How Much War Do We Need?

Internet humor is notoriously irreverent. I recall a couple of thought-provoking right-wing comics about the peace movement. In one you see a group with signs saying "There are no just wars!", but with the exception of one who carries a sign "Except WW2!".

The point is, of course, that people only rally against the wars they don't like, but when the chips come down, any nation must stand ready to defend itself. We support the wars we like, and the trick, so to speak, for the people in power, is to market the wars to the public will like them.

A new string of articles highlighting the US military budget, naturally juxtaposing it with the Washington budget and debt crisis, raises the question:

How much war do we really need?

In 2005 the United Nations published The first annual Human Security Report, which concluded to the surprise of news addicts all over the world that violent conflict around the world is declining.

While many small conflicts remain, since the Cold War the number of armed conflicts has decreased by more than 40%, and the number of major conflicts (defined as resulting in 1,000 or more "battle-deaths") has declined by 80%.

With the US caught in a serious debt crisis, and with BRIC predicted to be the four largest economies by 2050, the calls that US imperial power is now in rapid decline have become mainstream.

"America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show," wrote the Economics editor of The Guardian, Larry Elliott in June 2011.

Harvard Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr, a former US assistant secretary of defence, argues that in spite of the rise of China, projected to become the dominant economy by 2016, the US military power still plays a crucial role in forming world politics in the 21st century.

The Disastrous Effects of US Imperialism

US imperialism manifests itself as political pressure, economic sanction and military force. Diplomacy and economic measures are always backed up by the threat of military force. Any nation contemplating escalation of a conflict with USA will, in a final analysis, see an overwhelming military force descending upon them.

A recent WikiLeak perfectly illustrates how 21st century US imperialism works:

Hanes and Levis contacted the US State Department, because Haiti was considering raising the minimum wage to 61 cents per hour agains the current 31 cents, and the US State Department contacted the Haiti government and put pressure on them to halt the proposal.

The example demonstrates how Washington, backed by its unsurpassed military power, is effectively micro-managing the tiniest parts of the world for corporate profit.

Paul Craig Roberts speculates that the American empire will prevail by attempting to trigger a war between India and China. Others see the conflict between Iran and Israel, and by extention USA, as the next great war. The struggle over oil resources in the South China Sea is also considered a possible flash point for a new 21st century mega-conflict.

In a move to put an end to Chinese hackers who have consistently breached the firewalls of US official networks over the past decade, Washington has declared hacking "an act of war", while at the same time Obama calls drone bombing "kinetic action" and violates the US War Powers Act that demands that he put military action such as the intervention in Libya before Congress within 60 days of the first operations.

How the Foreign Aid Ponzi Scheme Works

China, caught in the cross-hairs of US policy makers, has stated that its military power does not constitute a threat, and that it is not the agenda of the country to establish an empire.

Meanwhile, support for the US agenda for the Middle East is waning, as the nations forming the Coalition of the Willing are counting the costs against the advantages, and finding that the military adventure does not measure up to expectations.

A new report states that Afghanistan is now officially a "war time economy" with 97% of its GDP linked to foreign spending.

Pakistan, one of the three largest recepients of US foreign aid has calculated the costs of carrying out the Washington imposed War on Terror, and the conclusion is that the direct and indirect costs for Pakistan far outweighs the foreign aid.

US foreign aid is paid out to anyone who will cooperate and comply with America's military agenda. It comes with a so-called "peace and security" clause, but effectively promotes corruption, as the money is easily funnelled into the pockets of leaders through the principle of connected vessels.

One should not be surprised that a leader who will agree to subordinate his country's interests to the interests of a foreign power for cash is also corrupted.

The US is sending out billions in foreign aid every year, even to Russia and China, but receives trillions in foreign aid from some of the same countries it gives foreign aid to - in the shape of the foreign holdings of US national treasury bonds.

This keeps up the system of global governance that we refer to as American imperialism, justifying the common phrase: "USA is the policeman of the world."

The problem, however, is that USA is not just the policeman, but represents pretty much all three branches of government. USA is the largest economy, the largest and most modern military force, and immune to prosecution for war crimes, even if she produces the majority of conflicts, casualties and human rights violations.

In global politics USA is the judge, the jury and the executioner.

That is why the system of governance in the 21st century is less than anarchic, and much less than democratic. That's why it makes sense to casually use a term like "American imperialism".

Producing Terrorism to Justify Empire

War is crucial to USA's business model for a number of reasons. The military-industrial base is the last remaining intact industrial base of the country and an object of intense concern in Congress, as Chinese manufacturers are cutting into also this area.

The Grand Area Doctrine of USA allows USA to take military action to defend her interests in literally every corner of the world, and this necessitates an enormous military apparatus.

USA makes use of this enhancement whereever and whenever it is applicable, and the only way to impede the intrusiveness of Pentagon and Washington is to counter efforts with enough economic or military counter-measures to make aggression untenable from a cost-benefit perspective.

Most countries outside the West does not have this capacity, and this is a huge contributor to the production of terrorism. The desperation is frequently described as a by-product of "assymmetric conflict," which simply means that a very weak player is being threatened or a attacked by a very powerful player and succumbs to illegal tactics.

The effectiveness of terrorism today testifies to its origin: USA is effectively producing it with its unrelenting stance on what activists and development experts in the Third World refers to as "economic rights", in contrast to the human rights highlighted by the affluent West, the social and cultural rights.

Perhaps USA is even consciously producing terrorism, in order to perpetuate the perception of a need for the world to rally around the world's largest military-industrial complex.

Even without conspiracy, nefarious CIA instigation and false flag operations, and economic destabilization through the World Bank and IMF two man con game, USA can simply manipulate the world using the dynamics of "assymmetric conflict" to produce terror. That is the privilege of holding the long end of the stick.

Meanwhile, other problems are neglected, drowned out by the narrative of perpetual war. A billion people suffer starvation, and in 2010 alone 42 million were displaced by natural disasters.

The effects on the global community of this autocratic power is harrowing, contributing to dangerous xenophobia and right wing terrorism at home and abroad.

Scores of American soldiers are being killed or maimed, only to return to a harrowing lack of prospects at home, and veterans are now considered the biggest threat to US security.

The Cost-Benefit of "Muscular Foreign Policy"

All this highlights to what extent USA is invested in making money from war, and to utilize military threat to further its interests.

It is imperative to Washington to justify not only its conduct and its policies, but its existence as a global hegemon.

The rest of the world must be depicted as on the brink of collapse, as profoundly chaotic, uncivilized... as the realm of barbarism, where only the light of freedom and democracy in the American meaning of the terms can provide progress and relief from a multitude of pangs.

What to Washington is "muscular foreign policy", however, constitutes to the rest of the world bullying, oppression and violation.

If USA is the policeman of the world, it is a corrupt policeman with economic investments directly tied to the persons and groups under investigation. It is a cop with a license to kill, impunity to prosecution and power over the judges and the politicans. American empire more resembles a mafia than an actual police force.

The issue of policing the world is also relevant to the methods applied by American forces in actual conflict zones. The armed forces are not a police force. They are not sufficiently trained to interact with the local population, except for the photo ops of candy bar distribution among the children.

The armed forces of not only USA but the entire Western coalition are ignorant about local customs, often full of contempt of foreign cultures, and in some cases indifferent to foreign lives.

When we look at the need for US military power to be a balancing force to "the chaos of the world", we must ask ourselves how much of this chaos is imagined, how much is exaggerated, and how much is produced by the West.

Like scientists do in clinical experiments, we must carefully subtract our own influence from the measurements, as well as place strict limitations on our biases.

