accorded top billing as an ideological imperative. But what, for the time being, was least conspicuous in the hierarchy of its legitimations would, as events were going to show, be most decisive in the map of its operations. For the moment, the Cold War had to be won, and the catechism of security was paramount….”
And, regarding the current situation in Syria,:
“…Russia did not oppose the UN resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over Libya, supposedly to protect civilian life, quickly converted by the US and its EU allies into a war with predictable loss of civilian life. Angered at this use of its green light, Putin vetoed a not dissimilar resolution on Syria, without offering notably greater support to the regime in Damascus, and temporizing with the rebels. Weakened by increasing opposition at home, he has since sought to make an impact abroad with a scheme for UN inspection of chemical weapons in Syria to avert an American missile attack on it. Intended to raise Moscow’s status as an interlocuteur valable for Washington, and afford a temporary respite to Damascus, the result is unlikely to be very different from the upshot in Libya. Born of the longing to be treated as a respectable partner by the US, naivety and incompetence have been hallmarks of Russian diplomacy in one episode after another since perestroika. Putin, fooled as easily over Libya as Gorbachev over NATO, now risks playing Yeltsin over Yugoslavia—thinking to offer weak help to Assad, likely to end up sending him the way of Milošević. Whether Obama, rescued from the embarrassment of a defeat in Congress, will prove as grateful to his St Bernard as Clinton was for escape from the need for a ground war, remains to be seen. In the Security Council, Russia can continue to fumble between collusion and obstruction. Its more significant relationship with the US unfolds elsewhere, along the supply-lines it furnishes for the American war in Afghanistan. A foreign policy as aqueous as this gives little reason for Washington to pay over-much attention to relations with Moscow….”
I offer both the article and these excerpts up merely to whet the appetite. I am not, it is unnecessary to remind sensible readers, endorsing the views in them.
Posted by: bevin | Oct 26 2013 21:15 utc | 5
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