|
A “Responsibility To Protect” Mercenaries?
From a recent Senate Committee on Armed Services hearing on Iraq and Syria picked up by Micah Zenko:
SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): I take it from your answer that we are now recruiting these young men to go and fight in Syria against ISIL, but if they’re attacked by Bashar Assad, we’re not gonna help them?
SECRETARY OF DEFENSE CHUCK HAGEL: They will defend themselves, Senator.
MCCAIN: Will we help them against Assad’s air…
HAGEL: We will help them and we will support them, as we have trained them.
MCCAIN: How will we help them—will we repel Bashar Assad’s air assets that will be attacking them?
HAGEL: Any attack on those that we have trained and who are supporting us, we will help ‘em.
The Pentagon confirmed to Zenko that Hagel meant what he said.
But what does this really mean? One hires a bunch of young fanatics, trains them to kill and sends them to fight some foreign government. Then, when that foreign government dares to defend itself against the mercenary goons, one has a "Responsibility To Protect" them? What a sorry illegal excuse for waging a war of aggression.
There is more of such nonsense coming up again. New talk of a "no-fly zone" as the U.S. is somehow the only one allowed to bomb civilians in Iraq and Syria and also new talk of some kind of buffer zone along the Turkish border.
I don't believe that any of these things will happen. Syria and its allies do have the means to block any legal justification for such issues and they have the means to deter against their implementation.
The policy the Obama administration is trying to implement now is too contradictory and not sustainable. It wants to destroy the ideological fighters of the Islamic State with the support of the states, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, which are based on the same ideology the IS fighters espouse and in which significant parts of the populations support the Islamic State. Obama wants recruit Turkey while the Islamic State is fighting against the Kurd paramilitaries from the PKK/YPK. Turkey has for decades fought against the PKK and the struggle has cost tens of thousands of death. It is also supportive of the Islamic State and similar movements in Syria.
The U.S. wants to bomb the IS in support of the "moderate rebels" who are protesting against such bombing:
The protesters singled out the reported deaths of a dozen or so civilians in the town of Kafr Daryan in northern Idlib province, where a U.S. cruise missile allegedly struck a building that housed displaced people near a base belonging to al Qaida’s Nusra Front.
These "moderate rebels" will now likely put themselves under the command of the Islamic State.
This policy and the lunatic alliances it is based on will break apart. Has there ever been a coalition with such discrepancies that has held throughout the ups and downs of a war? I do not know where, when and how the breaking up will occur but such a mess is simply not sustainable.
That is why I believe that Hagel's "R2P for mercenaries" is just nonsense and something that will never be implemented.
23
Allegedly Malaysia Air flight MH370 had 4 Chinese co-patent holders of some new military computer chips from a company owned by Jacob Rothschild, who held the remaining 5th patent.
Allegedly MA is majority owned by Jacob Rothschild. And allegedly, Rothschild owns the insurance company that insured both his hardware company and his airline against losses.
It’s a felony in EU to make any such statement against an Israeli. How did that come about?
Who knows, but it does seem odd that when a dual-citizen Israeli Coup leader in Ukraine and his dual-citizen Israeli Prime Minister poodle get in trouble with their conscripted armies fighting in Eastern Ukraine, again, a Rothschild-owned Malaysian Air flight is diverted by Kiev air control over the conflict zone, then ‘shot down’ by what appears to be a cockpit bmob, since no rookie airforce in the world, Ukraine’s included, are so accurate, even with the MH17 unwittingly flying level and straight, that they can riddle *just* the cockpit in a tight pattern, but not hit the rest of the plane. It had to be an internal cockpit bmob.
Which then goes back to the MH370 flight lost, suddenly radio silent, gaining altitude to maximum flight ceiling, rupturing the pressure dome, suffocating the passengers, veering sharply left, then trailing out into never-be-found-again SE Indian Ocean. The only thing that could have caused that was a cockpit bmob, together with the over-ridden-only-if-alive remote flight controls that could be operated from any nearby jet, or pre-programmed, since both flights veered sharply left after their cockpit crews were magically raptured away.