How much of the crisis is produced by fallacies in the US? How many conflicts are produced by the selfish interests of Western government and corporations? To what extent does the economic paradigm of Washington destabilize or undermine the development of foreign countries.

Only when this is done, we can begin to ask the question: "How much war do we need?"

Dialogue With USA in the 21st Century?

It is undoubtedly necessary to have USA and the other Western powers deeply involved in solving the challenges of our increasingly interconnected world.

Every country and every region must adopt responsibility for their own progress. All responsibility for corruption, sectarian conflicts, poor development and bad governance in general cannot be wiped off on the West.

Shared burden of responsibility is another by-product of the emerging multi-polar world order.

However, it follows with advocacy of US hegemony and military concentration, that USA must also carry the majority of blame. To argue in the same breath that USA will and must retain its leadership position while at the same time outsourcing blame is simply hypocritical.

The majority of the world, including Americans, want food, housing, employment and affordable health care, while "socialism" is still a four letter word on Capitol Hill.

There is a direct conflict of interest between the American corporatism and the billions of citizens directly or indirectly represented by the "world government" headed and financed by USA.

The Arab Spring, responding directly to dire need and to oppression by dictators and to corruption of the civil institutions claimed not to exist in the MENA region, reflect this conflict of interests. It is as much a revolt against a sattrap system as it is an internal argument manifesting as protests sweeping the entire region.

The shared interest between citizens in the Arab world and the Western world can be seen in the way protests migrate and spread also in USA and in Europe among discontented citizens who are beginning to decode and deconstruct the rhetoric and the policies of the dominant regime.

Nobody argues against the right of USA or any other nation to defend its borders and to take to arms against a foreign invader, but the discussion of American militarism is not about that - it is about the casual bombing and hasty invasions of foreign sovereign nations for altogether dubious purposes and with disastrous effect.

For the world to reduce cultural conflicts in order to be able to work in unison to solve collective global problems - such as climate change, displacement and impoverization, energy crisis, natural disasters and pandemics - these protests much settle into a vertical dialogue between the ones who have and the ones who have not.

If such a dialogue is rejected by the only side in the equasion that can reject them, the people in power, then we may find we need far more war than any of us want - including even the US military-industrial complex and the armed forces.

It was the gargantuan error in calculation of the previous decade that US policy makers thought that for the US military-industrial complex there is no such thing as "too much war."

False Bookkeeping For Zion: A Grand Indictment Against Western Media

The Western media black-out of the Palestinian side of the Middle East Conflict amounts to complicity in genocide

"I'll be a mirror, reflect what you are. In case you don't know..." (Lou Reed)

Gone are the days when the West could smugly lean back and claim to be the defender of democracy and free speech, while the Middle East and North Africa represented a backwards and insular culture, determined to undermine Western freedom.

Never mind that Washington took the first steps to end the integrity of Western media during the war against Iraq, applying the principle of embedded journalism and laying down a ban against photos of fallen US soldiers. That wasn't freedom of speech.

But the West maintained its view of the Western press as fundamentally "fair and balanced", revealingly the tagline for the most unfair and most imbalanced news outlet in the "free world", American Fox News.

The Arab Spring, regardless of how its success may be judged right now in terms of actual political change, has buried the notion of people devoted to totalitarianism and impervious to the virtues of modernity.

Most of the world supports the Palestinian cause, except for the West. You may argue that freedom of speech has generally poorer conditions outside the West, but in the West there is one area, where freedom of speech has poorer conditions, reflecting the inability of the imperialist countries to rid themselves of their historical baggage, and that is the Middle East Conflict.

Countries that support an independent Palestinían nation-state

"Islam-criticism can rapidly rocket you into a major position in strategic think tanks and media punditry, criticism of Israel is likely to send your career spiralling downward"

From staged anti-Islamism to Western censorship

To understand the depth of the moral corruption, the racism and white supremacism that underlies the Western attitude towards Palestinians, we need to paint an objective picture of how readily the West condemns all things Arab while at the same time endorsing Western oppression of dissent.

During the Mohamed Cartoon controversy, the West painted it as a clash between the values and methods of the Christian and the Islamic world.

The globalization of the controversy completely sidetracked the local problem with a radically racist population of Denmark, where 83 percent of the Caucasian population admits to being "a little or somewhat racist", according to a 1997 EU study, and where extreme right wing parties have dominated the political arena since 1973, where the first white racist populist party was formed and gained a landslide victory in Parliament.

The Mohamed Cartoon crisis was essentially the product of a media stunt, where neocon individuals strongly influenced by American neoconservatism, due to employment on a Danish paper, Jyllands-Posten, was able to produce a mega-event to form the perceptions of millions in the world, rather than conduct objective reporting.

Back then it was the argument that anything goes in the West: Freedom of speech must prevail.

But that noble ideal only counts, as long as it is convenient. The latest and most damning evidence to the Western media blackout when comes to anything relating to the Arab world is the way the Middle East conflict is being portrayed.

"Free Palestine" has become a frequent post on BBC's online articles on Facebook and beyond, mocking the mythical Western freedom of speech, ever since it was discovered that BBC censored a rapper on the radio show BBC 1Xtra. He couldn't say "Free Palestine".

Another rapper, only months later, could not even mention the word "Gaza Strip" as a metaphor.

“Come on Joe, who you know as hard as this?  Bringing more fire than the -”

The rest was killed. Censorship.

Indifference to a Genocide

How serious is this censorship? Already in 2004, the Glasgow University Media Group published a major study on contemporary TV coverage of the Middle East Conflict and its impact on public. The group analysed about 200 programmes and surveyed more than 800 individuals.

Their conclusion was that reporting was dominated by Israeli accounts, and that the views of the audience directly reflected the tint.

In a recent article on The Guardian's Comment is Free, Greg Philo, the research director of Glasgow University Media Unit, proclaims a complete Israeli PR victory:

"...we have been contacted by many journalists, especially from the BBC, and told of the intense pressures they are under that limit criticism of Israel. They asked us to raise the issue in public because they can't. They speak of "waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis" (meaning the embassy or higher), of the BBC's Jerusalem bureau having been "leant on by the Americans", of being "guilty of self-censorship" and of "urgently needing an external arbiter". Yet the public response of the BBC is to avoid reporting our latest findings."

The BBC media blackout rather accurately reflects the general position of Western media when comes to the Palestinian side of the conflict.

Between 1.5 and 2 million Palestinians have been killed since 1948, making some commenters dub it "the accidental genocide".

Only since 2000, where the Second Intifida or Al Aqsa intifada broke out, an estimated  6,430 Palestinians have been killed, of which 1,463 are children.

Most recently Israeli troops opened fire as hundreds of Palestinian protesters and supporters from Syria tried to cross the frontier with the Israeli-held Golan Heights, killing 23 people and injuring more than 350 injured.

Reports like these aren't censored by Western media, but they're routinely misrepresented, depicted in the context that suits Israel.

The wording of the press always reinforces the perception of Israel as being somehow justified when killing Palestinians, and Palestinians having no right to protest in any form - peaceful protests and children throwing rocks is treated as similar to Hamas firing Qassam rockets and Hezbollah conducting suicide missions.

"We've finally located the Western equivalent to the Quran, the one thing you cannot speak ill of: Zionism is the sacred cow around which the West has formed a consensus so monolithic it renders any notion of conspiracy redundant."

From Latent Racism to Complicity in Ethnic Cleansing

The robotic nature of reporting reflects the indifference of Western media, a product of its inherent bias towards Israel as a Western ally with "shared values."

