Barred From Canada: An Update

On March 3 Ambassador James Bissett had a letter published in Alberta’s premier daily, the Edmonton Journal, taking issue with an “assistant adjunct” professor [sic!] at the University of Alberta who had voiced support for the cancellation of my lectures at UBC and UofA because of my “denial of genocide” at Srebrenica:

First, the topic of the speech was The Balkans: Uncertain Prospects for an Unstable Region. It had nothing to do with Srebrenica. Second, Trifkovic’s credentials on the subject of genocide are beyond reproach. In June 2006, he was the keynote speaker at a symposium held in Israel on the topic of the Holocaust in Yugoslavia.

It is becoming all too common in Canada for individuals or groups to prevent the expression of views and opinions with which they do not agree. I find it particularly troublesome when a professor at one of Canada’s foremost universities publicly supports the suppression of that fundamental freedom and then argues he has always been in “favour of dialogue.”

(The formal grounds for my difficulties was my alleged position as a “senior official” of an unidentified government, but “Srebrenica” is, of course, the ever-present elephant in the room.) Bissett’s letter was followed by a much longer diatribe in the March 10 issue of the Edmonton Journal supporting the view that “Canada was within its rights and acted correctly in refusing admission to Srdja Trifkovic, a journalist and political activist”:

Trifkovic writes political commentary, principally for the magazine Chronicles, a polemical publication from an organization of the extreme right, in which he is also an editor. Among scholars Trifkovic is regarded, not as a colleague, but as a curiosity from the side… His arguments are summarized in an article, “The Hague Tribunal: Bad Justice, Worse Politics.” [NB: published in Chronicles in August 1996] He also published two books, The Sword of the Prophetand Defeating Jihad, arguing terrorism and violence are intrinsic to the Islamic religion.

As for the claims Trifkovic makes regarding crimes committed in Bosnia-Herzegovina, they have been disproven before international judicial bodies such as the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), which has found individuals responsible for genocide in Srebrenica, and the International Court of Justice, which found that genocide was committed… Despite extreme views that would discredit most public speakers, Trifkovic has become a bit of acause célèbre in some parts of the émigré community, partly because he is amusing and well-spoken and partly because he holds a doctorate… Freedom of movement is a fundamental democratic value and should be restricted only for compelling reason. The Canadian government was right to exclude a participant in violations of human rights from entry to the country and to prevent this misuse of the authority of the university from taking place…

The letter was signed by a multiethnic crew of academics and “independent scholars,” most of whom are regarded—among experts—as neither “colleagues” nor “curiosities from the side,” but as anonymi. A short response came on March 10 from George Thompson of Washington DC:

While mouthing support for academic autonomy and freedom to travel, the posse of professors who favour Srdja Trifkovic’s exclusion from Canada in fact seeks to suppress such virtues of civil society. These Guardians of Official Thought can brook no disagreement with their version of what happened during the Bosnian war, specifically at Srebrenica. If their version is unimpeachably correct, however, why is it so important to them to censor those who disagree?

It’s sad but not surprising that a small group of academics with an ugly agenda cheers the use of state power to silence dissenters. It’s quite worrisome that the state used its power in this manner. Canada has done its university students, and itself, a disservice by excluding Trifkovic from the country.

In the meantime I’ve taken the matter to the Canadian courts; but its background was minutely dissected by Julia Gorin in a long essay published on March 14 on JihadWatch. Following an examination of the background of an unfortunate attack on me by Jihad Watch’s editor, Ms. Gorin points out that the incident at the Vancouver airport on February 24 took place after a Bosnian-Muslim organization called The Institute for Research of Genocide in Canada (ICRG) alerted authorities that a “genocide denier” was within their borders:

In addition to claiming to represent “more than 50,000 Canadians of Bosnian origin”—despite 28,000 of those being Serbs and Croats—IRGC director Emir Ramic sits on the editorial board of a Sarajevo-based Muslim magazine titled Korak (“Step”). Korak, published by the veterans’ association of the Bosnian-Muslim Army, runs articles titled “Israel is a Terrorist Regime” and “Basic Principles of the Law of War in Islam.” The latter asserts that “Jihad is a just and legitimate fight against aggression and a struggle in protection of human rights and freedoms.”

The chief editor of this Islamist magazine, Asaf Dzanic, is also on the “Canadian” Genocide Institute’s board. Perversely, and where the Institute derives some of its “legitimacy,” Elie Wiesel has lent his name to its Board. There are more ironies that Ms. Gorin underlines:

As Canadian former ambassador to Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia James Bissett pointed out, the “Institute” actively engages in WWII Holocaust minimization and denial, of the already minimized and suppressed story of the Muslim-assisted genocide of Jews, Serbs and Gypsies in Croatia—the precursor to the wider European genocide. Ambassador Bissett contrasted the IRGC’s article “Examination of Serbian Deaths in Jasenovac Camp” with the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s numbers. … Elie Wiesel has admitted to being less than careful in what he lends his name to. In October 1993 at a talk he gave at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Wiesel became almost “rhapsodic”… when he spoke of walking through Sarajevo with Bosnian-Muslim wartime president Alija Izetbegovic.

Ms. Gorin points out that my detractors insist on the sanctity of the judgments by international courts to which the United States specifically declines to subject their leaders and soldiers. Given their confidence in UN courts, she adds, they might take a moment to notice that Milosevic was never found guilty—he was found dead, which that leaves him as an indicted war criminal… no more indicted than Tudjman or Izetbegovic, both of whom passed away waiting for their indictments to come:

Consider the efficiency with which the ‘genocide’ designation has been achieved. Note how much speedier, with less trouble and controversy, the Srebrenica “genocide” came to be than the much older and bigger Armenian Genocide. (Meanwhile, as Ambassador Bissett pointed out, “I am not aware of the ‘Institute’ seeking to ban or castigate as ‘genocide deniers’ those Turkish government officials…who are adamant that what happened to the Armenians is NOT a genocide.”) And what about the Greeks and Assyrians? (See “Three Genocides, One Perpetrator.”) Never mind about the WWII liquidation of one-third of Croatia’s Serbs—virtually unknown, much less officially designated as anything. What is the common denominator here? The elite guardianship, and the fevered—and very successful—rush to collect proclamations, resolutions, rulings, compulsory days of remembrance (internationally and locally) is for exactly ONE “genocide,” and of the smallest scale. Just as oddly, it is the alleged perpetrators of this particular “genocide” who can’t kick the label, which is used as a sledgehammer against them in pursuance of, and as a cover for, Islamo-Western geopolitical ends. In what amounts to the biggest false confession in history, the effort has even achieved an admission of guilt from the alleged perpetrators, if only to stop the whipping.

There is something political, and something desperate, going on here. Why is it so crucial for Muslims to have their desperately sought genocide? Enter the final irony of this convoluted, sleight-of-hand situation—from Trifkovic’s deportation, to his being ‘found out’ as an anti-Semite, to “tarring” Spencer with said “anti-Semite,” to criticism of Spencer for not disavowing the latter’s Balkan “pseudo-history”: In addition to the geopolitical purpose that “the massacre” was needed for at the time (an international intervention), there is a far bigger goal. Muslims see the Jews as deriving much of their influence, moral authority, and sympathy from the Holocaust. To compete, they must secure their own. That they are achieving it in between committing genocides themselves (Sudan, Turkey, Kosovo, WWII Croatia-Bosnia, 1990s Bosnia) is a testament to their prowess, and to the West’s stupidity and servility.

Being a genocide denier is not as bad as being a genocide fabricator, Julia Gorin concludes, “a relentless effort that takes on many forms and disguises to make it harder to recognize, camouflaging itself against seemingly unrelated or tangential incidents.”

Blowback: “Kosovars” Strike Again

The  by a “Kosovar”-Albanian Muslim at Frankfurt Airport on March 2 combines the fruits of the United States’ criminally misguided Balkan policy over the past two decades and of Europe’s suicidal immigration policy since the 1960’s. While it is probably too late to have either of them reversed, hope springs eternal: the deaths of two young Americans should remind us of where we stand with “Kosovars” in particular and Jihadist infiltrators into the Western world in general.

Kosovo’s Albanians we know from the news fall into two categories. One group consists of “Kosova’s” pro-Western, secular, democratic leaders  They are also, as the Western powers have known all along, mass murderers and organ harvesters, starting with “Prime Minister” Hashim Thaci. They are Europe’s leading drug smugglers, arms and people traffickers. They are among the world’s richest Mafia bosses—er, “controversial tycoons”—like “President” Behgjet Pacolli. They run the most lawless, violent, depraved entity in today’s Europe.

Another group of media-visible Kosovo Albanians are Islamic terrorists like Arif Uka (21) who was shouting Allahu Akbar! and Jihad, Jihad! as he opened fire in Frankfurt. This was an act of Islamic terrorism, of course, but the German authorities tried to pretend, at first, that this episode of Sudden Jihad Syndrome had nothing to do with terrorism.

Frankfurt Airport was the scene of yet another instance of what I’ve described as the Kosovo Blowback. In May 2007 four Albanian Muslims from Kosovo, plus a Turk and a Jordanian, were arrested for conspiring to attack Fort Dix and “to kill as many soldiers as possible” (U.S. Attorney’s Office). The mainstream media were reluctant to name them as Albanians but referred to them as immigrants from the former Yugoslavia.

Just like his German colleague on the day of the Frankfurt attack, White House spokesman Tony Snow was quick to assure us back in 2007 there was “no direct evidence” that the men arrested in the Fort Dix plot have ties to international terrorism. He was lying, but his meta-message was clear: The Administration knew that it could not keep the Albanian identity of four “Yugoslav” suspects concealed, but it wanted to pre-empt any suspicion that an independent KosovA would become a black hole of jihad-terrorism in the heart of Europe. Washington was too busy laying the ground for Pristina’s unilateral declaration of independence nine months later.

