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Saturday, July 12, 2008 |
Several days ago this blog was visited by the U.S. Department of State and HQ USAFE/SCNO (Armed Forces Europe, Middle East & Canada). Nothing special in a world where every little bit of internet traffic is monitored. But in this case it seems they were interested in what was generally being said on the net about Iran and a possible attack by Israel or the US. When big shots take the trouble to visit a small blog like this one, this can only mean something important is developing.
To be honest, I am quite pessimistic about the situation in this world. We could very well be experiencing a situation similar to that existing in Germany in the late thirties.
A very important event is going to happen in America on November 4. The first black American president will be elected. That is, if there is no foul play as in the two previous elections. Some consider American elections to be a criminal event (nevertheless the US administration accuses other nations of rigging elections).
With regard to America's past, with regard to the criminal actions of many Republicans, with regard to the program of the leading Democrats, with regard to the tenets of the neocon economy, a war with Iran is a definite possibility.
You see, increasing profits in oil industry and war industry is at the moment the main aim of the American administration. Wars increase prices and benefit war profiteers, some of which reside in the White House.
It seems the emphasis of the past years on the scarcity of oil is somewhat overstated. When Royal Dutch Shell a few years ago said they had to revalue their oil reserves downwards, I thought this is humbug. Of course, there can be a shortage in a number of years, but a shortage simply means higher prices and profits for oil companies. After all we live in a neocon environment.
ICH: "However, claims of an oil shortage are not supported by facts. Evidence shows that, in reality, there is no discrepancy between production and consumption of oil on a global level.
Contrary to the claims of the champions of war and militarism, of the Wall Street speculators in energy markets, and of the proponents of Peak Oil, the current oil price shocks are caused largely by the destabilizing wars and political turbulences in the Middle East. These include not only the raging wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also the danger of a looming war against Iran that would threaten the flow of oil out of Persian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz.
Close scrutiny of the soaring oil prices shows that anytime there is a renewed U.S. or Israeli military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.
War and political chaos in the Middle East tend to increase energy prices in a number of ways. For one thing, as war plunges the U.S. deep into debt, it depreciates the dollar - thereby appreciating, or inflating, the price of dollar-denominated commodities, especially oil.
Depreciated dollar tends to raise the price of oil (and other commodities) in two major ways. First, since oil is priced in U.S. dollars, oil exporting countries would demand more of the cheaper dollars for the same barrel of oil in order to maintain the purchasing power of their oil. Second, when the dollar falls, oil prices rise because investors are more likely to use their money to buy tangible assets or commodities such as oil and gold that won't lose value.
Stronger than the impact of dollar depreciation on the price of oil has been the impact of manipulative speculation: war and political instability have served as breeding grounds for hoarding and speculation in energy futures markets. According to F. William Engdahl, a top expert on energy and financial markets, 'As much as 60% of today's crude oil price is pure speculation driven by large trader banks and hedge funds. It has nothing to do with the convenient myths of Peak Oil. It has to do with control of oil and its price'.
While it is important to point out the impacts of dollar depreciation and commodity speculation on the price of oil, it is even more important to show that both of these factors are byproducts of war and militarism."
The new president of the US won't have any choice as far as foreign policy is concerned. He will have to go with the reigning neocon dogmas, or he'll be killed. It is as simple as that. The only difference a Democratic president could make would be in the internal matters. And even there, what can he do to sanitize the American economy? If he abolishes the tax benefits for the rich, he'll get some heavy flak, if he cuts down on American welfare, he'll get heavy flak, though with the help of the neocon media much less.
So if everything goes as should, Obama will be president, but a lame duck.
And even that is not sure. There is a great chance that Bush will order his generals to attack Iran. Of course, it will be a covert operation. It will look like an Israeli attack. But the order and action will be American, and the aim will not only be to destroy the nuclear facilities in Iran, but to take out all rocket launching installations. They would expect Iran to retaliate and bomb Israel, and then have a 'reason' to attack Iran full scale. The US could even simulate a fake attack on Israel and blame Iran. It has happened before, like in Vietnam.
George W. Bush already is a war criminal, and he wouldn't mind dropping a few more bombs and lying about it.
So I am very pessimistic about all this. It's very sad. I'd very much like to support Obama, like this ukulele group. But I'm afraid the reality is quite different.
ICH: "But don't be fooled, Obama could turn out to be worse than McCain, much worse. No one doubts that he is brighter and more charismatic than the irritating senator from Arizona. And no one underestimates his Pied Piper ability to galvanize crowds and stir up national pride. But what good is that? Obama works for the same group of venal plutocrats as Bush; a fact that was made painfully clear just last week when he voted to approve the new FISA bill that allows the president to continue spying on American citizens with impunity. Obama is a constitutional scholar; he understood what he was voting for. He was sending a message to his supporters that they don't really matter; that what really counts is the small gaggle of powerful corporatists who run the country and believe the president is above the law. That's what his vote really meant.
The truth is that the Obama supporters have projected their own values onto their candidate and are trying to make him out to be something that he is not.
The system has to be rebuilt from the bottom-up not the top-down. It'll take a revolution in thinking and lots of hard work. There's no quick fix. Freedom isn't free anymore; deal with it. Voting for Obama and keeping one's fingers crossed, is not a sign of hope. It's a sign of self-delusion."
It's very sad, but I am afraid the above is right. I think it will finally boil down to a slow decay of the US empire, similar to the fall of the Roman empire.