It reflects also the prevailing anti-Arab racism, the latest rendition of an ethnic superiority complex as endemic to the West as religious fundamentalism is to South Asia.

I say anti-Arab, but it also involves Turks and Persians, and Africans, but let's not fool ourselves and think it is merely a product of "Islamophobia" or "anti-Islamism". Islam does factor in, but the fear of contact extents beyond Muslims - a significant percentage of affected Palestinians are, for instance, Christians.

Western contempt, ranging from emphatic block to rambling xenophobia, has to do with not only religious beliefs and cultural habits, but extents to skin tone, facial expression and mannerism. Anything peculiar to Caucasian customs places you in the out-category, where it becomes a task, a challenge and a project of its own to earn the legendary Western "tolerance."

The callousness of Western reporting somewhat resembles the reporting of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, or suicide bombings in Pakistan, or US drone attacks in Northern Pakistan.

It's something that happens all the time, and the media deals with it mechanically, and in a detached manner.

The implication is that the sum and diversity of Palestinian suffering is unavoidable, or selfinflicted, or that it is a sad but somehow acceptable "collateral damage" in a vast cultural conflict, where Israel represents Western values and Western interests.

As such the Palestinian rights become subordinate to a larger, collective agenda of the West, and the media bias and media blackouts become a license to kill for the Israeli Defense Forces.

Every attempt to portray the Palestinian side is combated vigorously and quite frequently viciously by Zionist interest organizations in the West, always following a fixed and predictable line of argumentation: At first the journalism is imbalanced, favoring the Palestinians against the Israeli, and eventually it becomes "anti-semitic."

If "anti-semistism" is contained in Godwin's Law, the Middle East conflict is a discourse to be avoided by all means, since it is unproductive from the beginning, and that is also largely how it is treated in the West: As a set of given facts, a syllogism where neither the premises nor the logical leaps can be questioned.

Massively destructive Israeli attacks on Palestinians are always presented as inherently justified and carried out in retalition for a Palestinian attack, and at best criticized for being an overreaction or for not sufficiently taking precautions against civilian casualties.

Apparently, it doesn't strike anybody to question the motives of Israel, even if there is ample evidence of the country masterminding a plan for ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is not, mind you, the same as genocide; ethnic cleansing simply means any way of aggressively removing un undesired ethnic group from a territory.

"The Israeli masterstroke of complete media victory in the West relies on this false bookkeeping, where they present one version of events to the world and reserve the truth to themselves."

Western journalist simply refuse to consider the possibility that Israel, who kills eight times as many Palestinians as the other way around, is carrying out a carefully crafted plan that involves strategic settlement, diplomatic deception and slow but systematic displacement.

It is against such wilfil ignorance the Palestinian terrorism has developed, conditioned to rebellion by a combination of oppression by brute force and a sophisticated structure of ideological denial.

The Sacred Cow of the West

Israel exercises absolute control of the narrative to the point, where Western media is ready to betray all principles of reporting. But the blackouts, in themselves, are revealing.

The worse it gets with the media, the more apparent it will become that there is a flaw in the logic built up around Israel's exceptional position, a blind spot in our perception.

If there was nothing to be ashamed of, it would not be necessary to cover it up. If Israel's conduct was justified, and her motives clearly benign, there would be no need for censorship. Everything could be sorted out in a fair and systematic analysis of the conflict.

Just as the exteme reactions to the Mohamed Cartoons exposed extremist attitudes among some Muslims, an undeniable tendency to fundamentalism, the censorship and bias of the Western press reveals how little truth and justice and freedom of speech matters when compared to the inherent racist and imperialist attitudes.

When the truth is not convenient to the West, it becomes imperative to bury it, and it is done under a landslide of anti-Palestinian reports.

The bias and the censorship and the hysteria all just reveal the lack of rationality behind the pro-Zionist attitudes, and the inability of Zionism to defend itself on a level battle-field. It needs the upper hand advantage of a brainwashed class of media workers perpetually selling the illusion of justification to the public and to politicans of the West, who serve as a shield, not against terrorism, but against the diminishing of the Greater Israel.

The terrorism is a product of despair, and long-standing hostility as a result of a people being constantly swindled by the cunning manipulation of Western power brokers.

There are few countries or regions left in the world but USA and Europe that do not recognize the Palestinian right to autonomy, which is the rationale for the Palestinian authority and the Arab League to bring the issue for a vote in the UN Security Council this September.

"A brief look at the maps conveying the territorial development of Israel is enough to prove that if anybody holds reptilian greed, it would be Israel."

Everybody else gets the picture, except for the former and current colonialist powers. Why is that?

Could it be because the assessment of facts in Europe and America is dependent on the economic, strategic and political interests of the Transatlantic Alliance, and when feeling its supremacy threatened the truth is readily thrown under the bus?

One thing is certain: The press is not free. It is servile mouth piece of Western policy makers.

When biased it is simply shamed by its inability to carry out its duty to conduct independent reporting. But when, as in the case of BBC, the bias amounts to censorship, it becomes and attack on freedom of speech, similar to Muslims attempts to discourage media organizations from depicting the prophet Muhammed.

The fundamentalism and the hysteria is the same. We've finally located the Western equivalent to the Quran, the one thing you cannot speak ill of: Zionism is the sacred cow around which the West has formed a consensus so monolithic it renders any notion of "conspiracy" redundant.

When Dialogue Is Pointless

When the boycott of Israel was announced, defenders of Israel and those on the fence spoke frantically of the need for "more dialogue", a dialogue they do not find particularly necessary when Israel conduct raids and bombings, or when Palestinians are displaced by settlers, or subjected to the harrassment that is daily reality not only in the occupied territories, but also in the heartland of Israel.

Against such glaring hipocrisy communication has to take place by non-verbal means. Previously, terrorism has dominated the picture. One can only hope Palestinians will, as it seems to be occurring, turn ever more in the direction of non-violent protest, while at the same time gearing up their communication warfare with a strong and professionally conducted presence in the blogosphere and beyond.

That is the first step to a concerted effort to penetrate the absolutism of Zionism that rules the Western media and the public perception of a 63 year old conflict.

Under a general set of circumstances, where Israeli spin is taken as highest authority, and the highest authority is deemed to be Yahweh himself - as a majority of Christian Evangelicals in the West considering Israel a heavenly sign and any opposition against it a sin, there is little more point in dialogue - it makes no sense to talk about dialogue.

You can no more carry out a meaningful dialogue with a group of people who insist on lying through their teeth, as you can trust an organization sworn to eliminate you.

"Peace proposals with no sworn statements indicate a plot", Sun Tzu wrote.

Israel is, at first glance, entitled to demand a sworn statement of acknowledging Israel's right to existence in return for concessions. But the indictment of plotting destruction goes both ways, as the truth lies buried much too deep for the superficial journalism conducted around the Middle East Conflict:

"Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves ... politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves... The country is theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to come here and settle down, and in their view we want to take away from them their country", said David Ben Gurion in 1938.

The Israeli masterstroke of complete media victory in the West relies on this false bookkeeping, where they present one version of events to the world and reserve the truth to themselves.

"I personally feel that in spite of all the oppression and murder and theft conducted by Western imperialism the world owes the West more than retribution, more than contempt." 

In spite of ample documentation that this has been the consistent policy of Israeli governments throughout its history, the West readily believes that Israel is largely benevolent and absolutely sincere in its attempts to achieve peace.

Rather, Israel provokes confrontation by all means, in order to utilize the conflict to conduct a massive and intransigent land-grabbing strategy designed directly to reflect the Anglo-American policy towards the native Americans.

