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Some Links On That “War On ISIS”
Just some snippets and headlines on that non-war on ISIS.
On training, arming the "moderate rebels" there is pessimism all around:
“We need to do everything we can to figure out who the non-ISIS opposition is,” said Ryan C. Crocker, a former United States ambassador to Iraq and Syria. “Frankly, we don’t have a clue.”
That's right. No clue at all. From a White House Briefing by a "Senior Administration Official":
"ISIL has been I think a galvanizing threat around the Sunni partners in the region. They view it as an existential threat to them. Saudi Arabia has an extensive border with Syria."
These clueless folks can't even read a map. But we saw that before with those neocons who didn't know that there were Shia in Iraq before they invaded it. There is anyway not much difference between those and the "liberal interventionist" in Obama's administration. As Melkulangara Bhadrakumar notes:
Obama’s presidency has come full circle by reinventing the neocon dogmas it once professed to reject. On the pretext of fighting the IS, which the US and its allies created in the first instance, what is unfolding is a massive neocon project to remold the Muslim Middle East to suit the US’ geopolitical objectives. Call it by whatever name, it is an imperial war – albeit with a Nobel as commander-in-chief.
But the other side has its own ideas. Food for thoughts in three tweets by Peter Lee aka Chinahand:
Westerners mock pretensns of IS Caliphate bt it seems 2 strike chord among quite a few Muslims: effort to reestablish theocratic rule in 1/3
heartland of Umayyad/Abbasid caliphates, turn page on disastrus century of colonial/postcolonial rule, replace fragmented/corrupt states 2/3
w/ united Islamic power. West passivty validates the caliphate & its transnational strategy. May be PRC/Rus that try 2 draw the line. 3/3
Is ISIS an anti-Imperial movement?
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Cheney and his future anonymous Energy Policy Committee met with the Afghan Taliban in Houston in 1997, while George Bush was Governor of Texas. The Taliban were put up on a NY penthouse near the UN (which did not recognize them, nor Afghan Ambassador Hamid Karzai), while Cheney’s crew (e.g. Enron) pushed the Taliban to grant them a pipeline concession to India.
At some point in July 2001, now VP Cheney’s State Department junior ambassador is alleged to have lost her patience (Nuland’s ‘F*ck UE’ moment) and told the Taliban, “You can either have a carpet of gold, or a carpet of bmobs.”
To their credit, the Taliban told the b*tch to bring them mint tea, and put on a shawl.
Planning and logistics for the US invasion began in August 2001, which if you know ANYTHING about US Military, could not POSSIBLY have begun in November without that advance logistics.
After Karzai was pushed through the Loya Jirga to Chief Executive by immense pressure and baaksheesh directly from Cheney, Karzai nevertheless awarded the fabulous Aynak and Hajigak strategic reserves to China and India respectively. The famous US ‘Surge’ was ordered by Cheney in rage and retaliation (executed by Obama), then Clinton is on the record bribing Karzai with $5B diverted from US humanitarian aid funds, (which Karzai lost in Dubai R/E speculation then Clinton had to rush back and back-stop Bank of Kabul with $3.5B more, to prevent an audit that would have revealed her betrayal to the American people.)
But to Karzai’s credit, even though Cheney’s EPC group wrote the Afghan Hydrocarbon and Strategic Minerals Laws IN ENGLISH and in NOVEMBER 2001 (before the new ‘Afghan Government’ even existed!), then Hillary bribed him with $8.5B (of which she received $50M and Karzai paid off her $-35M bankrupt presidential campaign, e.g. 1% standard water carrier fee) to Karzai’s everlasting credit, he nevertheless awarded the Aynak copper to China, and Hajigak iron & coking coal, as well as the Oil & Gas concessions, to India.
Ha, ha. Everyone in the world knows how corrupt US Mil.Gov is, and their words are LIES.
So OEF-A was already planned BEFORE September 11th, then ‘September 11th’ was really about destroying Congressional records of Rumsfeld’s $2.3 TRILLION IN MISSING FUNDS malfeasance stored at the Pentagon, with backup files at WTC 7. There must have been a lot of smoking guns, skeletons in closets, a lot of betrayal and treason in those files, to slam a cruise missile into the Pentagon at just the right spot, and ‘pull’ WTC7 with a demolition team, knowing, according to German and Israeli advance intel, that a diversion attack was coming.
