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The Empire of Chaos is in a Jam
Topic Started: Oct 23 2015, 09:44 PM (39 Views)
Zechariah
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Zechariah
The Empire of Chaos is in a Jam

By Pepe Escobar

October 23, 2015 "Information Clearing House" - "Sputnik" - The no-fly zone in Syria already exists. It is run by Russia and Washington is unable to jam it.

NATO is desperate. The Pentagon is desperate. Imagine waking up one day in Washington and Brussels just to realize Russia has the ability to electronically jam — detect, trace, disable, destroy — NATO electronics within a 600 km range across Syria (and southern Turkey).

Imagine the nightmare of row after row of Russian Richag-AV radar and sonar jamming systems mounted on helicopters and ships jamming everything in sight and finding every available source of electromagnetic radiation. Not only in Syria but also in Ukraine.

Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, commander of U.S. Army units in Europe, was even forced to qualify Russian electronic warfare capabilities in Ukraine as "eye-watering."

For their part, caught in the crossfire as sitting ducks or headless chickens, that mighty ideological aircraft carrier known as the USS Think Tankland was left dabbling with the four options left for Washington to "achieve its goals" in Syria.

The first option is containment — which is exactly what the Obama administration has been doing. The recipe was proposed in full by the Brookings Institution; "containing their activities within failed or near-failing states is the best option for the foreseeable future."

But that, Think Tankland argues, would "crush the popular opposition" in Syria. There is no "popular opposition" in Syria; it's either the government in Damascus or a future under the ISIS/ISIL/Daesh Salafi-jihadi goons.

The second option is the favorite among US neocons and neoliberalcons; to weaponize the already weaponized opposition. This opposition ranges from the YPG Kurds — who actually fight on the ground against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh — to Jabhat al-Nusra, a.k.a. al-Qaeda in Syria and its Salafi-jihadi cohorts. Al-Nusra of course has been rebranded in the Beltway as "moderate rebels"; so this option means in practice the House of Saud weaponizing al-Qaeda while they fight under the cover of US air strikes.

Pure Ionesco-style theatre of the absurd. Compounded by the fact those apocalyptic nut jobs who pass as "clerics" in Saudi Arabia, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood, have duly declared jihad against Russia.

The third option will go nowhere; Washington allying with "Assad just go" and Iran — not to mention Russia — in a real fight-to-the-finish against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Obama boxed himself in a long time ago with "Assad must go", so he remains immobilized by a self-inflicted ippon.

The fourth option is the neocon wet dream; regime change, achieved, in theory, by what I call the Coalition of the Dodgy Opportunists (CDO), as in the NATO-GCC embrace, with a Turkish starring role and attached US air strikes, plus all those thousands of CIA-trained "moderate rebels" slouching all the way to Damascus. As if the Russian campaign did not exist.

In fact, for US corporate media, it's as if the overwhelming Russian massacre — and not "containment" — of "Caliphate" assets these past three weeks is not happening at all. Hubris has metamorphosed into huge embarrassment and finally into total omission.

The Obama administration's "Assad must go" diktat has also metamorphosed into a wacky version of a non-denial denial. It's plain obvious now that the Russia air campaign, way beyond ISIS/ISIL/Daesh, has destroyed the whole imperial game across "Syraq"; that same old mix of regime change, Balkanization, creating and keeping failed states, "isolating" Russia.

Moreover, and contrary to all the current rehash of Afghan mythology — where, incidentally, the Taliban continue to win in America's Longest War — Syria won't be a revisited USSR quagmire. On the contrary; while in Afghanistan in the 1980s the proverbial imperial game of using Salafi-jihadis against a secular government worked, as it worked in NATO turning Libya into a failed state, now Moscow reverse-engineered the process, smashing the Salafi-jihadis on the ground in conjunction with secular governments.
It's our (bombing) way or the highway

Which bring us to Iraq.

Next week, Iraq's parliament will vote on whether to request Russian air strikes against ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, former national security adviser to former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, is convinced the vote will pass — even facing Sunni and somewhat Kurdish opposition.

A measure of Washington's alarm is that the new chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine Gen. Joseph Dunford was forced to fly to Baghdad to make sure this won't happen. In his own words, the Pentagon was consumed by "angst" when Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi evoked the vote.

"Angst" is bound to persist. This is all about imperial spheres of influence. A "yes" vote, on the ground, means the Russian Air Force working in tandem with ground intel collected by Shi'ite militias such as the Badr Corps and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haqq to smash all fake "Caliphate" positions. And geopolitically, a "yes" vote signifies the ultimate humiliation — after all those elaborate multi-trillion dollar plans for the "Greater Middle East" which Shock and Awe in 2003 should have set in motion.

The USS Think Tankland's prescription for all the trouble in Syria is to beef up NATO, as in "send aid of all kinds" to "protect" poor Turkey.

Sultan Erdogan is possibly about to profit from a Chancellor Merkel-engineered 3 billion euro plan to "encourage" Ankara to keep on Turkish soil potential Syrian migrants bent on a peaceful invasion of the European Union. Thus the Sultan will have paved the way for being finally "accepted", in the long run, as a EU member.