"The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more", Ehud Barak, Prime Minister of Israel, complained in August, 2000.

A brief look at the maps conveying the territorial development of Israel is enough to prove that if anybody holds reptilian greed, it would be Israel.

After the smoke settled, the settlers came pouring in. Today Israel controls 78 percent of the land. This perspective has been free for the Western press to investigate for over half a century.

The Vast Scope of Zionist Media Control

The Jewish Defense League, listed as a terrorist organization by both the FBI and EU, actively works on both continents to intimidate critics of Israel, and the organization has carried out several murders in recent time.

Jewish Internet Defense Force, a group of Jewish hactivists, was formed as a response to the Second Intifada that broke out in 2000, and employing all manners of subversive information tactics under the guise of "combating anti-semitism and terrorism."

AIPAC is arguably the most influential political lobbyist group in USA, responsible for keeping Washington staunchly pro-Zionist and ready to funnel billions of dollars into the Israeli war machine, as well as offering moral support, but there are numerous other similar organizations.

The case of Jewish American scholar and Israel-critic, Norman Finkelstein, makes it quite apparent at what cost you open your mouth to criticize Zionism in the West. 

Whereas Islam-criticism can rapidly rocket you into a major position in strategic think tanks and media punditry, criticism of Israel is likely to send your career spiralling downward, if not by actual berufsverbot then by subtle marginalization, discrimination and ostracization.

Again, under such circumstances it makes no sense to talk about a Zionist cabal or a conspiracy or a secret Zionist lobby. The enforcement of pro-Israeli policies and the combative attitude towards anyone questioning this consensus is glaringly obvious. 

In several European countries there are laws prohibiting anybody from questioning the accounts of Holocaust, and in USA the Anti-Boycott Compliance Act prohibits individuals and companies from participating in boycotts of Israel.

"...after having caused the Middle East problem with aeons of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust, Europe and America have now adopted the Zionist project, perpetuating their disastrous effect on world politics."

While Holocaust denial may be repulsive, laws against it do not reflect a policy of freedom of speech, or even respect for academic virtues. Outlawing "genocide denial" marginalizes any attempt to seek physical evidence and documentation for historical claims.

Neither does the outlawing of a small group of right wing extremist reflect a reality-adequate risk of Nazism. Extreme views and attitudes can be freely expressed in Europe, when they are being directed against Muslims, and they frequently and consistently are.

The unhindered success of New Right populist parties seeking discriminatory legislation and targeting Muslims with hate speech from the very pulpits of the legislative chambers prove that right wing radicalization is not a concern for the political systems of Europe.

The only question is who the racism is directed again, and quite absurdly, after having caused the Middle East problem with aeons of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust, Europe and America have now adopted the Zionist project, perpetuating their disastrous effect on world politics.

Palestine is only the broken lamp that illuminates the slaughter caused by hundreds of years of imperialism conducted by the Western powers, from the British gunships anchored outside of Hong Kong during The Opium War (1840-1895) over the carving up of Africa in the The Berlin Africa Conference 1884-1885 to the 21st Century invasions of the Middle East and North Africa.

What people exterminated 10-100 million of the native population to make room for a new civilization, while basing its industrial boom and subsequent world domination on mass import of slave labor from Africa?

What continent bred not only Zionism, but Communism and Fascism, sending the whole world into two consecutive world wars?

What continent conducted massacre upon massacre on the native population, when it was formed as a penal colony?

Neither of those things originated in the Arab world. These were the deeds of Europe and America and Austrialia, the very powers that now oppose freedom for the Palestinians in a similar act of displacement and ethnic cleansing.

The future will no more forget this fact than it will ignore the fact that they held their ground for as long as possible when it came to securing the rights of the Palestinians. It will go into history.

A Warning About History

America in 2011 is Rome in 200AD or Britain on the eve of the first world war: an empire at the zenith of its power but with cracks beginning to show.

The words belong to Larry Elliott, Economics editor of The Guardian, a commentator who makes such statements at some professional risk. They were published on Monday 6 June 2011.

They say history is written by the victors. As the US empire collapses and other powers, the BRIC, slowly rise to take charge, history will be revised.

And here is my warning:

I sincerely hope democracy not only survives in the West, but penetrates every region of the Earth, and I believe that it will, and I believe it will do so even sooner, when the Anglo-American imperialism stops blocking all attempts at progress.

I believe the thirst for freedom is an energy that is pent up, in China as well as in the Middle East, waiting to be released, but unable to do so, because the world is under the thumb of Western hegemony.

As the lamp of democracy is lit in these far regions, and as their economic prosperity and political power overshadows the West, maybe the lives and the prospects of of those who were formerly the master race and the privileged class will depend on people of foreign origin defending their rights.

I personally feel that in spite of all the oppression and murder and theft conducted by Western imperialism the world owes the West more than retribution, more than contempt. 

While the concept of "the white man's burden" was naive and arrogant, we must credit the Western countries for having developed and maintained as well as they were able the superior ideals of democracy, freedom and human rights.

"The parable of the unjust steward is about using money to gain friends, but it can also be seen as a parable about forgiveness, and writing off the metaphysical debt of guilt. But the universal core of the message, the focal point, is to prepare for the future."

The scientific progress with which the West has enriched the world has caused much damage to the environment, and it poses great risks and ethical challenges for, but rational thinking and technological progress are still our best options to create a sustainable future for mankind.

But the world is rapidly changing, as the songwriter put it.

‎"Soon, Israelis will find themselves global pariahs, much as white South Africans were for a time", says Robert L. Grenier.

Again, this is not a casual statement by some marginal strategic analyst on a blog, but former Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center, a man who also coordinated CIA activities in Iraq from 2002 to 2004 and before that served as the CIA Chief of Station in Islamabad.

Grenier goes on to say:

"Within 25 years, Israel will have an Arab Prime Minister; and in 45 years, the Israeli military will have an Arab Chief of Staff."

The Parable of the Unjust Steward

There are those developments in the world that are almost fixed, and then there are the political conditions that depend on what we do right here, right now. China is projected to eclipse the American economy by 2016, and at the rate the US economy is unravelling at this point, it could be sooner.

It is certain beyond reasonable doubt that BRIC will be the four dominant economies by 2050.

What is relative in this picture is what level of cultural and racial hostility is reproduced through the next generations in the various cultures affected by Western policies. If the post-imperial West is to hope for less than reciprocation, it depends on the grace and largesse with which these countries manage their exit from empire.

Let me go Biblical for a moment and share my favorite parable, one very relevant to the problem of false bookkeeping in the Western accounts of the crimes of Zionism:

Jesus told an intriguing fable of a manager, who was accused of fraud by the owner of the estate. It is called the parable of The Unjust Steward.

The owner tells the manager to settle his accounts, because he is not going to retain his position. The manager panics. He is not suited for menial labor, and he has no friends. He calls in the various debitors and halves their debt, one by one, hoping to secure their friendship, so he will have a network, when he is laid off.

In a surprising twist to the story the owner doesn't chastise the corrupted manager for having written off the debts. After all, half of something is better than all of nothing. Instead, the manager praises his shrewdness.

It is obvious from the context that the parable has to do with how you handle money, and it is directly applicable, eerily applicable, to the long-standing discourse about debt relief for the Third World.

“So the master commended the unjust steward because he had dealt shrewdly. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in their generation than the sons of light. And I say to you, make friends for yourselves by unrighteous mammon..."