It was the SAUDIS, and NOT the Afghans, who slammed two planes into the WTC as purely a diversion. The classic ‘bitch slap’ before the rape at the Pentagon. Planned by, funded by, executed by, Saudi Royals. This is all documented fact, and now look where we are today.
Oil was $15 a barrel under Clinton, then shot to $147 after Cheney’s Holy Oil Wars, and remains around $100 today, castrating the US economy, 92,000,000 jobless or homeless or both, giving the Saudis ONE BILLION DOLLARS A DAY FOR THE PAST TEN YEARS in excess oil profits above ~$25 a barrel Prince Bandar publicly stated would be a ‘reasonable price’.
It’s also documented fact the Saudi Royals are sponsoring ISIS, and publicly declaring on their media in Riyadh that they are doing so, (whether they personally are or not), because Iraq just had the temerity and lack of humility and foresight to announce in July they were back to pre-war oil production levels and ‘ready to go to 8MBPD, a hot dagger in Riyadh’s TRILLION DOLLARS IN EXCESS OIL PROFIT HOT MONEY SLOSHING ENDLESSLY AROUND THE WORLD schema.
The Iraqi Gov’s must not be too bright, and now Uncle Kerry-Kohn says they ‘have to go’.
Photo-documentation has also surfaced showing John McCain meeting with Abu Bakr during a covert trip into Syria while on an ‘inspection tour’, promising to fund ‘moderate’ mercs, and pretending he didn’t know who the people in the room were, as if that’s not laughable.
It’s all happening in plain view now, because we are SHEEP, and they know it. Panetta just lost ONE TRILLION DOLLARS on his shift. Nada. Mil.Gov just awarded $SEVEN BILLION to Spook Central WADC-NOVA for a New Global Intelligence Putsch. Nada. NOBODY SAYS A WORD, because that boy CIA plant in Russia and his Mossad ally Greenwald have everyone cringing in fear.
Subzero in Kiev in just 65 days from now, and they have no heating gas.
Tick tock.
Posted by: ChipNikh | Sep 14 2014 2:21 utc | 127
@Fast Freddy # 144
Today I find my child’s writing assignment – an essay about the meaning of the flag (the word freedom is in parenthesis in case direction is needed).
The Flag and Freedom in Early America
by Malooga (with a tear in his eye)
The design of the US flag is directly descended from the designs of the flags of the British Charter Companies. The Origin and History of the American Flag pps. 220-223. That is why many maintain that we, as a nation, were born under a fascist flag, and that we will likely die under one. Let me explain.
As early as as early as 1704, the British East India Company had the exact same thirteen red and white stripes that we now have, although what they stood for is not recorded, and perhaps not known. (Note: This is the East India Company, tasked with trading and colonizing the area around what we now know as India. In addition to the black-and-white picture found in the link above, one can see a color picture of the flag on the East India Company wikipedia page, although in the interest of US patriotic propaganda, the flag is now incorrectly dated as being in service from 1801 on. As the link above shows, it actually predates the birth of America by many years.) The only difference between the two flags is that, in splitting with Britain, the Union Jack insert in the upper left corner was logically removed and replaced with the 13 stars, which symbolically represented the original 13 states. The stripes, which had not symbolized states, but perhaps investor groupings as their numbers varied from corporation to corporation, were left untouched.
Chartered Companies were the forerunner of todays corporations. A group of merchants were granted a charter for a specific area of the globe, and then pooled their investment resources and risks in setting up a trading company. The arrangement was mutually beneficial, as it gave the monarch foreign policy separation from commercial activity, as well as the loyalty of the new wealthy commercial class; the investors, in turn, were granted limited liability in the case of loss or bankruptcy, similar to what stock holders have today. In return, these investor/merchants paid a certain sum to the regent, and were required to pledge their loyalty. The story is told by Buckminster Fuller in chapter 3 (HEADS OR TAILS WE WIN, INC. ) of his remarkable book, The Grunch of Giants. (Free Download.) Much of British history was this battle between monarch and commerce.