It is to be expected that, in the same spirit, Frankfurt will be spinned by the mainstream media and Thaci’s friends and enablers—such as Mrs. Clinton—as follows:

• Lone gunman, perhaps deranged, or traumatized by “Serbian crimes against his people.”
• Kosovo Albanians are shocked, express grief and horror, eternal love for America.
• CAIR & Co. condemn the attack, warn against Islamophobia and hasty conclusions.
• This isolated incident does not reflect in any way on the nature of the “Kosovar” society.
• Even less does it justify questioning Kosovo’s “right to independence,” which is absolute.

We have been assured by successive U.S. administrations that Kosovo’s Albanians are largely secular. Thaci’s enablers insist that even when they desecrate and destroy Christian churches, they do it for reasons of “revenge” against the Serbs rather than Islam. When these Albanian “secularists” reveal themselves as Islamic terrorists, the episode is dismissed as untypical. Asking what this transformation bodes for a new Muslim state in the heart of Europe is still verboten in America, but no longer in Europe.

Dick Marty’s revelations about Thaci’s gory criminality and the latest instance of his émigré compatriots’ Jihadism should help unmask the web of lies and distortions that has guided U.S. policy in the Balkans for years. Should, but won’t. This is America, AD 2011.

 

Banned From Canadistan

On Thursday, March 24, I was . After six hours’ detention and sporadic interrogation at Vancouver airport I was escorted to the next flight to Seattle. It turns out I am “inadmissible on grounds of violating human or international rights for being a proscribed senior official in the service of a government that, in the opinion of the minister, engages or has engaged in terrorism, systematic or gross human rights violations, or genocide, a war crime or a crime against humanity within the meaning of subsections 6 (3) to (5) of the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act.”

It appears that my contacts with the Bosnian Serb leaders in the early nineties make me “inadmissible” today. As it happens I was never one of their officials, “senior” or otherwise, but the story has been told often enough (most recentlyin one of my witness testimonies at The Hague War Crimes Tribunal). The immigration officer at Vancouver decided that what was good for The Hague was not good enough for Canada; but her decision evidently had been written somewhere else by someone else well before my arrival. (She was so out of her depth that she asked me if President Vojislav Koštunica had been indicted for war crimes.)

I’ve visited Canada some two dozen times since the Bosnian war ended; ironically, one of those visits, in February 2000, was to provide expert testimony before the Canadian House of Commons in Ottawa. Why should the Canadian authorities suddenly decide to keep me out of the country now, and for transparently spurious reasons? Well, because the Muslims told them so. The campaign started when a Bosnian-Muslim propaganda front, calling itself The Institute for Research of Genocide of Canada, demanded to have me “banned” from speaking at the University of British Columbia on February 24. The ensuing campaign soon escalated into demands to keep me out of Canada altogether. The authorities have now obliged.

As Ambassador James Bissett noted last week, what is outrageous is that, over the years, this “Institute” has indulged in the denial of a real genocide in the former Yugoslavia. It has also attempted to blacken the reputation of one of Canada’s most highly respected soldiers by posting (last December 26) “The Shocking Account by Raped Bosniak Women and Criminal Undertakings of Lt. General (Ret.) Lewis Mackenzie”:

During the war in Bosnia, the Muslim leadership in Sarajevo became furious when General Mackenzie—who was representing the UN—was not deceived (as many journalists were) by the blatant propaganda generated by the Muslim side and by his insistence at remaining impartial. In an attempt to have him replaced, the Muslims concocted false charges of rape and misconduct against him. These charges were so obviously fabricated they were summarily dismissed by responsible authorities. As the general was able to prove, he was not even in Bosnia when many of the alleged offences took place. Despite the facts, the “Genocide Institute” continues to slander the good name of General Mackenzie. Its web site contains a long list of so-called rape victims who relate in lurid detail how they were raped … by the Canadian officer. They even claim that during some of these rapes the general was “protected ‘– not by UN troops but by heavily armed “Chetniks.” The stories are so obviously fabricated that to those who know the General personally—as I do—can only wonder at the seriously psychotic nature of individuals who would repeat these lunatic charges.

General Mackenzie is a Canadian so he cannot be deemed “inadmissible,” but who knows what unpleasantness could await him upon arriving in another country with a powerful Muslim lobby. Extradition for trial in Sarajevo? A long and arduous legal battle to prevent such outcome?

Let it be noted that the “Institute for Research of Genocide of Canada” uses for itself the acronym “IRGC.” That acronym is more commonly associated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. While conceivably accidental, the coincidence is not altogether inapt. The Canadians will learn, in the fulness of time, the price of kowtowing to these people’s demands. They will become less free with each act of surrender, and the demands will have no end.

The Tragedy of American Education

Robert E. Holloway is a high school teacher in suburban Northern Virginia. He is probably considered a decent man by his neighbors, a competent educator by his peers, and a figure of some authority by his students. He is the embodiment of much that is wrong with this country’s education system, however: a bigot, a genocide denier, and a disseminator of falsehoods. He does not even realize what he is—not because he is mad but because he is an ignoramus. Having teachers like Holloway in American classrooms is worse than a crime, it is a mistake.

EPIC IGNORANCE—In the second week of February Mr. Holloway gave his students an assignment on Aristotle’s “Three Points,” and instructed them in some detail on how to proceed:

The recent breakup of Yugoslavia into separate countries provides many examples of the power of this kind of rhetoric. Yugoslavia was created after the second world war [sic!] out of several smaller states, including Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzgovenia, and Slovenia. Within each state there were ethnic and religious minorities with long histories of conflict. While Yugoslavia was under the control of the Soviet Union, these conflicts were kept in check by military force. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, new political structures were necessary, and political opportunities arose for the ambitious. The leaders of various factions, understanding Aristotle’s tlree [sic!] points very well, began to mobilize their followers to war by reminding them of their historical grievances against other groups. Serbian leaders published photographs of atrocities alledgedly committed by Croatians during WWII, reviving a conflict from 50 years earlier. Individuals were inspired through this angry rhetoric to attack, rape, and kill neighbors that had lived near them all their lives, simply because of their ethnicity or religion.

Mr. Holloway’s ignorance is astounding. While causing Aristotle to turn in his grave, it prompts both laughter and tears among the living:

• Even a superficially informed Middle American is dimly aware that Yugoslavia was the product of the First World War and that Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina had not been independent states but Austro-Hungarian provinces before its creation.
• Even a casual listener of Morning Edition knows that Yugoslavia’s dictator Josip Broz Tito broke away from Stalin in 1948 and that Yugoslavia remained outside the Soviet orbit (let alone Moscow’s “military force”) until its demise in the 1990’s.
• Even an occasional reader of a quality broadsheet may recall that the collapse of Yugoslavia was simultaneous with that of the Soviet Union, and not contingent upon it.

Mr. Holloway’s teaching is the equivalent of a Belgrade high school teacher, say, telling his Serbian charges that the United States of America came into being by the merger of the Union and the Confederacy in the aftermath of the Mexican War of 1861-1865, but remained under the British yoke until President Coolidge’s New Deal in the 1940’s.

GENOCIDE DENIAL—The morally outrageous part concerns Mr. Holloway’s dismissive reference to the Ustaša-instigated holocaust in Croatia, a gruesome yet relatively little known chapter of the Second World War which killed, by conservative estimates, half a million men, women and children… “simply because of their ethnicity or religion,” to paraphrase his rhetoric. Try to imagine Mr. Holloway instructing his students as follows: “Jewish leaders published photographs of atrocities allegedly committed by Germans during WWII, reviving a conflict from 50 years earlier” and thus instigating the Jews to commit mass murder, rape, and ethnic cleansing of innocents. Mr. Holloway would be clearing his desk and contemplating a new career in fast food catering by now, and justifiably so.

As I noted in my keynote presentation at Yad Vashem Center’s June 2006 symposium on the Holocaust in Yugoslavia, presided by Professor Yehuda Bauer, the most widely respected living authority on the grim issues of the period,

The number of victims at the Croatian death camp at Jasenovac—the only Quisling extermination outfit entrusted to the locals—is still uncertain. The lowest estimate with any pretense to seriousness—tens of thousands of victims—was made by the late Croatian President Franjo Tudjman, famous for saying “Thank God, my wife is neither a Serb nor a Jew.” Tudjman’s “estimate” on Jasenovac fits in with his other assessments:

“In his book Wastelands: Historical Truths, published in 1988, Mr. Tudjman wrote that the number of Jews who died in the Holocaust was 900,000—not six million. He has also asserted that not more than 70,000 Serbs died at the hands of the Ustashe—most historians say around 400,000 were killed.” (The New York Times, August 20, 1995)

Other sources provide estimates tens of times greater than Dr. Tudjman’s: “Jasenovac”—entry by Menachem Shelach in Encyclopedia of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, 1990, pp. 739-740—says, “Some six hundred thousand people were murdered at Jasenovac, mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, and opponents of the Ustasa regime.” The Holocaust Education & Archive Research Teamestimated “that close to 600,000 … mostly Serbs, Jews, Gypsies, were murdered at Jasenovac.”

So much for the Jewish sources. Let us look at what the contemporary German allies of the Croatian Ustaša regime had to say on the subject. Hermann Neubacher, Hitler’s foremost political expert for the Balkans, in his book Sonderaufrag Südost 1940-1945. Bericht eines fliegenden Diplomaten (Goettingen, 1957, p. 18) wrote: “The prescription for the Orthodox Serbs issued by the leader and Führer of Croatia, Ante Pavelic, was reminiscent of the religious wars of the bloodiest memory: One third must be converted to Catholicism, another third must be expelled, and the final third must die. The last part of the program has been carried out.” [I.e., one-third of cca. 1.9 million were killed.]

In a report to Himmler, SS General Ernst Frick estimated that “600 to 700,000 victims were butchered in the Balkan fashion.” General Lothar Rendulic, commanding German forces in the western Balkans in 1943-1944, estimated the number of Ustaša victims to be 500,000. In his memoirs Gekaempft, gesiegt, geschlagen (Welsermühl Verlag, Wels und Heidelberg, 1952, p.161) he recalled a memorable exchange on this issue with a Croat dignitary:

When I objected to a high official who was close to Pavelic that, in spite of the accumulated hatred, I failed to comprehend the murder of half a million Orthodox, the answer I received was characteristic of the mentality that prevailed there: Half a million, that’s too much—there weren’t more than 200,000!