The parable of the unjust steward is about using money to gain friends, but it can also be seen as a parable about forgiveness, and writing off the metaphysical debt of guilt. But the universal core of the message, the focal point, is to prepare for the future.

Westerners love prudence. They love prudence more than justice. That is one important reason, actually, why they prefer to side with Israel over Palestine. Israel is productive, innovative, modern and apparently liberal. It provides some hope of stability, and its violence is organized and cold-blooded, carried out by police and military forces, contrasted by the disorderly violence carried out by Palestinians.

"The bias and the censorship and the hysteria all just reveal the lack of rationality behind the pro-Zionist attitudes, and the inability of Zionism to defend itself on a level battle-field. It needs the upper hand advantage of a brainwashed class of media workers."

It is not too dissimilar from the sentiments that accompanied the industrial and military build-up in Germany before second world war. Other countries, including USA, were disturbed by the armament, but also awed by German cultural and scientific and technological accomplishment.

Prudence, however, is also to prepare for the future, and in this regard the Zionist axis - the axis against recognition of the equal rights of Palestinians to life, freedom and national autonomy - displays less than prudence in their systematic denial of historical facts.

I am not advocating that the current Israeli bias is replaced with a Palestinian bias. I'm fairly sure the Palestinians would settle for equal terms and equal time, even after more than half a century of being deprived of a voice.

Today Palestine, more than any other place on Earth where oppression reigns, has become the epicentre of global conflict, and the symbol of an era of unbridled Western infringement on the rights of others.

Don't let it become another genocide to be added to the list of the sins of the Christian West.

If unable to be morally upright, at least be wise, and if unable to be wise, at least be shrewd. The future is upon you. Settle your accounts.

Also written about the Middle East Conflict: Christian Zionism is Not Biblical, The Case For Palestine and Why Does USA Support Israel?

The Coldplay Effect (updated June 6)

Cairo has just shut off the Rafah Crossing to Gaza after having opened it for only four days, providing a temporary relief for the occupants who have been cut off from the world since June 2007.

The passage was shut down, of course, due to American pressure on the military administration of Egypt that forms the interim government prior to the first democratic election.

In other news Coldplay has stirred outrage among Zionists by linking to the protest song for the Palestinian cause, Freedom for Palestine, on their Facebook page.

Last year Zionist bloggers were gloating that the list of 150 Irish artists pledging to boycott Israel didn't amount to a list of very notable names, whereas megastars like Elton John, Paul McCartney, Madonna and Metallica ignored the boycott.

In May this year rock legend Deep Purple stated that artists who boycott Israel are "whimps."

Here's a brief list of prominent artists (and intellectuals) who take a stance in the Middle East Conflict, based on random media coverage I've come across.

Carlo Strenger, on Haaretz, predicts that "...Israel will have to go through the full South Africa treatment before it turns around" from the unwavering no-negotiation stance taken by Netanyahu in his recent confrontation with US president Barack Obama and speech to the US Congress.

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) was first initiated on 9 July 2005 by 171 Palestinian non-governmental organizations "... for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel until it complies with International Law and Universal Principles of Human Rights."

The three stated goals of the campaign are:

• An end to Israel's "occupation and colonization of all Arab lands", as well as "dismantling of the Wall"
• Israeli recognition of the "fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality"
• Israeli respect, protection, and promotion of "the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194.

A part of the BDS is the BIG campaign to Boycott Israeli Goods, covering especially products originated in the illegal Israeli settlements and supermarkets trading them.

Even though rock stars and Zionist pundits alike scoff at the BDS, it is slowly gaining traction, and the political and economic realities has prompted Israeli companies to group in an effort to suggest alternatives to Netanyahu's unrelenting stance.

Israeli lawmakers are pursuing their own boycott of firms helping to build Rawabi, the first new Palestinian city on the West Bank. Israel has also intensified its PR effort and arm-twisting maneuvres to a dangerous level, where it is about to bring exposure to the unetichal and undemocratic tactics employed by Israel to turn public opinion in its favor:

...we have been contacted by many journalists, especially from the BBC, and told of the intense pressures they are under that limit criticism of Israel. They asked us to raise the issue in public because they can't. They speak of "waiting in fear for the phone call from the Israelis" (meaning the embassy or higher), of the BBC's Jerusalem bureau having been "leant on by the Americans", of being "guilty of self-censorship" and of "urgently needing an external arbiter".

The Israeli army has announced new harsh guidelines, not dissimilar from the clamp-downs on protesters in the Arab dictatorships. The Naksa Day massacre on June 5, 2011, where 23 unarmed civilians were gunned in the Golan Heights by the border of Syria for a "provocation", proves that Israel is intent on enforcing it.

‎"Soon, Israelis will find themselves global pariahs, much as white South Africans were for a time."

The words come from ‎Robert L Grenier, retired Director of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC) 2004-2006, Iraq Mission Manager of CIA activities in Iraq (2002-2004), former CIA Chief of Station in Islamabad, deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia, former CIA chief of operational training and lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Openly boycotting

Gill Scott-Heron (recently deceased)

Elvis Costello

The Pixies
Roger Waters
The Klaxons
Gorillaz Sound System
Devendra Banhart
Arundhati Roy
John Berger
Ken Loach
Naomi Klein
Meg Ryan

Supporting Palestine

Coldplay
Lowkey
Outlandish

Uncertain

Carlos Santana
Vanessa Paradis
Snoop Dogg

Not boycotting

Paul McCartney
Leonard Cohen
Elton John
Madonna
Joan Armatrading
Bob Dylan
Rihanna
Metallica
Rod Stewart
Diana Krall
Linkin Park
Macy Gray
Suzanne Vega
DJ Shadow
DJ Tiesto
U2
Cohen Brothers

Banned

Noam Chomsky
Cat Stevens

If you are aware of changes or additions to the list, or you become aware of them, I would very much appreciate a notification or a comment.

Ressource Wars

"According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, Dec. 24, 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it On July 3, 1979 US President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul...We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would. The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war..." (Zbignev Bzezhinski, in an interview to French Le Nouvel Observateur)

The end game is on:

In the geostrategic game a region with defensible borders or a nation-state is simply a field, which can be used to move troops. Understanding the value of locations is as important as in retail, and logistic significance is as compelling a factor as exploitable ressources. The hidden hand in all warfare is logistics. Location is essential for troop movement and for strike capacity.

While China has dropped 97 percent of its holdings in U.S. Treasury bills, decreasing its ownership of the short-term U.S. government securities, retiring U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in a parting speech to Asian war weariness, debt won’t deter US from widening military presence in Pacific Rim.

The first is a natural market response to growing uncertainty about the US economic recovery and growing debt, but widely misconstrued as an aggressive measure among common Americans. Most rational analysts admit that China has limited regional territorial disputes on which she aims to express herself with vigilance, but no interest in replacing USA as a global hegemonic power.

It is important also to remember that China is not the second largest economy in the same sense as Japan was, until recently, nor will she become the largest economic power in the same way USA was. China is a developing country with swarms of underpaid industrial workers, and a huge portion of rural Chinese excempt from the privileges of the middle class.

Even in the Chinese middle class the average household income is eight times that of the American household.

As for the cutting of the short term US treasury bills, it is more of a prelude than a blow, a signal rather than a definitive financial decision.

It does, to some degree, increase pressure on Washington to resolve its budget deficit, which Beijing has also urged via regular diplomatic channels. China remains the largest holder of the foreign portion of US treasury securities.

Her interest, right now, is to cut away from the US debt, partially in order to be able to make foreign investments. Beijing has recently criticized USA for not making enough investments, thereby hampering global economic growth.