Charter Companies represent the point in history when commercial capital began to have separate interests from the ruling regent. This came about do to the development of the stout-ribbed sailing ship, which for the first time in history was capable of carrying significant amounts of cargo or weaponry. This allowed the amassing of significant amounts of wealth. Concurrently, developments in finance and banking, education, science, warfare, philosophy and propaganda led to much of the modern world as we know it today.
Among the Charter Companies involved in the settlement and exploitation of America were the British Virginia Company (1606), Massachusetts Bay Company and Providence Island Company (1629); the French Compagnie de l’Occident (1664), and Compagnie du Mississippi (1717); the Dutch New Netherland Company (1614), and Dutch West India Company (1621); and the Swedish New Sweden Company (1638–1655), and Swedish West India Company (1786–1805).
This new legal construct, the Charter Company, accorded wealthy people many powerful new rights they never had before:
*They could invest as a group with legal standing.
*They were granted limited liability, meaning that they could not lose more than their original investment.
*They were granted vast territories (generally for free) where they had the exclusive right of trade or settlement.
*They could form their own banks.
*They had the right to own, manage and grant or distribute land under their charter.
*They had the right to raise their own police force and make their own laws (within reason).
It is easy to see from this description that Charter Companies combined many of the properties which today we attribute to government (control over a delimited physical territory, monopoly of power, legal rights, trade policy, banking policy), with those that we attribute to corporations (limited liability, investor rights, distribution of profits). Now what was that word that we use today to describe the marriage of government and corporations? I know it starts with an “F,” and while “Freedom” is resonating in an Orwellian way, I seem to remember there was a more accurate word. (Note to Fast Freddy: This is where your child might need to ask his teacher for help.)
At this point, we should briefly explore the difference between a Right and a Freedom. A right is a legal, moral, or social claim that people are entitled to, primarily from their government. A freedom is the right to conduct one’s affairs without governmental interference. In other words, a right is something the government gives to you, while a freedom is something a government does not take away from you. The wealthy investors had rights — extensive ones — granted by their government. The settlers’ had limited freedoms that their Charter Company did not take away from them. Let’s look at what life was like for the settlers.
While it may be true that certain groups of settlers belonged to persecuted religious sects in Europe, the relationship between the Chartered Company, who was investing money in the venture in the hope of earning a profit, and the settlers, was purely of a financial nature. There were any number of different financial schemes involved in getting things going, but once a settlement was established in what is now “America,” the settlers were responsible for finding and producing enough export crop (tobacco, rice, indigo, sugar etc.) to pay off the investors, and to pay for their extensive import needs (as they found no department stores in this new land). This could take many years, and often an entire lifetime. So their situation was technically one of debt bondage or peonage, or indentured servant — the first category removed from absolute chattel slavery. After a colony’s debt was theoretically paid off, they remained a captive market for several generations, which gave them little, if any, economic bargaining power.
Freedom — is a word we all love, but like the Supreme Court and pornography, none of us can define it. Were the settlers free? Economically, as I have described, they were not, often for several generations. Were they free to live long, healthy lives? Certainly not. Life was extraordinarily harsh and precarious. There were many settlements completely overrun by the local natives where a great number of people died and others where everyone died; in other settlements everyone died without leaving a record why. Most colonies lived in fear of native attack, especially as they expanded beyond their original settlements, taking over native land and breaking treaties. (Native peoples did not have our sense of individual land ownership and resource rights, and to put it generously, the settlers deep religious views allowed — no, encouraged — them to murder and screw over the natives every chance they got.) Finally, crop failure and starvation remained a threat for several generations. Also, settlers encountered both new and old diseases.
Settlements, due to their precarious nature, were very authoritarian hierarchical communities. There was relatively more freedom for the leaders of the community, and very little for the young and least skilled. Regardless of social position, all worked six days a week and spent half of their one day off in church.
Which brings us to the subject of religious belief and freedom. All people are, and have always been, free to believe whatever they choose within the confines of their own mind. It is true that a mere handful of original settlement communities, numbering far less than a thousand people in total, such as the Pilgrims and the Puritans, whose faiths had been persecuted in Europe, were free to follow those faiths in the New World.
But, while American history proudly trumpets a few cases of religious freedom, it willfully ignores the almost universal religious intolerance — and America’s first communities were in most ways, far more intolerant than European societies of the same time period. American colonies were small and parochial, while Europe was large and diverse.