Julia Gorin reminded us in The Jerusalem Post (Feb. 22, 2010) of some facts of life, and death, in the Croatian state established and controlled by the Axis powers:

Germany entrusted Croatia with running its own concentration camps, without oversight…  Archive photos of sadism that would make horror filmmakers blush survive today: Ustashas displaying an Orthodox priest’s head; an eyeless peasant woman; Serbs and Jews being pushed off a cliff; a Serb with a saw to his neck; and a smiling Ustasha holding the still-beating heart of prominent industrialist Milos Teslitch, who had been castrated, disemboweled and his ears and lips cut off. Italian writer Curzio Malaparte in his 1944 book Kaputt offers this detail: “While [Croatian Fuehrer Pavelic] spoke, I gazed at a wicker basket on his desk which seemed to be filled with mussels, or shelled oysters… ‘Are they Dalmatian oysters?’ I asked. [Pavelic] said smiling, ‘It is a present from my loyal Ustashas… Forty pounds of human eyes’.”

BETTER RED THAN BRAIN DEAD—The Holloway farce brings to mind my own high school education, in Tito’s Yugoslavia, four decades ago. Its diploma—obtained after a grueling final exam known as the Matura (equivalent to Germany’s Abitur, or France’s Baccalaureat)—was the graduate’s entry to university or the civil service. By the time I attended the Tenth Gymnasium, a quarter of a century of Communist neglect was in evidence everywhere. It was nevertheless a very good school. It had a solid contingent of old teachers (then still titled “professors”) inherited from the old times, who firmly believed that their role was to teach, not to interact and connect. They used the polite “vous” form when addressing people half a century their juniors, but had no qualms about telling a wanting student that he was unfit to be in class, or his parents that he was too stupid for the Gymnasium and should transfer to a vocational school instead. The grading system was unabashedly meritocratic, from 1 for “F” to 5 for “A”, and designed with no allowances for social rank or parents’ clout (race, gender, and sexuality were not an issue in those days).

In contrast to the United States, we had a clearly articulated relationship between what is taught and what is tested. The workload was heavy, and necessitated several hours of serious study every day. At the end of it all the Maturantwas a jack of all trades and a master of none, just as he was meant to be. He had a solid grounding in most areas once considered necessary for an educated, civilized person, and the assumption was that eventual excellence would be attained in his chosen field of university study.

In practical terms this meant that we all had some idea of what Leonidas did at Thermopylae and what Caesar said at the Rubicon; what was the Protagoras and who was Pythagoras; who was Attila and who was Totila; what was natural law and what was the second law of thermodynamics. Attendance at the symphony orchestra, ballet and opera matinees, every first Sunday of the month, was not obligatory but it was necessary for a good grade in music; and what started as a chore soon became a habit for at least some. Latin was on the whole easy, and making puns—I prided myself on rephrasing Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum by removing the g from “cogito”—was deemed only slightly pretentious.

Some areas of our curriculum were burdened by the veneer of the Titoist brand of Marxism—notably sociology, 20th century history, and modern philosophy—but the stamp was not deeply felt in most subjects. For the most part we had a curriculum essentially similar to the Gymnasiums of Austria-Hungary that provided the model for the Kingdom of Serbia in the 1880s and remained in force ever since. Under this system an ever-present principle, mostly implied and only rarely explicitly spelled out, was that moral and aesthetic norms are not a matter of personal choice. There were “standards” and we were supposed to conform to them, and to accept the lasting norms that antedated and transcended the rules of the current regime. In addition there was the home, and friends, where one could be free.

I have often wondered if the Communists allowed old-style schools to survive by design or by default, and on balance I give more weight to the former. For many middle-ranking apparatchiks having good schools was a personal need: they wanted their own children to be “properly educated,” and, secretly knowing the limits of their abilities, they were loath to experiment with the school system the way they had experimented—with catastrophic effect—with the economy and society. They wanted their children to assume the positions of leadership that they had come to regard as rightfully theirs, and—being largely half-educated peasants—they had enough common sense to find the answer. They intuited that the only way to forge a New Class from their offspring was to combine the usurped privilege of power with the inherited privilege of good education that develops the mind and enhances character.

My high school days came at the tail end of a period of uneasy coexistence between Us and Them, the society and the “comrades.” The schools produced young people capable of thinking for themselves, able to read between the lines of the official media, and at the same time to be unintimidated by “the West” to which they were increasingly exposed. When I took my Matura we had our dreams and we were smarting for action; four decades later we are mostly dispersed over three continents, which is a generational defeat, but we did well conventionally and financially, which is a credit to our long-dead teachers.

Even before the first shots were fired came the destructive reforms of Yugoslav education of the late 1970s and early 1980s, which were inspired more by the fashionable Western notions of egalitarianism and visceral hatred of excellence than by the old Marxist orthodoxy. The reformers of the past two decades have declared that theGymnasium was an elitist institution incapable of responding to the demands for greater equality of educational opportunity and the growing need for vocationally qualified personnel. It was to become a mass institution, and effectively abolished in the process.

By now Serbia is reintegrated into the “international community” and ready to welcome the creative input Robert E. Holloway. Going east may be an astute career move for a man of his creative sweep and talent.

Beware the Neocon Advocacy of Egyptian Democracy

It is essential to take William (“Bill”) Kristol seriously. He has been so utterly wrong on so many things (America’s ability to run the world, NATO, Turkey, the Balkans, Chechnya, Iraq, Sarah Palin, Russia, Iran, Georgia, John McCain, missile defense . . . ) that his pronouncements merit respect. Being consistently wrong—in the fleeting guise of things measurably empirical, that is—they contain a deeper wisdom. Kristol’s “analysis” is the equivalent of Tetzel’s dropping penny: The form may seem inane, but the message reverberates in faraway places.

Bill Kristol matters, so please bear with me and endure the longest quote I’ve ever copied to these pages over the past decade, because a mere hyperlink won’t do:

[H]ysteria is not a sign of health. When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.

Nor is it a sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it’s a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition…

The idea that democracy produces radical Islam is false: Whether in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, or Egypt, it is the dictatorships that have promoted and abetted Islamic radicalism . . . Nor is it in any way “realist” to suggest that backing Mubarak during this crisis would promote “stability.” To the contrary: The situation is growing more unstable because of Mubarak’s unwillingness to abdicate. Helping him cling to power now would only pour fuel on the revolutionary fire, and push the Egyptian people in a more anti-American direction . . .

[O]ne of the most hopeful aspects of the current conservative revival is its reclamation of the American constitutionalist tradition. That tradition is anchored even beyond the Constitution, of course, in the Declaration of Independence. And that document, let’s not forget, proclaims that, “Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness], it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” An American conservatism that looks back to 1776 cannot turn its back on the Egyptian people. We should wish them well—and we should work to help them achieve as good an outcome as possible . . . American conservatives should remember our commitment, in the words of Federalist 39, to “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom, to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government.”

Egypt turns out to have its votaries of freedom. The Egyptian people want to exercise their capacity for self-government. American conservatives, heirs to our own bold and far-sighted revolutionaries, should help them.

I do not know where to start, so I won’t: All I have to say in response to this is contained in  my earlier writings, and plagiarizing oneself is no compliment to oneself.

And yet . . . Call me a conspiracy theorist, but the magnitude of Kristol’s idiocy is so breathtaking that it cannot be accidental. There are 12 to 15 red flags one could grab and exploit for all their rhetorical, logical, historical, legal, and moral worth.

I prefer to leave the parsing to our on the whole astute and intelligent online commentators. Bill Kristol matters. Treat him like one of Will Shortz’s Sunday morning mind games. Enjoy!

Joseph Lieberman’s Long Overdue Departure

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Al Gore’s vice-presidential candidate in 2000 who subsequently broke away from the Democratic Party and won reelection as an independent in 2006, has announced that he will not seek reelection when his fourth term expires next year.

Lieberman’s departure will not make much difference to the political scene in Washington as his influence has been on the wane for years. It is nevertheless moderately good news because his hypocrisy, bad judgment and malevolence are impressive even by the standards of the best Congress money can buy.

Lieberman took pride of his well publicized pontifications on issues of “values” and “morality,” notably in 1998 when he described President Clinton’s conduct in the Lewinsky scandal as “disgraceful,” drawing praise from members of both parties for his supposedly principled stand. At the same time he has supported a host of bad causes and continues to support them.

In 1999 Lieberman co-sponsored the “Hate Crimes Bill” (S.622) that had sought to criminalize any statement critical of militant homosexuals’ objectives, practices and “lifestyle.” He was outspoken in his advocacy in giving homosexuals and lesbians the same rights as heterosexuals to adopt children. He has been a vocal supporter of the repeal of don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy: “The late Senator Barry Goldwater once said, ‘It’s not important if you are straight, just that you can shoot straight.’ I agree, and believe our current policy should be changed.” When it was changed last month he hailed the decision as a personal triumph.

An advocate of open borders, in January 2004 Lieberman supported “one-time earned legalization” for illegal immigrants. Four months earlier he accused President George W. Bush of using 9/11 as an excuse to avoid immigration reform. In June 2007 he voted against declaring English as the official language of the U.S. government and supported blanket amnesty for the illegals (“Comprehensive Immigration Reform”). In March 2008 he voted to support continuing federal funds for declared “sanctuary cities” which violated federal immigration laws. He was rated 0% by USBC.

Lieberman’s pro-abortion stand and his voting record on abortion are incompatible with Orthodox Judaism which he claims to profess: “Al Gore and I respect and will protect a woman’s right to choose and our opponents will not. We know that this is a difficult, personal, moral, medical issue. But that is exactly why it ought to be left, under our law, to a woman, her doctor and her god.” He has regularly scored 100% in voting record surveys by NARAL and other pro-abortion groups.