The current movements can be interpreted as a sign that Beijing is ready to abandon the concept of USA being the primary engine of global investment and begin using its capital for direct investment on its own, as direct foreign investment in China grows at staggering rates, fuelling risk of the economy overheating.

China as the Arch-Enemy

The second event, the bold statement from Pentagon to increase its military presence in the Asia Pacific, a declaration of war against Beijing. It is an affirmation of a security pact between USA and the Western-leaning democratic nations of East Asia.

Participants in the Shangri-La Dialogue carried out since 2002, have been Australia, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan, People's Republic of China, Philippines, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand, East Timor, United Kingdom, United States and Vietnam.

Below the radar, however, USA is talking up a storm against China. While trading with China, and relying on Chinese capital to prop up its bloated budget, USA has a general interest in portraying China as belligerent, intent on imposing her will on the world in the manner of Washington.

The political code for this is to state that "China will act like a superpower", intended to strike fear into especially the smaller and weaker democratic nations in East Asia.

To curb such fears, General Liang Guanglie vowed, at an Asian security conference in Singapore, that "China will never seek hegemony or military expansion", stressing also that the country's conventional forces is 20 years behind USA.

Six countries are making claims on the South China Sea: China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brunei, Taiwan and Malaysia, as China estimates there could be up to 213 billion barrels of oil beneath the sea, making the owner the world's second-largest proven oil reserves, just falling behind Saudi Arabia with 264 billion barrels.

Estimates include up to two quadrillion cubic feet of hydrocarbon natural gas.

Since 1997, when China established its first pipeline connection with Central Asia through Kazakhstan, the emerging military doctrine of USA has been to combat and curb the rise of China.

In 1997, when John McCain announced his bid for presidency, the senator has consistenly called for a "League of Democracies":

"We need to renew and revitalise our democratic solidarity. We need to strengthen our transatlantic alliance as the core of a new global compact – a League of Democracies – that can harness the great power of the more than 100 democratic nations around the world to advance our values and defend our shared interests."

The concept is widely perceived to be directed by "America's perceived national interest", adressing pet issues like the "turn towards autocracy in Russia" and "unimpeded market access". You may, without infringing upon realism, add to these the US interest in establishing control over the development of the Chinese republic.

The Matrix of US Imperial Decision Making

With the waning of US economic and diplomatic power are likely to see US unilateralism carried out on an even vaster scope than in previous decades, with a closer resemblance to what we commonly know as terrorism. 

USA will direct its military operation and clandestine coups not only towards areas and regions where they have direct financial interest, but strategically, aiming at the Sino-Russian alliance, disrupting nations and economies on which the Chinese economic growth and development and stability relies.

In this context controlling the Pacific Rim, encircling China, is not deterrence, but a set-up for universal strike capacity. The Grand Area Strategy of Washington/Pentagon demands guaranteed mobility to intervene in every nation or region.

The matrix upon which this strategy relies is multi-tiered and complex, which is why it is also confounding to the majority of citizens, and capable of hiding in plain sight.

Paul Wolfowitz famously declared that Iraq was made a target, because it contained oil, but he did not mean that USA invaded for the sake of the oil. He just meant that it was an added incentive, making Iraq a more desirable goal.

There are a number of identifiable parameters for a good target:

1) Pretext: The ability to mislead the general population, as well as achieve backing from prominent multinational entities, whether they be UN or Amnesty International. The case must look solid, or provide the capacity to be made to look "just". In many cases news stories are launched in a "trial and error" mode, where Washington test the waters to determine the public response, as well as diplomatic, to see if they hold the political leverage.

2) Economy: The target must provide an avenue for increased productivity for oil, mining companies, construction contractors and so forth, fuelling the American war machine. In this grand context all of America, including her citizenry, is perceived as the structural engine of the penetrating forces. Advantage can be negative, as I pointed out in the previous comment: If you deprive China, for instance, of an advantage, Washington is seen to gain indirectly. Tibet is an economic target, even if it appears to most people to be political. It is essential to the Chinese development program, because the region is the source of the water for the Chinese irrigation projects.

Afghanistan and Pakistan remains crucial, because they provide the platform for controlling and securing the Kazakhstan Pipelines. As mentioned, China already established its first oil pipeline to Central Asia through Kazakhstan in 1997, and just like the case of the generous investments of the Bush administration in Africa, Washington policies for the region is a case of attempting to copy Chinese "soft power."

3) Strategy: A target is also a potential permanent military base, providing the logistical backup for further expansion. In the geostrategic game a region or a nation-state is simply a field. A field adjacent to field, such as Iraq (bordering up to Iran), and such as Afghanistan (bordering up to Kazakhstan), is therefore desirable. The borders of a nation, and the sphere of control it affords the military, is often the determining factor behind the military decision to attack.

Direct strike capacity is not the only value - the logistic capacity to transport or store war materials, fuel vehicles and establish "momentum" behind a campaign for "shock and awe" also adds value. You can draw direct lines - not dissimilar to the movement of pieces in checkers. The military pieces need permanent bases to "jump" from, and regardless of the hustles and bustles of politics, without permanent military presence in Afghanistan, the withdrawal of forces constitutes a military failure.

4) Politics: The effective control of a nation-state, its subduction to Washington consensus politically and economically, and its value as leverage in political matters, is also crucial to imperialist decision making. Taiwan, for instance, is relatively strategically insignificant, and economically not sufficiently important to hamper Chinese growth, even if it is the prime foreign investor. Taiwan is mainly politically significant, because it can produce pretext as a part of the "free world" oppressed by China. Western reports on human rights, worker's rights, women's rights, racism in China (Han Nationalism) - however relevant and factually accurate - are frequently being exploited to paint a picture of China as a less than benevolent rising empire.

The matrix of US foreign policy decision making is so transparent, it makes Washington predictable. You can quite accurately identify the fault lines along which American forces will be deployed. In a sense, it is the mode of the nation to engage, whenever it seems possible, wherever there is a reasonable view to American geostrategic advantage, according to the four parameters listed. In other words: If conflict can be produced, it will be produced, simply because USA is driven by the momentum of continued aggregation of advantages by military means. In that sense USA is a profoundly rational player.

Detractors and Complicating Factors

US, European and East Asian interest (namely Japan and South Korea) in a region may be threatened to a point, where USA does not find it viable or productive in a final analysis to destabilize. This is to some extent - even if there are indications that the rebel forces are controlled by CIA liaisons - the case in Libya, which is also why the campaign is so ambivalent and bungled.

There are significant oil interests, but Russia, India and China are deeply opposed to US-NATO invasion with ground forces, which is seen as a way to establish a new military-political bastion in North Africa. US complies, because of the expedience of action, and because she is not ready to compromise existing investments in the country.

Considering the direct British and French interests in the region it is unlikely that the French and British became the leading voices calling for intervention, because they participate in some destabilization game. The risk assessment effectively rules it out.

However, USA has no vital direct interests in Libya. It is entirely feasible that Libya is a constructed attempt at exploiting the Arab Spring as an element of a general "curb, contain and control strategy", and for the sake of expanding the Western hemisphere with an important "plus one" bordering directly to Egypt, a country whose influence in the escalating Middle East Conflict has suddenly become multiplied.

In Iraq and Afghanistan the neocons greatly underestimated the cultural opposition, while it overestimated its own ability to conduct effective anti-guerilla warfare, plus its own martial virtue.