The problem is Sultan Erdogan not only supports ISIS/ISIL/Daesh as a regime change tool, but he also has renewed his war against PKK Kurds, which are allied with YPG Kurds, which are objectively allied with Washington.

Even that configuration does not prevent the USS Think Tankland from advising the creation of a NATO-enforced no-fly zone along the Turkish-Syria border, supported by American, Turkish, British and French troops.

Beltway, now we do have a problem. This no-fly zone is already in effect. And it's run by Russia. And you won't be able to jam it.

A quick final recap: the Empire of Chaos destroys Iraq; creates the conditions for the emergence of a Salafi-jihadi constellation, from al-Qaeda in Iraq to its Frankenstein, ISIS/ISIL/Daesh; does not get the oil (remember Wolfowitz's "We're the new OPEC"?); tries to destroy Syria for four years, unsuccessfully; and in the end Russia reinstates its Middle East sphere of influence as the real power fighting Salafi-jihadism across "Syraq".

If this is what passes for imperial planning, the Empire of Chaos certainly does not need enemies.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article43238.htm
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U Thant
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Its about Time you got something right, you old fossil

Chaotic Empire...is in a Jam

Zechariah
Oct 23 2015, 09:44 PM
Netanyahu’s fairytale about Hitler and the mufti is the last thing we need

by Tom Segev

For many years historians have tried without success to determine when and how Adolf Hitler reached the decision to exterminate Europe’s Jews. Among the many mysteries accompanying the history of the second world war this is one of the most intriguing.

But now Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, has found the answer. Speaking last night at the opening of the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu stated that it was actually a Palestinian, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, who gave Hitler the idea.

The mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini was appointed by the British in 1921. The title recognised his position as the major religious and political authority among the Palestinian Arabs. In accordance with the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my ally”, the mufti sought support from Nazi Germany and in return backed Hitler’s war, including the extermination of the Jews.

He initiated the formation of a predominantly Muslim unit of the Waffen SS in Bosnia. In November 1941 he was received by Hitler in Berlin. According to Netanyahu, “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time; he wanted to expel the Jews. But Husseini protested to Hitler that “they’ll all come here” – in other words, to Palestine. “So what should I do with them?” Hitler asked, according to Netanyahu. The mufti replied: “Burn them.” Netanyahu did not describe Hitler’s response, but one can imagine that it was something like: “Wow – how come I never thought of that?”

All Israeli governments have used the Holocaust as a political argument. Every Arab leader since 1948 has been compared at least once to Hitler. All Arab countries have compared Israel to the Nazis. And the Arabs have always refused to acknowledge that the Holocaust is a central element of the Israeli identity. This is particularly unfortunate because unless one understands one’s enemy, one cannot make peace.

Netanyahu has used such rhetoric in his flamboyant speeches against the Iran nuclear agreement, particularly in the US Congress and the UN general assembly. The story of the mufti is also not new to him; apparently it appears in one of his books. It is based on the postwar contention of one of Adolf Eichmann’s aides, Dieter Wisliceny, who also described a conducted tour of Auschwitz that the mufti was supposedly given by Adolf Eichmann. But the exact dialogue between the mufti and Hitler that Netanyahu presented this week goes far beyond anything even he has claimed before.

In addition to meeting Hitler, Husseini sat down with Eichmann and sabotaged a plan to transfer Jewish children from eastern Europe to Palestine. He should have been brought to trial along with other war criminals. His conduct during the war remains a shameful chapter in Palestinian history.

But there is no solid evidence to suggest that he played any role in the decision to exterminate the Jews. For, as Bernard Lewis wrote in Semites and Anti-Semites, it “seems unlikely that the Nazis needed any such additional encouragement from outside”.

It is equally implausible that Husseini was given a guided tour of the Auschwitz gas chambers in operation. In fact, his meeting with Hitler, which has been established in both Arab and German records, did not go very well for the mufti, who sought a statement of support for the Palestinian national rights: a kind of German Balfour declaration for the Arabs. Hitler refused to sign such a document. Foolishly Husseini agreed to have his picture taken with Hitler, which has haunted the Palestinian cause ever since.

The mufti’s support for Nazi Germany demonstrated the evils of extremist nationalism. However, the Arabs were not the only ones who were seeking a deal with the Nazis. At the end of 1940 and again at the end of 1941, before the Holocaust reached its height in the extermination camps, a small Zionist terrorist organisation – Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, also known as the Stern Gang – made contact with Nazi representatives in Beirut, hoping for support for the struggle against the British. One of the Sternists, in a British jail at the time, was Yitzhak Shamir, a future Israeli prime minister.

Netanyahu’s fictitious dialogue between Husseini and Hitler has come at an extremely delicate moment, with a new wave of Palestinian terror once again raising fear and hatred in both Israel and the Palestinian territories. Involving the Holocaust once again can only make matters worse. This should be a moment for responsible leadership and restraining language. The last thing the present situation needs is a fairytale about Hitler and the mufti.




Edited by U Thant, Oct 24 2015, 03:38 AM.
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Zechariah
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Zechariah
LOL, poor COON, his sad little empire is crumbling. :P
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