A life-long global interventionist, Lieberman has been a consistent supporter of NATO expansion and an enthusiast for the Iraq war, “a heroic struggle against enemies of civilization” (September 2003). He took pride in not having “an inch of difference” from George W. Bush on the issue, declaring that “overthrowing Saddam was right,” and—somewhat oddly—that the victory in Iraq would open door to Israeli-Palestinian peace (January 2004)

The darkest side of Senator Joseph Lieberman’s record has to do with his stand of Kosovo.  Well before the KLA escalated its terrorist campaign in early 1998, instigating the crisis that culminated in the bombing campaign a year later, Albanian separatists were active purchasing political influence in Washington. Their key backer was Bob Dole, but Lieberman soon became a major asset and was given money by Albanian lobbyists. This champion of campaign finance reform performed on cue: as early as in October 1998, way ahead of the rest of the pack, he went on television to advocate war against Serbia.  It was not only a matter of U.S./NATO “credibility,” said he, but also of morality, “a question of acting early to stop a broader war in the Balkans… a question of acting out of our humanitarian values.” In April 1999 he declared that “the United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.”

Once he did get that longed-for bombing, Lieberman urged an unlimited escalation of the war with ground troops, and actively advocated war crimes against Serb civilians. He expressed hope that the air campaign, “even if it does not convince Milosevic to order his troops out of Kosovo, will so devastate his economy, which it’s doing now, so ruin the lives of his people, that they will rise up and throw him out.”

On May 23, 1999, Lieberman repeated this call for indiscriminate terrorist bombing of civilian targets in Serbia on Fox News.  When the presenter said, “But wait, I thought we weren’t trying to make life miserable for regular, every day Serbs,” Lieberman’s answer was unambiguous:

Oh, we are. I mean that’s what we’ve been doing for the last couple of months. We’re not only hitting military targets, otherwise why would we be cutting off the water supply and knocking out the power stations—turning the lights out. We’re trying through the air campaign to break the will of the Serbian people so they will force their leader to break his will to then order the troops out of Kosovo.

A paragon of moral virtue was actively advocating war crimes against innocent (“regular”) civilians. Lieberman additionally repaid his Albanian benefactors by sponsoring the infamous “Kosovo Self-Defense Act” that would have provided $25 million of U.S. taxpayers’ money to equip 10,000 KLA “fighters” with arms and anti-tank weapons. In the event Lieberman’s KLA friends did not need additional arms: they were given a free hand to kill and expel non-Albanians from Kosovo under the benevolent gaze of NATO occupiers. He remaind mute following last month’s revelations that his KLA protégés were involved in organ harvesting and heroin trafficking on a grand scale.

Joseph Lieberman has been described as “the conscience of the U.S. Senate.” Indeed, just as Luca Brasi was the conscience of the Corleone family.

Kosovo’s Thaçi: Human Organs Trafficker

The details of an elaborate KLA-run human organ harvesting ring, broadly known for years, have been confirmed by a Council of Europe report published on December 15. The report, “Inhuman treatment of people and illicit trafficking of human organs in Kosovo” identifies the province’s recently re-elected “prime minister” Hashim Thaçi as the boss of a “mafia-like” Albanian group specialized in smuggling weapons, drugs, people, and human organs all over Europe. The report reveals that Thaçi’s closest aides were taking Serbs across the border into Albania after the war, murdering them, and selling their organs on the black market. In addition, the report accuses Thaçi of having exerted “violent control” over the heroin trade for a decade.

Deliberate Destrution of Evidence – Long dismissed in the mainstream media as “Serbian propaganda,” the allegations of organ trafficking – familiarto our readers – were ignored in the West until early 2008, when Carla Del Ponte, former Prosecutor at the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague, revealed in her memoirs that she had been prevented from initiating any serious investigation into its merits. She also revealed – shockingly – that some elements of proof taken by ICTY field investigators from the notorious “Yellow House” in the Albanian town of Rripe were destroyed at The Hague, thus enabling the KLA and their Western enablers to claim that “there was no evidence” for the organ trafficking allegations.

In April 2008, prompted by Del Ponte’s revelations, seventeen European parliamentarians signed a motion for a resolution calling on the Assembly to examine the allegations. The matter was referred to the Assembly’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, which in June 2008 appointed Swiss senator Dick Marty as its rapporteur. He had gained international prominence by his previous investigation of accusations that the CIA abducted and imprisoned terrorism suspects in Europe.

“Genuine Terror” – In his Introductory Remarks Marty revealed some of the “extraordinary challenges of this assignment”: the acts alleged purportedly took place a decade ago, they were not properly investigated by any of the national and international authorities with jurisdiction over the territories concerned. In addition, Marty went on,

… efforts to establish the facts of the Kosovo conflict and punish the attendant war crimes had primarily been concentrated in one direction, based on an implicit presumption that one side were the victims and the other side the perpetrators. As we shall see, the reality seems to have been more complex.  The structure of Kosovar Albanian society, still very much clan-orientated, and the absence of a true civil society have made it extremely difficult to set up contacts with local sources. This is compounded by fear, often to the point of genuine terror, which we have observed in some of our informants immediately upon broaching the subject of our inquiry.  Even certain representatives of international institutions did not conceal their reluctance to grapple with these facts: “The past is the past”, we were told; “we must now look to the future.”

The report says Thaçi’s links with organized crime go back to the late 1990’s, when his Drenica Group became the dominant faction within the KLA. By 1998 he was able to grab control of “most of the illicit criminal enterprises” in Albania itself. Thaçi and four other members of the Drenica Group are named as personally guilty of assassinations, detentions and beatings:

In confidential reports spanning more than a decade, agencies dedicated to combating drug smuggling in at least five countries have named Hashim Thaçi and other members of his Drenica Group as having exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics… Thaçi and these other Drenica Group members are consistently named as “key players” in intelligence reports on Kosovo’s mafia-like structures of organised crime. I have examined these diverse, voluminous reports with consternation and a sense of moral outrage.

Marty notes that the international community chose to ignore war crimes by the KLA, enabling Thaçi’s forces to conduct a campaign of murdereous terror against Serbs, Roma, and Albanians accused of collaborating with the Serbs. Some 500 of them “disappeared after the arrival of KFOR troops on 12 June 1999,” about a hundred Albanians and 400 others, most of them Serbs. Some of these civilians had been secretly imprisoned by the KLA at different locations in northern Albania, the report adds, “and were subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment, before ultimately disappearing.” Captives were “filtered” in ad-hoc prisons for their suitability for organ harvesting based on sex, age, health and ethnic origin. They were then sent to the last stop – a makeshift clinic near Fushë-Krujë, close to the Tirana airport:

As and when the transplant surgeons were confirmed to be in position and ready to operate, the captives were brought out of the ‘safe house’ individually, summarily executed by a KLA gunman, and their corpses transported swiftly to the operating clinic.

Thaçi the Untouchable – The report states that Thaçi’s Drenica Group “bear the greatest responsibility” for the prisons and the fate of those held in them. It criticizes the governments supportive of Kosovo’s independence for not holding to account senior Albanians in Kosovo, including Thaçi, and of lacking the will to effectively prosecute the former leaders of the KLA. The diplomatic and political support by such powers “bestowed upon Thaçi, not least in his own mind, a sense of being untouchable.”

Marty concludes that “[t]he signs of collusion between the criminal class and the highest political and institutional office holders are too numerous and too serious to be ignored,” but “the international authorities in charge of the region did not consider it necessary to conduct a detailed examination of these circumstances, or did so incompletely and superficially.”

Following Marty’s presentation of the report to the Council of Europe in Paris on December 16 it will be debated by the Parliamentary Assembly in Strasbourg on January 25.

Media Reaction – Within days of the publication of Marty’s report, numerous of excellent articles were published in the mainstream media Europe linking his revelations with the broader problem of NATO’s war against the Serbs in 1999, the precedent it had created for Afghanistan and Iraq, and the nature of the “Kosovar” society today.

Neil Clark in The Guardian assailed “the myth of liberal intervention.” Far from being Tony Blair’s “good” war, he wrote, the assault on Yugoslavia was as wrong as the invasion of Iraq:

It was a fiction many on the liberal left bought into. In 1999 Blair was seen not as a duplicitous warmonger in hock to the US but as an ethical leader taking a stand against ethnic cleansing. But if the west had wanted to act morally in the Balkans and to protect the people in Kosovo there were solutions other than war with the Serbs, and options other than backing the KLA – the most violent group in Kosovan politics… Instead, a virulently anti-Serb stance led the west into taking ever more extreme positions, and siding with an organisation which even Robert Gelbard, President Clinton’s special envoy to Kosovo, described as “without any question, a terrorist group.”

Clark reminds us that it was the KLA’s campaign of violence in 1998 which led to an escalation of the conflict with the government in Belgrade. “We were told the outbreak of war in March 1999 with NASTO was the Serbian government’s fault,” he adds, yet Lord Gilbert, the UK defence minister, admitted “the terms put to Miloševic at Rambouillet [the international conference preceding the war] were absolutely intolerable … it was quite deliberate.” Then came the NATO occupation, under which an estimated 200,000 ethnic Serbs and other minorities from south Kosovo, and almost the whole Serb population of Pristina, have been forced from their homes. But as the Iraq war has become discredited, Clark concludes,

so it is even more important for the supporters of “liberal interventionism” to promote the line that Kosovo was in some way a success. The Council of Europe’s report on the KLA’s crimes makes that position much harder to maintain. And if it plays its part in making people more sceptical about any future western “liberal interventions”, it is to be warmly welcomed.

Tony Blair has some very bizarre friends, wrote Stephen Glover in The Daily Mail, but a monster who traded in human body parts beats the lot. The prime minister of ­Kosovo is painted by the report as a major war criminal presiding over a corrupt and dysfunctional state, Glover says, and yet this same Mr Thaci and his associates in the so-called Kosovo ­Liberation Army were put in place after the U.S. and Britain launched an onslaught in March 1999 against Serbia, dropping more than 250,000 and killing an estimated 1,500 blameless ­civilians:

This was Mr Blair’s first big war, and it paved the way for the subsequent Western invasion of Iraq. The crucial difference is that while the Left in ­general and the Lib Dems in particular opposed the war against Saddam ­Hussein, both were among Mr Blair’s main cheerleaders as he persuaded President Bill Clinton to join forces with him in crushing Serbia.