Martial virtue is a hugely underestimated factor in modern warfare, whereas it has been crucial in all historical conflicts. The inability to control your troops, and conduct invasion in an ethically defensible manner, and the deterioration of a campaign into atrocious behavior such as Falluja, Abu Ghraib, the Afghan Kill Team and many other examples, is a clear detractor and complicating factor.

Atrocities are, particularly in the case of illegal invasions, seen as a natural extention of the lack of virtue of the invading culture, and perhaps fairly so. What to the cynic may appear to be structurally insignificant deviations from some paper code is, to the vast majority of citizens on Earth, indications of the ability of a power to govern affairs to the interest of common people. This is, to a large degree, why neo-conservatism had to be publicly buried, and why in the last woes of empire, American commanders complained about losing "the battle for the hearts and minds."

In the resurrected version of US imperialism these elements will have to play a larger role.

The last dectractor and complicating factor I will mention is MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction or, as some have dubbed it, "Mutually Assured Distress", as the doctrine has also been expanded to encompass certain devastating sanctions in case of violation. It is the case for Iran, who holds the Hormutz Strait Crisis weapon, and for China who holds the power to dump the US treasuries and remove teh privileged position of the dollar as universal reserve currency.

Combined, Russia and China "outnukes" USA. Sanction comes in "high wield" and "low wield" form. Total disruption of US economy, or blocking 80 percent of oil transports from the Persian Gulf, are to be considered "high wield" and, just like nukes, a last resort.

In this game low wield sanction is as important as high wield options, and in many cases far more useful. Countries need a carefully laid out strategy of gradual deterrence in the age of ressource war, in order to be able to "signal" to the public empowering decision makers that there is a price to be paid for aggression, but also that the diplomatic response is measured, reality-accurate and not "fanatic" or a part of a zero-sum game aiming for the total destruction of USA.

The problem for a lot of poor countries is, of course, that they hold neither high wield or low wield deterrents against foreign aggression of the scale represented by USA. Even China has admitted she is not capable of defending herself against an American invasion by conventional means.

A Measured Defensive Strategy

The most important keys to effectively securing autonomy in the age of Ressource War are:

1) To study and learn the Washington decision matrix and identify your country's ranking on the "hit list", which may not be as favorable as it would appear from public dialogue. The idea that you can stay out of trouble by being inconspicous in the conflict belongs to the era before the Cold War. USA is not going to take on China and Russia head on, which is also why the utterances against them are muffled. USA is going to continue to pick on weaker parties that are perceived to be crucial to especially Chinese interest.

2) To clearly identify the main instruments of control exercised on your country, economic as well as military, and potential gateways for control, including media and cultural imperialism, funding of insurrection, and strategic arms dealing. That is not to say that Western media is an instrument of aggression or disruption as such, but in many cases specific tendencies in reporting are products of political programming and tendentious rhetoric, aimed to produce pretext for sanctions or intervention.

3) To assess the real value of your country's product and the subsequent strength of its diplomatic ties, and the probability of diplomatic or military support in case of calls for aggression. It will be essential to form alliances according to the most pessimistic risk assessment. Your geographical position can become the sole reason for your involvement in a global conflict. Assess therefore also the strategic importance of every nation your are linked to with mutual borders.

4) To assess the strength of your entire network, and the primary partners upon which the growth and stability of your nation relies, since these are associated targets in any conflict. It is also important to remember that, as in the case of Pakistan, you may become a target by association with a higher ranking target, such as China. Conflict travels along opaque lines of communication - an economic conflict can morph, inside the minds of decision makers, to a strategic necessity, and reversely a strategic interest may morph into hostile economic measures.

5) Utilizing media and means of modern communication to make your country's security concerns widely known. The Resource War conflicts build up beneath the public radar and are often outside the attention or interest of global supranational entities. The West holds almost absolute control of the narrative to the degree, where questionable cultural habits in a small region, or isolated  human rights violations, can become the rhetorical vehicle for aggression, whether economic or military. Controlling the narrative is, in the age of globalized information, the most effective deterrent, and it is advisable to make attempts at this before a conflict breaks out, rather than to climb the steep ladder in the midst of turmoil.

In essence, it behooves any intelligence agency, nation leader or parliament to conduct a brutally honest SWOT analysis. It is also important to recognize the fact that in this new structure of multi-tiered aggressive competition defense systems alone cannot protect a nation.

The main problem in this age is that the economies and subsequently the political structures grow increasingly intertwined, while Washington, the largest economy and the greatest military power, is continuing its operations in an antiquated doctrine of power. This effectively makes everybody a potential target, along the lines of "if you are not with us, you are against us", even when not expressed as crudely.

Until the US bid for total planetary control is buried and replaced with a genuine soft power approach carried out in good faith, the rest of the world, including Europe and other allies, have no choice but to cautiously cautiously comply for as much as it is reasonable and good for the overall development, and for the interests of the individual nations, while at the same time creating checks and balances to Washington by stacking an effective opposition to its hegemonic power.

Economic downturn increases the propensity for political radicalization, militarism and irrational policies. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has just issued a warning that the ‘Deep State’ intelligence and security organizations in the United States have now grown larger than similar agencies in the fascist dictatorship of Nazi Germany in the 1920’s.

For all its merits in science and philosophy, the American learning curve is significantly behind the curve when comes to learning to operate in the globalized reality. The American ignorance about geography is a common point of ridicule. The reason is simple: The learning curve is not steeper for USA, rather the opposite. USA falls behind in understanding the world, because what she is doing has worked for so long. The faster the world steps up and introduces the lesson that unilateral military action does not pay off, not even for the "world's policeman", the sooner a new and more peaceful dynamic than the one described here can be established.

A Desperate Overreach: The Geostrategic Game of Obama and Brzezinsky

Neoconservatism officially died in 2008, scandalized and having lost support from the world, namely the European powers used as pawns in the Republican bid for a strengthened position on the world stage. Two war theaters remained for Barack Obama to deal with, and new ones were opened.

"There's another target, and that's Pakistan. It's a Muslim country with 160 million people, and they have nuclear weapons, and they have the means to deliver them. Back last summer in Chicago there was a Democratic debate, and Obama came out and said: I want to have the unilateral US bombing of North West Pakistan, and now the US is doing what Obama demanded", said Webster Tarpley already back in 2008, warning that Barack Obama was a "face-lift" for American imperialism, a hand-puppet of The Trilateral Commission, taking cues from the Polish American geostrategist Zbigniew Brzezinski.

"...and indeed, the US and NATO is preparing to invade Pakistan across the Afghan border", Tarpley continues.

Indeed. In August 2007 Obama announced that he would take the fight to Pakistan, warning Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf that as president he would be prepared to order U.S. troops into that country unilaterally if it failed to act on its own against Islamic extremists.

"When I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won. The first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan", Barack Obama said to an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center in the District.

This policy is now in effect: Not only has drone attacks been increased by Obama on North West Pakistan, but the recent incursion into Pakistani terrority to allegedly kill Osama bin Laden carries all the traits of provocation. 

In fact, it was followed up by subsequent provocations from Washington, heating up the US-Pakistani relationship and spurring further domestic turmoil in the terrorism afflicted nation of Pakistan.

The Last Attempt at Anglo-Saxon Hegemony

According to Tarpley this is all policy, not accident. It is a staged event that follows a direct, specified and formulated policy of disprupting Pakistan in order to carve it up, and remove an ally to China.

This is why China has responded with unwavering support for Pakistan, reaffirming the "all weather" relationship with Pakistan and stating to USA in an unprecedented diplomatic missive, that an attack on Pakistan will be perceived as an attack on China.

Every US engagement on the world stage tightly follows the Brzezinsky-Obama script as it is interpreted by Tarpley.