12:05:37 PM 
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America is an imperialist nation, there is no doubt about that. It interferes with nations all over the world, and even interferes with democratically elected governments. The bombing of Dresden and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the beginning of a totalitarian state. American governments before and after WWII have invaded hundreds of countries and the result has not been a better world, on the contrary. America's greatest friend in arms is Britain.
"'At the heart of the US and UK project,' says Shiner, 'is a desire to avoid accountability for what they want to do. Guantanamo Bay and extraordinary renditions are part of the same struggle to avoid accountability through jurisdiction.' British soldiers, he says, use the same torture techniques as the Americans and deny that the European Convention on Human Rights, the Human Rights Act and the UN Convention on Torture apply to them. And British torture is 'commonplace': so much so, that 'the routine nature of this ill-treatment helps to explain why, despite the abuse of the soldiers and cries of the detainees being clearly audible, nobody, particularly in authority, took any notice'.
A wall of silence has always surrounded the British military, its arcane rituals, rites and practices and, above all, its contempt for the law and natural justice in its various imperial pursuits. For 80 years, the Ministry of Defence and compliant ministers refused to countenance posthumous pardons for terrified boys shot at dawn during the slaughter of the First World War. British soldiers used as guinea pigs during the testing of nuclear weapons in the Indian Ocean were abandoned, as were many others who suffered the toxic effects of the 1991 Gulf War. The treatment of Gurkha Tul Bahadur Pun is typical. Having been sent back to Nepal, many of these 'soldiers of the Queen' have no pension, are deeply impoverished and are refused residence or medical help in the country for which they fought and for which 43,000 of them have died or been injured. The Gurkhas have won no fewer than 26 Victoria Crosses, yet Brown's 'affordable expenditure' excludes them.
An even more imposing wall of silence ensures that the British public remains largely unaware of the industrial killing of civilians in Britain's modern colonial wars.
'The overall figure [since 1945] is between 8.6 and 13.5 million,' Curtis writes. 'Of these, Britain bears direct responsibility for between four million and six million deaths. This figure is, if anything, likely to be an underestimate. Not all British interventions have been included, because of lack of data.' Since his study was published, the Iraq death toll has reached, by reliable measure, a million men, women and children.
The spiralling rise of militarism within Britain is rarely acknowledged, even by those alerting the public to legislation attacking basic civil liberties, such as the recently drafted Data Communications Bill, which will give the government powers to keep records of all electronic communication. Like the plans for identity cards, this is in keeping what the Americans call 'the national security state', which seeks the control of domestic dissent while pursuing military aggression abroad. The £4bn aircraft carriers are to have a 'global role'. For global read colonial.
The militarising of how the British state perceives and treats other societies is vividly demonstrated in Africa, where ten out of 14 of the most impoverished and conflict-ridden countries are seduced into buying British arms and military equipment with 'soft loans'. Like the British royal family, the British Prime Minister simply follows the money. Having ritually condemned a despot in Zimbabwe for 'human rights abuses' - in truth, for no longer serving as the west's business agent - and having obeyed the latest US dictum on Iran and Iraq, Brown set off recently for Saudi Arabia, exporter of Wahhabi fundamentalism and wheeler of fabulous arms deals.
To complement this, the Brown government is spending £11bn of taxpayers' money on a huge, privatised military academy in Wales, which will train foreign soldiers and mercenaries recruited to the bogus 'war on terror'. With arms companies such as Raytheon profiting, this will become Britain's 'School of the Americas', a centre for counter-insurgency (terrorist) training and the design of future colonial adventures.
It has had almost no publicity.
Of course, the image of militarist Britain clashes with a benign national regard formed, wrote Tolstoy, 'from infancy, by every possible means - class books, church services, sermons, speeches, books, papers, songs, poetry, monuments [leading to] people stupefied in the one direction'."
The image of an idyllic England is nurtured wherever possible. Even P.G. Wodehouse is being used to bolster imperialist ideas. If there was a writer who satirised the English class system and hated the notion of empire it was Wodehouse. But the Tories and the English establishment in general seem to have annexed Wodehouse. Boris Johnson is a Wodehouse lover too. Wodehouse would turn in his grave. Even the Russian Wodehouse society, which is nothing more than a business venture, is led by right-wing extremists.
NYTimes: "Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were 'categorically' torture, which is illegal under both American and international law."
Karl Rove, considered the architect of the present criminal administration, has fled the country.
"Karl Rove was scheduled to testify before the House Judiciary Committee yesterday. He didn't show. Not only that, the Committee was told that Rove had left the country on a 'long scheduled' trip."
And in the meantime, the carnage continues.
BBC: "A US air strike in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday killed 47 civilians, 39 of them women and children, an Afghan government investigating team says."
The US and Britain are actively engaged in controlling our world. They have a huge army of spies and infiltrators.
FAS: "There are more than a thousand members of the U.S. military who are qualified Chinese linguists, a Defense Department official told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year.
'I have been told that information regarding the number of DOD intelligence analysts who speak Mandarin and/or Cantonese is classified,' said James J. Shinn, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Security Affairs, who was confirmed in December 2007.
'At the unclassified level, I can tell you that there are over 5,800 military personnel (officers and enlisted) with at least a basic capability in Mandarin and/or Cantonese. Of those, over 1,000 are considered proficient in Mandarin.'"
11:10:50 AM
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© Copyright 2008.
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