Or not… and we’ll never know. That’s the plan. The Netherlands is basically saying this must be forgotten, and the Pentagon just awarded $7 BILLION for cointel to twelve usual-suspects WADC-NOVA spook firms for domestic intel, for PSYOP, for rewriting world history.
“What MH17? There was never any MH17? That flight never took off from Schiphol! Those were holographic images projected by laser beams from Venus, and besides, ISIS, ISIS, ISISISIS!”
Having with their fake snuff flick ‘British pop star beheadings’ secured an unimpeachable MindSpace beachhead in the US/UK psyche, then thoroughly flensing their tax-bleed jugular, Perpetual Contingency Action™, together with its blowback, unrest, national police state, the Dark Government, whoever they are, has achieved critical mass.
This is our Trinity moment. We can’t shut down the NeoLiberal chain reaction now. Global oil cartel wars, heads on pikes, popular uprisings, epidemic collapses, Apple 666, we’re retrograde to pre-12th Century and burning an inexhaustable supply of fiat war bucks, until ‘all the useless mouths’ are interred in mass graves, and Israel can finally have its ‘Peace and Quiet’ moment.
Posted by: ChipNikh | Sep 27 2014 23:29 utc | 26
The Free Syrian Army was formed on July 29, 2011. On December 7, 2012, rebel leaders from across Syria announced the election of a new 30-member unified command structure called the Supreme Joint Military Command Council, known as the Supreme Military Command (SMC). Some 500 delegates elected the 30-person Supreme Military Council and a chief of staff on Friday and planned to meet soon with representatives from the opposition’s newly reorganized political leadership, participants said.
In June of 2013, it was reported that FSA troops make up two-thirds of the 12,000 fighters that report to the Joint Command while the rest are drawn from a patchwork of Islamist groups that Gen. Albtaish said are relatively moderate.
But later last year, the SMC began to break up. “It’s really sad to see,” Elizabeth O’Bagy, a senior research analyst at the Institute for the Study of War who just returned from a research trip to Syria, told Defense One. “Islamic movements are taking over the council and people feel they can’t fight back.”
On August 22, 2013, four of the five front commanders threatened to resign from the SMC, promising to break “red lines” and work “with all forces fighting in Syria,” a clear reference to the war’s growing Salafist-Jihadist contingent.
And now, according to SecDef Hagel, there is nobody in charge of the force that the US has been supporting for years. The SMC and FSA have no chief, and no spokesman.
Yet these ghosts are the basis of the new US policy to attack both Syria and ISIS. These ghosts can’t speak . . . .so the White House speaks for them.
FoxNews:
A top White House national security adviser said Sunday that the United States has strong support from Syrian residents in its effort to destroy Islamic State positions in their country, downplaying protests and arguing that Syrian President Bashar Assad is a common enemy.
“We’ve seen strong expressions of support from the Syrian opposition for the effort that we’re making,” Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken told “Fox News Sunday.”
Yup — that’s Tony Blinken speaking for the Syria “moderates,” telling us about the strong expressions that he’s seen. Antony John ‘Tony’ Blinken has been the Assistant to the President of the United States and Deputy National Security Adviser for President Barack Obama, since January 25, 2013. Blinken was born in Yonkers, New York, to Jewish parents Judith and Donald Blinken. He attended Dalton School in New York City until 1971, when he moved to Paris, France, with his divorced mother and her new husband, Holocaust survivor and lawyer, Samuel Pisar. Pisar, who had survived both the Auschwitz and Dachau, strongly influenced his views. (–wiki)
Posted by: Don Bacon | Sep 29 2014 0:06 utc | 75
Posted by: nomas | Sep 28, 2014 11:36:15 PM | 90
The logic of a regime of finance capital (based on the surplus value of work income) and done by actors who live in a secular democracy themselves would be “comparatively” benign. European/Ottoman colonialists created nightmares in the colonized countries, you can find many examples of them cutting heads, not to mention slavery and torture, the psychological effects probably still at work today. So no, it is not an Islamic custom, but European colonialists had to pacify their empires (missionaries, schools, administration) to be able to profit, and profit would have to be long term. It is instant profit nowadays without the “nation building”. The last attempt to do old fashioned colonialism was Iraq and Afghanistan, both failed because of Saudi supported Jihadi fighters and in both cases Saudi were not identified as hostile because they paid their way. And 9/11 and now the IS decapitation videos had links to Saudi, and both managed to get the US electorate to support US intervention.