Both London and Washington tended to ignore atrocities committed by Hashim Thaci’s KLA, Glover concludes, and offered unacceptably draconian terms to the Serbs “because by that stage Blair and Clinton preferred war”:

Those were the days, of course, when most of the media thought Tony Blair could do no wrong. His military success in 1999 convinced him that Britain could and should play the role of the world’s number two policeman to the U.S. A ­messianic note entered his rhetoric, as at the 2001 Labour party conference, when he raved that ‘the kaleidoscope has been shaken… Let us ­­re-order this world about us.” … What happened in Kosovo helped shape subsequent events in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is richly ironic that ‘liberated’ Kosovo should now be a failed, gangster state… With his messianic certainties, the morally bipolar Tony Blair liked to divide the world into ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’, having presumptuously placed himself in the first category. How fitting that this begetter of war after war should end up by receiving the Golden Medal of Freedom from a monster who traded in body parts.

U.S. Damage Limitation and Self-Censorship – Such commentary is light years away from the feeble and half-hearted reporting in the American mainstream media. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, did not deem it fit to publish a story about the Council of Europe report itself. It published two related items critical of the report instead, on the European Union expressing doubt about its factual basis and on the “government” of Kosovo planning to sue Dick Marty for libel. No major daily has published a word of doubt about Bill Clinton’s wisdom of waging a war on behalf of Thaçi and his cohorts a decade ago, or perpetuating the myth of it having been a good war today.

That Thaçi aka “The Snake” is a criminal as well as a war criminal is no news, of course. The intriguing question is who, on the European side, wanted to end his “untouchable” status, why now, and what is the U.S. Government – his principal enabler and abettor – going to do about it.

Unsurprisingly, Thaçi’s “government” dismissed the report on December 14 as “baseless and defamatory.” On that same day Hashim Thaçi wrote in a telegram to President Obama that “the death of Richard Holbrooke is a loss of a friend.” “The Snake” has many other friends in Washington, however, people like US senator (and current foe of WikiLeaks) Joseph Lieberman, who declared back in 1999 at the height of the US-led war against the Serbs that “the United States of America and the Kosovo Liberation Army stand for the same human values and principles … Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values.” Thaçi’s photos with top U.S. officials are a virtual Who’s Who of successive Administrations over the past 12 years: Bill and Hillary Clinton, Albright, Bush, Rice, Biden, Wesley Clark…

Thaçi’s American enablers and their media minions are already embarking on a bipartisan damage-limitation exercise. Its twin pillars will be the assertion that the report rests on flimsy factual evidence, an attempt to discredit Dick Marty personally, and the claim the Council of Europe as an irrelevant talking shop.

Richard Holbrooke: An American Diplomat

A few hours before Richard Holbrooke’s death last Monday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told a group of America’s top diplomats gathered at the State Department for a Christmas party that he was “practically synonymous with American foreign policy.” Her assessment is correct: Richard Holbrooke’s career embodies some of the least attractive traits of contemporary American diplomacy.

As assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs under Jimmy Carter, Holbrooke was instrumental in securing continued U.S. support for Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor. In 1997 he authorized arms deliveries to Indonesia in violation of the supposed U.S. arms embargo against Suharto’s regime. It was during this period the suppression of the Christian Timorese by the Muslim Indonesians reached genocidal levels, killing 200,000 people or about a third of the island’s population. Holbrooke’s 1997 response to a reporter’s question about the tragedy to which he had directly contributed was illustrative of his character and style: “I want to stress I am not remotely interested in getting involved in an argument over the actual number of people killed. People were killed and that always is a tragedy but what is at issue is the actual situation in Timor today… [As for the numbers of victims] … we are never going to know anyway. “

True to form, Holbrooke lied to Congress in 1979 that the famine in East Timor – caused by the Indonesian army’s scorched-earth campaign – was a belated consequence of Portuguese colonial misrule. Over two decades later, in a lavish tribute to the diplomatic skill of his friend Paul Wolfowitz – who was the US ambassador to Indonesia at that time – Holbrooke boasted how “Paul and I have been in frequent touch to make sure that we keep East Timor out of the [1980] presidential campaign, where it would do no good to American or Indonesian interests.”

Far from “bringing peace to Bosnia” at Dayton in 1995, Holbrooke presided over the imposition of a package broadly similar to the 1992 Lisbon Plan brokered by the European Union – the deal which could have avoided the war altogether but which was deliberately torpedoed from Washington. The chief outcome of the Bosnian war was a NATO transformed into a tool of U.S. hegemony, and the renewal of American dominance in European affairs to an extent not seen since Kennedy. The settlement at Dayton was not unlike a plausible compromise that would have been reached much earlier had America remained on the sidelines; but the meaning of Dayton was evident from Holbrooke’s boast, a year later, “We are re-engaged in the world, and Bosnia was the test.”

As special representative to Cyprus in 1997, Holbrooke irritated the Europeans by his strident advocacy of Turkey’s membership in the European Union. His bias in favor of Muslim Turks against Christian Greeks in the divided island reflected a consistent bipartisan trend in U.S. foreign policy making. Holbrooke was not the creator of that trend, but he was its enthusiastic supporter – from Indonesia to Bosnia, from Cyprus to Kosovo.

In 1998 Holbrooke was back in the Balkans, preparing the ground for Clinton’s Kosovo war against Serbia. On June 24 of that year he met with the KLA commander Gani Shehu in the village of Junik, near the Yugoslav-Albanian border, dutifully taking his shoes off like a good dhimmi. He promised American support for the the KLA campaign of violence against the Serbs. Earlier that year Clinton’s Balkans envoy Robert Gelbard correctly characterized the KLA as a terrorist organization, but Holbrooke’s visit signified a change of policy and directly led to Racak, Rambouillet, NATO bombing, and Kosovo’s transformation into the Jihadist mafia state that it is today.

The most eloquent epitaphs are crafted while the person is still alive. Borrowing a page out of Richard Holbrooke’s diplomatic manual, Vice President Joe Biden called him “the most egotistical bastard I’ve ever met.” Norwegian diplomat Kai Eide, until last March the top UN official in Afghanistan, said five weeks ago of Holbrooke’s Afghan performance, “This is not the Balkans, where you can bully people into accepting a solution.” Eide added that the U.S. Special Envoy did not fully grasp “the complexity of the Afghan political scene.”

Holbrooke’s grasp of the complexities was illustrated by his calling the Serbs “murderous assholes” and by referring to Radovan Karadzic as the Osama Bin Laden of Europe. He was “synonymous with American foreign policy,” indeed: he was a coarse, arrogant bully who understood diplomacy as the art of imposing one’s will at the point of a gun. Richard Charles Albert Holbrooke was a bad man advocating and implementing bad policies.

Countdown to Zero: Propaganda for War on Iran

Seductive, fascinating and frightening, Countdown to Zero motivates the public to support complete nuclear disarmament and to fear Iran, which is conveniently the next country the US wants to invade. Framed in no-nuke rhetoric, Countdown to Zero is not-so-subtle agitprop. The film relies on conventional geopolitics to whip up conventional audiences into another conventional state of panic. Islamo-terrorists just can’t acquire this technology! This is painfully similar to what we were told prior to the invasion of Iraq.

In 2002, Condoleezza Rice warned the world, “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”  Invading forces never found weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. They did find plenty of oil, though, which corporations seized for pennies on the dollar. [1]  The same reason – WMDs – is now being used against Iran. When Zero mentions Islamo-terrorists seeking nuclear technology, it spotlights Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Repeatedly.

Zero features war hawks Tony Blair, Ronald Reagan, Zbigniew Brzezinski, James Baker, and Pakistan’s Pervez Musharraf, as well as spies and analysts, including Valerie Plame. Past or current members of the Carlyle Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations share the screen with well-financed groups ostensibly focused on nuclear nonproliferation.

Some of the film’s talking heads promoted, engaged in and/or profit from the “War on Terror,” which critics deem a euphemism for Western resource wars in the Middle East. James Baker, who served under both Bushes, makes a brief appearance. Until 2005, he legally represented the Carlyle Group, a private equity firm dominated by former heads of state who profit enormously on Middle East wars. [2]

Joe Cirincione of the Council on Foreign Relations (and of Ploughshares, a non-proliferation group) [3] delivers most of the Iran-is-bad message:

“Iran is the tip of the spear. It’s the big problem that we have to solve.”

This marks a 180-degree reversal from his position in 2007 when he described to Asia Times:

“‘a group of people inside the administration who view Iran as Nazi Germany’ and who are ‘constantly exaggerating’ the threat from Iran.” [4]

But that isn’t the only inconsistency.

Nine nations reportedly have nuclear weaponry: the US, Russia, the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan and North Korea. Of these, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea are not current signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). [5]

Leaving India and Israel free of criticism, Zero disparages nuclear members Pakistan and North Korea. Key information on these two nations presented in the film conflicts with other information publicly available – in some cases for over a decade.

First keep in mind that invading Iran is part of the “Long War” in which the US and its allies seek control of the entire region for access to its gas, oil and minerals. Long War proponent, Zbigniew Brzezinski, briefly appears in Zero. In 1997, he published The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. [6]  Among those imperatives is the need to control Iran, a “primarily important geopolitical pivot.” [p.47]

Iran stands in the way. India does not. Neither does Pakistan or Israel.  Brzezinski writes of the Central Asian states:

“Moreover, they are of importance from the standpoint of security and historical ambitions to at least three of their most immediate and more powerful neighbors, namely Russia, Turkey and Iran, with China also signaling an increasing political interest in the region. But the Eurasian Balkans are infinitely more important as a potential economic prize: an enormous concentration of natural gas and oil reserves is located in the region, in addition to important minerals, including gold.” (p.124, emphasis added)

Johannes Koeppl, a former German defense ministry and NATO official, called Grand Chessboard “a blueprint for world dictatorship.” [7]  Iran is pivotal in those plans; Zero demonizes Iran. This is precisely the same fear mongering elites used when leading us into war on Iraq.