"[Barack Obama is a puppet of Zbigniew Brzezinski... it's going to be not so much wars in the Middle East, but wars on a greater scale. Brzezinsky says: The centre of power in the world is not Iran; it's Moscow and Beijing... that's the project, and it's more ambitious than any neo-con, and it's more adventurous, and more dangerous."

It is understood that Brzezinsky's war doctrine is far more sophisticated and comprehensive than the one dominating the Bush-administration. It is predominantly concerned with the economic aspects of warfare, ressources and logistics, rather than primarily with "firepower and mobility".

"What makes Obama attractive to me is that he understands that we live in a very different world where we have to relate to a variety of cultures and peoples", said Brzezinsky of his support for Barack Obama.

Hailed by the Economist as "Barack Obama's new brain" Brzezinsky is seen as the brilliant and prolific mastermind of Obama's geostrategic perspective, one that includes the ambition to "dismember the Russian Federation itself and put the finishing  touches on Afghanistan as an impregnable US military base against  China, Russia..." (Eric Wahlberg on Rense.com).

The Arab Spring: A Surprise, Except for Libya

Whether or no Brzezinsky is really the behind-the-scenes mover fomenting the US sponsored rise of  Islamic fundamentalism as a bulwark against Soviet communism, and involved in the overthrowing of the Shah of Iran with the Iranian Revolution, is less important than to identify that Washington is currently involved in a geostratetic game directed at the Sino-Russian alliance.

What Tarpley does not seem to fully acknowledge is that the current paradigm of global war is not a new one. It is only a temporary shift in focus and means. For instance, the impoverization of North Korea, and the US sanctions against Iran, are long-standing policies aimed at the Sino-Russian alliance - policies that have remained unquestioned, even as the neocons directed their attention at the Arab world.

Tarpley correctly identifies a couple of other targets in the potential Sino-American conflict, besides Pakistan, namely Taiwan (whom he sees as having passed on the bid, forming closer ties to Beijing rather than turning aggressively pro-Western or imperialistic), and Sudan where the US interest in the conflict may be to deprive China of 7 percent of her oil imports.

The civil war in Libya attacked Chinese oil interests, forcing the country to remove 30,000 Chinese workers in the largest overseas evacuation ever. From the beginning there were indications that the rebel forces were backed by CIA. In spite of vowing "no boots on the ground", Obama did position CIA agents inside Libya.

The Libyan leader, Khalifa Haftar, is a long-standing enemy of Gadaffi with ties to CIA.

In a bizarre twist, Colonel Gadaffi  used the example of China’s violent crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989 to justify his own use of military force against domestic opponents.

“The unity of China was more important than those people on Tiananmen Square,” he bellowed.

The UN mandate for a US-NATO "humanitarian intervention" was the fastest mandate in history, but notably carried out with the strict imposition that "boots on the ground", an actual Western military force to take control of the country and linger in it for ages, was not allowed.

With the NATO failure to produce a quick resolution, India, Russia and China in unison have called for an end to the bombings. The countries were forced to back intervention, as they saw their interests threatened, but all of the three emerging giants are horrified by the prospect of a new Western occupation.

The Dynamics of Ressource War

As previously explained, Washington's military strategy is to secure optimal mobility and momentum in aggressive wars by setting up a vast network of bases and allies, putting literally everything and everyone within strike range.

While not saints, China and Russia are useful as the only effective opposition to this titanic and, ultimately, totalitarian ambition.

Gadaffi tries to exploit the situation, threatening to seize European oil and gas operations in Libya and turn them over to India and China, The same may happen to the significant US oil interests in the country.

The oil wells of Libya are so embattled that expropriation reciprocated with a cash offer from the benefited countries to the American and European companies might not be acceptable compensation.

It is equally absurd to believe China has an interest in provoking war over Pakistan, as it is to believe that the Libyan crisis is a masterminded by Washington.

The Arab revolutions and revolutionary tendencies are the proverbial stick in the wheel for the Grand Area Strategy of Washington and her latest bid for global dominance. Bipolarity is not an emerging possibility, but a realized fact.

The conflicts of the 21st century will revolve around a land- and ressource-grabbing game in which "the gentlest gamester is the soonest winner", as Shakespeare put it in Henry V, necessitating the use of "soft power" and more agreeable trade agreements than presently customary.

The dynamics are simple: China will attempt to scoop up as much access to natural ressources as possible, while at the same time extending its trade network as far as possible. Neither China or Russia have sufficient conventional military power to assert themselves strongly outside their own immediate sphere of power, so they will play on political and economic instruments.

USA will undoubtedly attempt to do the same, as it happened in Africa under GW Bush, while at the same time keeping an option open for underhanded warfare, disrupting nations, where China holds considerable financial interests. USA has lost both political and economic credibility, so Washington is left to battle with crude instruments of war and of clandestine geostratetic scheming.

The financial condition of USA, and its debt dependency on China, does not allow for Washington to realistically pursue a direct military confrontation with China.

According to this matrix it is now possible to specifically highlight the areas of predictable conflict, which will follow the basic principles of crime and criminal investigation: Means, motive and opportunity.

Mexico recently foiled a bid by Hezbollah to set up a network in Latin America, as this was being exploited by right wing forces in USA to prepare America for armed conflict.

The race for China in Africa is to promote development at a faster pace than local forces, backed by US funding and arms trade, can foment strategic destabilization. China has, so far, avoided the unfortunate reputation of being a country it is hazardous to do business with, because it might find the weaker partner in the crosshairs of US interference.

War or Development, That is the Question

It is doubtful if this can continue. Washington is likely to do everything it can, beneath the radar, to alienate every single major player who is instrumental to the prosperity and continued growth of China. On the most apparent level the strategy involves encircling China, controlling the Pacific Rim. Producing pretext for war is the key ingredient in the new recipe for USA to remain a relevant player on the world stage.

In the case of the Arab Spring, the American strategy can be described as "Curb, Contain and Control". While keeping Afghanistan and Iraq as active war theatres for as long as possible to justify the ammassment of US and NATO ofrces, Libya and Pakistan have been added to the list of hot war zones.

The Washington strategy for the uprisings in the Middle East is to curb them whenever possible, offering military support for the clamp-downs in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Bahrain, while at the same time condemning them and expressing support for the protesters.

In the case of Tunisia and Egypt, namely Egypt, the Western powers are moving in with foreign aid, 40 bn dollars combined grants and loans, largely funnelled through IMF and the World Bank, or through bilateral relations with USA and EU.

The money, as always, comes with specific demands for "peace and security" cooperation, meaning strategic compliance, and "structural adjustment", meaning economic compliance to a rigid set of demands leading to devastating conditions perpetuating the usual debt circle sending more money back to the lenders in the long run, filling up the empty treasuries.

The concern for Russia and China is that the waning of the US empire may lead to World War 3, as the Transatlantic Alliance is unwilling to accept the end of privilege and hegemony, and USA still controls the largest arsenal of conventional weapons in the world.

As things stand, people all over the world lean towards Western values and ideals, but reject the notion of Western hegemony for the unfair and imbalanced terms it imposes on everyone else. This can be seen in the Arab uprisings, and it will also factor into even a democratic movement in China.

Regardless of where you stand with regards to democracy and human rights, development remains a priority for every nation, and a nation at war develops poorly.

And to the profound disappointment of the belligerent extremes under every banner, and everyone invested in a zero-sum game, the most probable conclusion to the long equasion is relative peace, fostered by the emergence of a carefully self-regulating mechanism of multipolar deterrence.