You now have a business model of resource rich clients paying patrons to fight for their protection and power. In the Middle East and in Ukraine. The “no boots on the ground” is a logical consequence. As long as US and European citizens don’t get killed, as long as the war is payed for by the clients via the weapons bought, the jobs in the arms industries created in the US and Europe, voters will not really get upset.
Hillary Clinton-Run State Department Approved Bill Clinton Speeches, Despite Potential Conflicts
Writing about the documents in the Washington Examiner, Judicial Watch’s Micah Morrison notes that Bill Clinton also earned millions off speeches to groups with close ties to the government of Saudi Arabia. For one speech in January 2011 at a business forum in Riyadh founded by the Saudi Investment Authority, he was paid $300,000. Those speeches followed 2008 disclosures showing that the governments of Saudi Arabia, Norway, Kuwait, Qatar, Brunei, Oman, Italy and Jamaica have donated money to the Clinton Foundation.
The documents also show Bill Clinton was also paid $625,000 for two speeches in Russia, including one to an investment bank that the State Department describes as “focused on the emerging markets of Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Sub-Saharan Africa.” Kazakhstan is particularly noteworthy: In 2008, the New York Times reported that Bill Clinton accompanied Canadian mining executive Frank Giustra to a meeting with Kazakhstan’s president. Two days later the Kazakhstan government gave that executive’s company permission to invest in a uranium mining project. The Times pointed out that “just months after the (mining) pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra.”
Bush family Saudi connections
Bush can spew all the frontier rhetoric he wishes, but in the case of the Saudis, his inaction speaks louder. Why he would rather undermine the war on terrorism than confront Riyadh is an interesting question, and it doesn’t require a particularly active imagination to wonder if there is more here than just oil and a bad case of realpolitik.
The links between the House of Bush and the House of Saud are deep, overlapping and notoriously opaque: the Saudi investment in the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm whose rainmakers include George Bush Senior; the Saudi bankrolling of Poppy’s presidential library; the lucrative contracts the Saudis doled out to Halliburton when Dick Cheney was at the company’s helm. The main law firm retained by the Saudis to defend them against the 9-11 families is Baker Botts — as in James Baker, the Bush family consigliere. And, of course, there’s oil, the black glue connecting all these dots.
And this here is Patrick Cockburn
Iraq crisis: How Saudi Arabia helped Isis take over the north of the country.
A speech by an ex-MI6 boss hints at a plan going back over a decade. In some areas, being Shia is akin to being a Jew in Nazi Germany
US foreign policy is something you can pay for by funding competing politicians and lobby groups. It is hard to patch the policies resulting from these conflicting interests and personal animosities, therefore the more and more incoherent political statements and speeches.
Assad has called the Saudis “half men”. They now insist on getting rid of him.
British alliances against the Ottomans decided Saudi borders and their Wahhabi ruler. The finance capital that pays for the weapons has shifted in this neo colonial enterprise. It is no longer invested by British nor US citizens but by the rulers of the colonies themselves. In hereditary absolute monarchies their investment decisions are guaranteed to be made with a very personal flavour.
This here is the British ambassador to Lebanon’s ambiguous blog post in April 2013
It is not just about the last Sykes and Picot, but the next ones. And they should have Arabic names.
Posted by: somebody | Sep 29 2014 7:08 utc | 95
|