Zero isn’t even wholly anti-nuke; it only condemns nuclear arms. The film spends time, for example, on the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear disarmament talks without mentioning what drove Gorbachev to the table: the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor explosion. [8]  The Ukraine government reports that the explosion released 100 times more radiation than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [9]   But Zero doesn’t mention this or any other civilian nuclear accident. [10]  The goal is not to ban all nuclear use, even though a nuclear power incident (by accident or sabotage) is just as deadly.

And, it presents absurdities. According to Zero, Osama bin Laden is alive and well and living in Pakistan, which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also recently asserted. [11]  Never mind that a dialysis-dependent man [12] on the run in rugged terrain for nine years would have likely died by now. [13]  Elites refuse to give up their bogeyman.

A closer look into those nations that refuse to sign the NPT reveals different treatment by the US based on corporate investment deals. That difference is reflected in Zero. Though sanctions are applied against North Korea on the grounds it refuses to reach a nuclear accord, the U.S. trades nuclear technology with Israel, India and Pakistan, according to sources enumerated below.

A Look at India

It’s hard to take the nuclear powers seriously about disarmament, writes Russ Wellen in Foreign Policy in Focus. [14]  India refused to sign not only the NPT, but also the Proliferation Security Initiative, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and the Missile Technology Control Regime. India is now gearing up its anti-satellite system for deployment by 2015.

In India’s Quest for Dual-Use Technology, [15] nuclear research scientist Matthew Hoey mentions an India defense paper “that demonstrated a clear interest within the Indian military of deploying not only a space-based [directed-energy] laser but also a hypersonic suborbital delivery system with global-strike capability.”

Yet, somehow, India escapes “rogue state” status, with its attendant economic sanctions. Wellen cites Hoey who reported that the Bush Administration lifted the 1998 sanctions against India for its nuclear tests, “and then progressively loosened export and commerce laws against India.” Going even further:

“[In 2008] the United States approached the Nuclear Suppliers Group … to grant a waiver to India to commence civilian nuclear trade.… The implementation of this waiver makes India the only known country with nuclear weapons which is not a party to the Non Proliferation Treaty … but is still allowed to carry out nuclear commerce with the rest of the world.” (emphasis added)

So why the focus on Iran in this film? Why no concern about India, with its internal “insurgencies” necessitating ‘Operation Green Hunt’ (as the natives call it)?  Wellen explains:

“As Andrew Lichterman and M.V. Ramana write in Beyond Arms Control (2010, Critical Will), ‘… the nuclear deal is part of a broader set of [US-Indian] agreements [which] US-based multinationals are … hoping to use … as a wedge to further open India to foreign investment and sales.’”

Oh, corporate profits are at stake. Zero’s talking heads don’t condemn India for refusing to sign the NPT, likely because India has opened its tribal areas to multinational mining companies. [16] Once those pesky tribes are removed (via Operation Green Hunt), massive profits can be made in destroying ecosystems for the underlying minerals.

A Look at Pakistan

Nuclear member Pakistan also refused to sign the NPT, but its relationship with the US has been fitful. In 1979, President Carter suspended aid after discovering a nuclear enrichment facility. After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan later that year, aid resumed in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan. In 1990, President Bush suspended all aid after confirming that Pakistan had acquired a nuclear bomb. [17]

In good graces once again, Pakistan just learned it will receive $7.5 billion in aid from the US. [18]  Since 2001, Pakistan has received at least $12 billion in aid and “military reimbursements” from the U.S.

While speaking at the Brecht Forum last year, [19] Noam Chomsky (not in the film) accused the US of facilitating both India and Pakistan’s development of nuclear weaponry.

“Pakistan’s nuclear arsenals were developed with Reagan’s crucial aid. And India’s nuclear weapons program got a major shot in the arm with the recent US-India nuclear agreement.”

Former CIA expert on Pakistan’s nuclear secrets, Richard Barlow, may be the source of Chomsky’s accusation. In the 1980s, Barlow blew the whistle “that senior officials in government were … breaking US and international non-proliferation protocols to … sell it banned WMD technology.” [20]

Zero makes no mention of US involvement in Pakistan acquiring nuclear capability. It tells us that China gave Pakistan a blueprint for a nuclear bomb, and that Pakistani nuclear weapons scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, provided the rest. We’re told that A.Q. Khan set up a “full service” nuclear trade “in the early 1980s.”  CIA operative Valerie Plame then tells us that the US didn’t begin focusing on Khan “until the late 1990s,” long after Pakistan joined the nuclear club.

This is simply not plausible, even if Richard Barlow was not the expert on Pakistan nuclear secrets in the 1980s as he asserts. Someone in the US was watching Khan in the 1980s or Bush would not have had been inspired to suspend aid to Pakistan in 1990.

Another discrepancy between these two sources: Zero reports that Pakistan joined the nuclear club in 1990, whereas Barlow asserts it was in 1984, two years after Reagan renewed aid to the country. Regardless, US aid was not cut off until after Pakistan acquired the bomb.

A Look at Israel

Zero also does not condemn Israel for its nuclear program, despite its refusal to sign the NPT. The film asserts Israel has 80 nuclear weapons, which contradicts revelations made by nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, in 1986. [21] An independent nuclear physicist examined Vanunu and his documents and reported that, in 1986, Israel had enough material for 150 nuclear bombs. [22]

Of note, Obama expanded nuclear trade with Israel last month. [23]

Another absurdity asserted by Valerie Plame in Zero is that “Hamas is a terrorist organization.”  But, since when is defending your homeland from invasion an act of terrorism? Take a look at this map of Palestine lands seized by Israel over the past 60 years:

Plame won global sympathy when the Bush Administration outed her as a CIA spy. [24]  Then, it was that Iraq had obtained yellowcake uranium from Nigeria, which her husband, former US Ambassador Joe Wilson, refuted in a New York Times piece in 2003. [25]  For this, she was outed as a spy.  How ironic that she would now help advance the cause of war today with terrorist fear mongering – the same propaganda that Bush used.

Why even mention Hamas? Gaza’s popularly elected government clearly has no capability of acquiring and deploying WMDs. It’s barely alive under Israel’s military strikes and continual (and deadly [26]) blockade of food, medicine and building materials.

That statement – ‘Hamas is a terrorist organization’ – stands alone in the film, with no further comment. It’s pure psyops. The U.S.’s unending support [27] of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine [28] does more to create instability than it does to secure peace in the region.

A Look at North Korea

Zero mocks nuclear club member North Korea, using old black and white footage of a stern Kim Jong II, yet worries about its potential to trade nuclear secrets regionally. Its fears are realized as North Korea may be assisting Myanmar (Burma) in achieving nuclear capability, according to several sources reported in Bloomberg recently. [29]

Hillary Clinton just increased sanctions against North Korea for its continuing refusal to sign nuclear accords, but the US may have a tougher time in Myanmar, given Chevron’s lucrative arrangement with the military junta. [30] The Carlyle Group, with its many business interests in South Korea, [31] also held (and may still hold) business interests in Myanmar. [32]

Given US handling of India and Israel, and its massive infusion of cash into Pakistan, three states which have not signed the NPT, can we expect a similar pass on a nuclear Myanmar (but not North Korea) given corporate interests in that regime?

A Well-Made Film

Put aside for the moment Islamo-terrorist bashing, elite plans for invading Iran, and the deadly hypocrisy of the US using depleted uranium in Iraq after finding it did not have its own WMDs. Watching war hawks demand complete nuclear disarmament is sobering.

Filmmaker Lucy Walker uses potent imagery, like the tennis ball representing how much highly enriched uranium is needed to destroy an entire city.

She also shows numerous accidents with planes carrying nuclear weapons.  Citizens do need to be concerned that nuclear accidents are possible. This is one of the supporting themes of the film. “If the probability isn’t zero, it will happen,” warns nuclear physicist Frank von Hippel.

Mentioned in Zero under “Accidents” is the B-52 flight over the US in 2007, which carried six nuclear warheads. News reports in the film assert, “nobody knew – not the aircraft’s crew, not the commanders on the ground.” Six nuclear warheads could never be loaded onto a plane and flown 1,500 miles across the U.S. without anyone having a clue.  This was no accident.

One unintended message may be that rogue forces within the US military are a threat. Indeed, former UN Ambassador Gordon Duff recently speculated about such a frightening scenario. [33]  Decommissioning the US arsenal is just as important as all other nuclear arsenals. The US, in fact, is the only nation confirmed to have used all three WMDs: nuclear, biological and chemical. This is a claim that not even the immortal Osama bin Laden can make.

“Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fallujah. And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them.”

~Bob Koehler, “The suffering of Fallujah.” [34]

As presented, the history of nuclear proliferation is morbidly fascinating. Rare video footage offers a glimpse into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer, the man who understood – and yet created – the means to end life on Planet Earth. He admits that the technology will spread; that it cannot be made secure.

Mikhail Gorbachev also appears, calling for complete nuclear disarmament. He put it most succinctly in a 2007 article: “It is becoming clearer that nuclear weapons are no longer a means of achieving security; in fact, with every passing year they make our security more precarious.” [35]

We can all agree on complete nuclear disarmament. We can all take Zero’s suggestion to pressure our public servants into bringing the number of nuclear weapons down to zero, a process begun in 1963.

But, let us also recognize war propaganda when it surfaces. The film’s sincerity in promoting complete nuclear disarmament is undermined by its transparent promotion of war on Iran and by its failure to condemn nuclear energy.  By not condemning all nuclear power, Countdown to Zero misses a golden opportunity to unite peace activists with safe-energy ones to rid the world of such a dangerous, destructive technology.  Nuclear fallout is deadly – whether from weapons or energy plants.