Smithsonian Magazine, in an article entitled “America’s True History of Religious Tolerance,” relates:
The initial encounter between Europeans in the future United States came with the establishment of a Huguenot (French Protestant) colony in 1564 at Fort Caroline (near modern Jacksonville, Florida). More than half a century before the Mayflower set sail, French pilgrims had come to America in search of religious freedom.
The Spanish had other ideas. In 1565, they established a forward operating base at St. Augustine and proceeded to wipe out the Fort Caroline colony. The Spanish commander, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, wrote to the Spanish King Philip II that he had “hanged all those we had found in [Fort Caroline] because…they were scattering the odious Lutheran doctrine in these Provinces.” When hundreds of survivors of a shipwrecked French fleet washed up on the beaches of Florida, they were put to the sword, beside a river the Spanish called Matanzas (“slaughters”). In other words, the first encounter between European Christians in America ended in a blood bath.
In other words, the new settlers often treated those white people of another faith, which they happened to encounter, as cruelly as they treated the natives.
Again, it is notable that the famed Puritan fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony did not countenance tolerance of opposing religious views. Their “shining city upon a hill” theocracy, the ideological precursor of American Exceptionalism, brooked no dissent, religious or political — and that sanctimonious, self-righteous tradition continues to this day. (“You are either with us, or with the terrorists.”)
The most famous dissidents within the Puritan community, Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, were banished following minor disagreements over theology and policy. (These disagreements were often so theologically abstruse — like Antinomianism — as to be almost incomprehensible in our day.) From Puritan Boston’s earliest days, Catholics (“Papists”) were anathema and were banned from the colonies, along with other non-Puritans. Four Quakers were hanged in Boston between 1659 and 1661 for persistently returning to the city to stand up for their beliefs. And would any survey of religious freedom in early America be complete without mentioning the Salem Witch Trials — perhaps the nation’s most notorious case of mass hysteria — where 20 people were tried and killed for no reason at all? Of course, people were accused of witchcraft and killed on a regular basis in early America, but doing away with 20 at once was so unique that it continues to make Salem one of America’s favorite and most popular tourist destinations.
Catholics and Jews were not accorded full civil rights until the 1800‘s, and there were large anti-Catholic movements and even sanctioned political parties all throughout the century. The most famous of those parties was the appropriately named “Know Nothings,” whose mass intolerance helped provide us with one of our Presidents — the somewhat-less-than illustrious Millard Fillmore. Mormons were evicted from Missouri en masse in 1838.
Because of this extensive violent and unforgiving history, one must question deeply what the relationship between freedom and tolerance is, and whether there any value in freedom without tolerance, and if so, what? Perhaps that is why we have always been schooled in the importance of freedom, and never of tolerance.
What freedoms did the settlers have?
*They had the freedom to set their own community laws, unless disallowed by their sponsoring Charter Company. These laws were often harsh, for many reasons: Life in the new colony was precarious and physical group survival was often at stake. Religion was taken seriously and the bible was interpreted literally, in a manner that we would now call extreme fundamentalism: no deviance of action or thought was allowed. There was always the threat of someone, or a group, “going native,” that is, running away and joining the local natives, where survival was easier and life far less doctrinaire.
*They had complete freedom of religion as a community. In practice this meant that the community leaders practiced one single absolutist religion as interpreted by their religious leader in consultation with other community leaders. Any deviance from this practice was punished by ostracism (which often meant death), or severe capital punishment (which occasionally meant death).
So, to sum up, the American flag, in both design and meaning, descends from one used by a pre-corporate legal construct, which was accorded rights we now attribute to both corporations and government, prefiguring what we now call fascism; and America’s original European settlers had very limited freedoms (what nowadays would be recognized as slavery), and possessed almost no tolerance for other beliefs whatsoever. Challenges to this severe social order generally resulted in harsh capital punishment or death.
Sad as that sounds, that’s the unvarnished truth, and any other version is a fairy tale which, if learned, will cause much pain and suffering when unlearned as an adult. Now, where was that blue pill I had lying around on the table?
Posted by: Malooga | Sep 15 2014 8:17 utc | 162
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