Director and writer: Lucy Walker
Producer: Lawrence Bender
Magnolia Pictures, Participant Media, The History Channel, World Security Institute
89 mins.
Website: http://www.takepart.com/zero

NOTES:

[1] Iraq Revenue Watch, “Iraqi Fire Sale: CPA Rushes to Give away Billions in Iraqi Oil Revenues,” June 2004. http://www.iraqrevenuewatch.org/reports/061504.shtml

Also see: Terry Macalister, “Iraqi government fuels ‘war for oil’ theories by putting reserves up for biggest ever sale,” The Guardian, 13 Oct 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/13/oil-iraq

[2] Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger, “The ex-presidents’ club,” The Guardian, 31 Oct 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/31/september11.usa4

See also: Dan Briody, “Carlyle’s Way,” Red Herring, 10 Dec 2001. http://www.redherring.com/Home/6793

[3] SourceWatch, “Joseph Cirincione.” Accessed July 2010. http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Joseph_Cirincione

[4] Gareth Porter, “US frets at Iran’s ‘strategic dominance’” Asia Times, 28 Sep 2007. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/II28Ak01.html

[5] Wikipedia, “Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.” Accessed July 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Non-Proliferation_Treaty

[6] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” Basic Books, 1997. http://sandiego.indymedia.org/media/2006/10/119973.pdf

[7] Michael C. Ruppert, “A War in the Planning for Four Years” From the Wilderness, 7 Nov 2001. http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/zbig.html

[8] Richard Rhodes, “Arsenals of Folly,” Knopf, 2007, as reviewed by Charles Matthews in “Life and death in the Bomb’s shadow,” The Houston Chronicle, 19 Oct 2007. http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/life/books/reviews/5226743.html

[9] Ukraine Chernobyl InterInform, “The explosion of the reactor,” n.d. Accessed July 2010. (The site is now being administered by the United Nations Development Programme.) http://www.chernobyl.info/index.php?userhash=&navID=10&lID=2

[10] Wikipedia, “List of civilian nuclear accidents.” Accessed July 2010. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_nuclear_accidents

[11] Regional Times, “US-Pak nuke deal unlikely without satisfying Int’l community: Hillary—Bin Laden & Mullah Omar are hiding in Pakistan,” 20 Jul 2010 http://regionaltimes.com/20jul2010/frontpagenews/uspak.htm

[12] Adam Sage, “Ailing bin Laden ‘treated secretly for kidney disease,’” London Times, 1 Nov 2001. Reposted at http://www.wanttoknow.info/011101londontimes

[13] Lionel U. Mailloux, MD and William L. Henrich, MD, “Patient survival and maintenance dialysis,” 2010. http://www.uptodate.com/patients/content/topic.do?topicKey=~s4PPbmdadYoEaMP

[14] Russ Wellen, “Would You Trust a Country that Named Its First Nuke Test ‘Smiling Buddha’?” Foreign Policy in Focus, 28 Jun 2010. http://www.fpif.org/blog/smiling_buddha

[15] Matthew Hoey, “India’s Quest for Dual-Use Technology,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Sept-Oct, 2009. http://cryptome.org/in-dual-tech.pdf

[16] Arundhati Roy, “Walking with the Comrades,” Outlook India, 29 Mar 2010. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?264738

Also see Roy’s speech opposing Operation Green Hunt, India’s ongoing genocide of tribal people to seize their lands scheduled for mining, 2 Jun 2010. Video and transcript. http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/06/06/arundhati-roy-resists-operation-green-hunt-transcript-and-video/.

[17] K. Alan Krondstadt, “U.S.-Pakistan Relations, Congressional Research Service, 6 Feb 2009. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33498.pdf

[18] Matthew Lee, “Clinton cajoles Pakistan on security, offers $7.5-billion in aid,” Associated Press, 19 Jul 2010. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/clinton-cajoles-pakistan-on-security-offers-75-billion-in-aid/article1644492/

[19] Noam Chomsky, “Crisis and Hope: Theirs and Ours” speaking at Riverside Church in Harlem 12 Jun 2009. Transcript by Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/3/noam_chomsky_on_crisis_and_hope

[20] Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, “The man who knew too much,” The Guardian, 13 Oct 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/13/usa.pakistan

[21] The Sunday Times, “Revealed – the secrets of Israel’s nuclear arsenal/ Atomic technician Mordechai Vanunu reveals secret weapons production,” 5 Oct 1986, web posted 21 Apr 2004 at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/article830147.ece

[22] Charles F. Barnaby, Ph.D., “Expert Opinion of Charles Frank Barnaby in the Matter of Mordechai Vanunu,” Federation of American Scientists, 14 Jun 2004. http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/barnaby.pdf

[23] Haaretz Service, Barak Ravid, Reuters, “Report: Secret document affirms U.S.-Israel nuclear partnership” Haaretz, 07 Jul 2010.  http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/report-secret-document-affirms-u-s-israel-nuclear-partnership-1.300554

[24] SourceWatch, “Valerie Plame.” Accessed July 2010.  http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Valerie_Plame

[25] Joseph C. Wilson, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa.” New York Times, 6 Jul 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/opinion/06WILS.html?pagewanted=all

[26]  Cultures of Resistance, “Israeli Navy Attacks Gaza Freedom Flotilla,” 11 Jun 2010. http://www.culturesofresistance.org/gaza-freedom-flotilla

[27] 111^th U.S. Congress, “House Resolution 867: Calling on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.” Passed 3 Nov 2009. http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=hr111-867

[28] United Nations, “Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” UN Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, 15 Sep 2009. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/specialsession/9/docs/UNFFMGC_Report.pdf

[29] Peter S. Green, “Myanmar Nuclear Weapon Program Claims Supported by Photos, Jane’s Reports,” Bloomberg, 21 Jul 2010. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-21/myanmar-nuclear-weapon-program-claims-supported-by-photos-jane-s-reports.html

[30] Gemma Richardson, “Corporations in Burma: Companies Operating in Myanmar Profit at the Expense of the People,” Social Corporate Responsibility, 22 Mar 2009. http://social-corporate-responsibility.suite101.com/article.cfm/corporations_in_burma

[31] Moon Ihlwan, et al., “Carlyle Group’s Asian Invasion,” Bloomberg, 14 Feb 2005. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_07/b3920143_mz035.htm

Also see: Ellen Sheng, “Carlyle Group Invests US$140 Mln in Four Asian Companies,” Wall Street Journal, 7 Jun 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20100607-700192.html

[32] Norwatch, “Drilling for the Burmese Junta,” 7 July 2006, translated into English at Business and Human Rights Resource Centre, http://www.business-humanrights.org/Categories/Individualcompanies/C/CarlyleGroup

[33] Gordon Duff, “Did the Military Stop Cheney from Destroying the World?” Veterans Today, 7 Jul 2010. http://www.veteranstoday.com/2010/07/07/gordon-duff-did-the-military-stop-cheney-from-destroying-the-world/

[34] Robert C. Koehler, “The Suffering of Fallujah,” 29 Jul 2010. http://coto2.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/the-suffering-of-fallujah/

[35] Mikhail Gorbachev, “The Nuclear Threat,” Wall Street Journal, 4 Jan 2007, reposted at http://www.wagingpeace.org/articles/2007/01/31_gorbachev_nuclearthreat.htm.

The Genocide Myth

The Uses and Abuses of “Srebrenica”

On July 11, the constituent nations of Bosnia-Herzegovina — no longer warring, but far from reconciled — will mark the 15th anniversary of “Srebrenica.” The name of the eastern Bosnian town will evoke different responses from different communities, however. The difference goes beyond semantics. The complexities of the issue remain reduced to a simple morality play devoid of nuance and context.

That is exactly how the sponsors of the “Srebrenica Remembrance Day” — currently before the Canadian House of Commons — want it to be:

Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre, also known as the Srebrenica Genocide, was the killing in July of 1995 of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces;

Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II and the largest massacre carried out by Serb forces during the Bosnian war;

Whereas the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, unanimously decided in the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić that the Srebrenica Massacre was genocide…

The trouble is that the event known to the bill’s sponsors as the “Srebernica genocide” was no such thing. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence; it is not an “estimate” but a political construct. The magnitude of casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been routinely misrepresented in official reports by the pro-Muslim governments, quasi-non-governmental institutions, and the media.

As for The Hague Tribunal, an Orwellian institution with which I am well acquainted, its “unanimous decisions” are as drearily predictable as those in Moscow in 1936. It is not known to the public, however, that those “decisions” are now disputed by a host of senior Western military and civilian officials, NATO intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts who dispute the official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica as a unique atrocity in the Bosnian conflict.

The Facts — During the Bosnian war between May 1992 and July 1995, several thousand Muslim men lost their lives in Srebrenica and its surroundings. Most of them died in July of 1995 when the enclave fell unexpectedly to the Bosnian Serb Army and the Muslim garrison attempted a breakthrough. Some escaped to the Muslim-held town of Tuzla, 38 miles to the north. Many were killed while fighting their way through; and many others were taken prisoner and executed by the Bosnian Serb army.

The exact numbers remain unknown, disputed, and misrepresented. With 8,000 executed and thousands killed in the fighting, there should have been huge gravesites and satellite evidence of both executions, burials, and any body removals. The UN searches in the Srebrenica vicinity, breathlessly frantic at times, produced two thousand bodies. They included those of soldiers killed in action — both Muslim and Serb — both before and during July 1995.

The Numbers Game — In the documents of the Yugoslav War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague (ICTY) there is no conclusive breakdown of casualties. That a war crime did take place, that hundreds of Muslim prisoners were killed, is undeniable. The number of its victims remains forensically and demographically unverified, however. According to the former BBC reporter Jonathan Rooper, “from the outset the numbers were used and abused” for political purposes:

Over the years it has been held to be highly significant that original ballpark estimates for the number who might have been massacred at Srebrenica corresponded closely to the ‘missing’ list of 7,300 compiled by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).  But the early estimates were based on nothing more than the simple combination of an estimated 3,000 men last seen at the UN base at Potocari and an estimated 5,000 people reported ‘to have left the enclave before it fell.’  [ ... ] Perhaps the most startling aspect of the 7-8,000 figure is that it has always been represented as synonymous with the number of people executed.  This was never a possibility: numerous contemporary accounts noted that UN and other independent observers had witnessed fierce fighting with significant casualties on both sides. It was also known that others had fled to Muslim-held territory around Tuzla and Zepa, that some had made their way westwards and northwards, and that some had fled into Serbia.  It is therefore certain that nowhere near all the missing could have been executed.

The key problem of all is that the arithmetic does not add up. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported at the time that some 3,000 Bosnian Army soldiers managed to reach Muslim lines near Tuzla and were redeployed by the Bosnian Army “without their families being informed.” The number of military survivors was also confirmed by Muslim General Enver Hadzihasanovic in his testimony at The Hague.

The last census results for Srebrenica, from 1991, counted 37,211 inhabitants in Srebrenica and the surrounding villages, of which 27,118 were Muslims (72.8 percent) and 9,381 Serbs (25.2 percent). Displaced persons from Srebrenica registered with the World Health Organization and Bosnian government in early August 1995 totaled 35,632. With 3,000 Muslim men who reached Tuzla “without their families being informed” we come to the figure of over 38,000 survivors. The Hague Tribunal’s own estimates of the total population of the Srebrenica enclave before July 1995 — notably that made by Judge Patricia Wald — give 40,000 as the maximum figure. The numbers don’t add up.

Furthermore, despite spending five days interviewing over 20,000 Srebrenica survivors at Tuzla a week after the fall of the enclave, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Henry Wieland declared, “we have not found anyone who saw with their own eyes an atrocity taking place.” A decade later Dr Dick Schoonoord of the Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdoumentatie (NIOD) confirmed Wieland’s verdict: “It has been impossible during our investigations in Bosnia to find any people who witnessed the mass murder or would talk about the fate of the missing men.”

A UN-Protected Jihadist Camp – It is often pointed out that Srebrenica was an UN “protected zone,” but it is seldom noted that the enclave was simultaneously an armed camp used for attacks against Serb villages in the surrounding areas. Muslim General Sefer Halilovic confirmed in his testimony at the Hague Tribunal that there were at least 5,500 Bosnian Army soldiers in Srebrenica after it had obtained the “safe haven” status, and that he had personally arranged numerous deliveries of sophisticated weapons by helicopter.

French General Philippe Morillon, the UNPROFOR commander who first called international attention to the Srebrenica enclave, is adamant that the crimes committed by those Muslim soldiers made the Serbs’ desire for revenge inevitable. He testified at The Hague Tribunal on February 12, 2004, that the Muslim commander in Srebrenica, Naser Oric, “engaged in attacks during Orthodox holidays and destroyed villages, massacring all the inhabitants. This created a degree of hatred that was quite extraordinary in the region.”

Asked by the ICTY prosecutor how Oric treated his Serb prisoners, General Morillon, who knew him well, replied that “Naser Oric was a warlord who reigned by terror in his area and over the population itself”: “According to my recollection, he didn’t even look for an excuse. It was simply a statement: One can’t be bothered with prisoners.”

Professor Cees Wiebes, who wrote the intelligence section of the Dutch Government report on Srebrenica, notes that despite signing the demilitarization agreement, Bosnian Muslim forces in Srebrenica were heavily armed and engaged in provocations (“sabotage operations”) against Serbian forces. Professor Wiebes, a senior lecturer in the Department of International Relations at Amsterdam University, caused a storm with his book Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992-1995, detailing the role of the Clinton administration in allowing Iran to arm the Bosnian Muslims. Wiebes catalogues how, from 1992 to January 1996, there was an influx of Iranian weapons and advisers into Bosnia. By facilitating the illegal transfer of weapons to Bosnian Muslim forces and turning a blind eye toward the entry of foreign Mujahadeen fighters, the US turned supposed safe zones for civilians into staging areas for conflict and a tripwire for NATO intervention.  Dr Wiebes notes that the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency facilitated the transfer of illegal arms from Muslim countries to the Tuzla airport using Hercules C-130 transport planes. It arranged for gaps in air surveillance by AWACs, which were supposed to guard against such illegal arms traffic.  Along with these weapons came Mujahadeen fighters from both Iranian training camps and al-Qaeda, including two of the hijackers involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Khaled Sheik Mohammed who helped plan the attack.

Cui bono? — On 11 July, 1995, the Muslim garrison was ordered to evacuate the town which the Serbs entered unopposed. Local Deputy Director of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, wrote in 2004 (“Was Srebrenica a Hoax?”) that Muslim forces did not even try to take advantage of their heavy artillery because “military resistance would jeopardize the image of ‘victim,’ which had been so carefully constructed, and which the Muslims considered vital to maintain.”

Two prominent Muslim allies of the late Bosnian President Alija Izetbegovic, his Srebrenica party chairman Ibran Mustafic and police commander Hakija Meholjic, have subsequently accused Izetbegovic of deliberately sacrificing the enclave in order to trigger NATO intervention. Meholjic is explicit: in his presence, Izetbegovic quoted Bill Clinton as saying that 5,000 dead Muslims would be sufficient to provide the political basis for an American-led intervention on the side of the Muslims, which both of them wanted.

In their testimony before The Hague Tribunal, Bosnian Muslim Generals Halilovic and Hadzihasanovic confirmed that 18 top officers of the Srebrenica garrison were abruptly removed in May 1995. This was done even as the high command was ordering sabotage operations against Bosnian Serbs.  One of these was a militarily meaningless attack on a strategically unimportant nearby Serb village of Visnica, which triggered off the Serb counter-attack which captured the undefended town. Ibran Mustafic, the former head of the Muslim SDA party in Srebrenica, is adamant that the scenario for the sacrifice of Srebrenica was carefully prepared:

Unfortunately, the Bosnian presidency and the Army command were involved in this business … Had I received orders to attack the Serb army from the demilitarized zone, I would have rejected to carry out that order. I would have asked the person who had issued that order to bring his family to Srebrenica, so that I can give him a gun let him stage attacks from the demilitarized zone. I knew that such shameful, calculated moves were leading my people to catastrophe. The order came from Sarajevo.

British military analyst Tim Ripley, who has written for Jane’s, agrees with the assessment that Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by the Muslim political leaders. He noted that Dutch UN soldiers “saw Bosnian troops escaping from Srebrenica past their observation points, carrying brand new anti-tank weapons [which] made many UN officers and international journalists suspicious.”

The G-Word — The term “genocide” is even more contentious than the exact circumstances of Srebrenica’s fall. Local chief of UN Monitors, Carlos Martins Branco, noted that if there had been a premeditated plan of genocide,

instead of attacking in only one direction, from the south to the north — which left the hypothesis to escape to the north and west, the Serbs would have established a siege in order to ensure that no one escaped. The UN observation posts to the north of the enclave were never disturbed and remained in activity after the end of the military operations. There are obviously mass graves in the outskirts of Srebrenica as in the rest of ex-Yugoslavia where combat has occurred, but there are no grounds for the campaign which was mounted, nor the numbers advanced by CNN. The mass graves are filled by a limited number of corpses from both sides, the consequence of heated battle and combat and not the result of a premeditated plan of genocide, as occurred against the Serbian populations in Krajina, in the Summer of 1995, when the Croatian army implemented the mass murder of all Serbians found there.

The fact that The Hague Tribunal’s presiding judge, Theodor Meron, called the massacre in Srebrenica “genocide” does not make it so. What plan for genocide includes offering safe passage to women and children? And if this was all part of a Serb plot to eliminate Muslims, what about hundreds of thousands of Muslims living peacefully in Serbia itself, including thousands of refugees who fled there from Bosnia? Or the Muslims in the neighboring enclave of Žepa, who were unharmed when the Serbs captured that town a few days after capturing Srebrenica? To get around these common sense obstacles, the ICTY prosecution came up with a sociologist who provided an “expert” opinion: the Srebrenica Muslims lived in a patriarchal society, therefore killing the men was enough to ensure that there would be no more Muslims in Srebrenica. Such psychobabble turns the term “genocide” into a gruesome joke.

Yet it was on the basis of this definition that in August 2001, the Tribunal found Bosnian Serb General Radislav Krstic guilty of “complicity in genocide.” Even if the unproven figure of “8,000” is assumed, it affected less than one-half of one percent of Bosnia’s Muslim population in a locality covering one percent of its territory. On such form, the term “genocide” loses all meaning and becomes a propaganda tool rather than a legal and historical concept. On that form, America’s NATO ally Turkey — a major regional player in today’s Balkans — certainly committed genocide in northern Cyprus in 1974. On that form, no military conflict ever can be genocide-free.

Because of the manner in which international criminal law is currently formulated, the threshold of proof required to secure a conviction for genocide is actually lower than it is for crimes against humanity. To secure a conviction for crimes against humanity the ICTY prosecution must prove that the acts were “widespread or systematic.” No such condition applies for genocide. Moreover, as British analyst John Laughland points out, crimes against humanity can be committed only against civilians, whereas genocide — as redefined in the case of Srebrenica — can include the killing of military personnel as well. In other words, spontaneous or disparate acts involving the killing of military personnel can be classified as “genocide.” This creates ample room for propagandistic abuse of the term.

Srebrenica as a Postmodernist Totem — Laughland contends that the myth of the “Srebrenica Genocide” is essential to a program of international interventionism, based on weak legal reasoning and disregard for due process, of which the Serbs happen to be the guinea-pigs. In his view, Srebrenica has been raised to the status it now enjoys because its fall represented a defeat not only for the Bosnian Muslims but also for the “international community” and its policy of global interventionism:

Srebrenica was important — at least for the supporters of interventionism — because the UN was there, not just because it was a Muslim enclave. The United Nations as an institution, it must be remembered, had embarked in the 1990s on an aggressive policy of military, political and judicial interventionism in both Iraq and Yugoslavia. It continued to apply the highly intrusive sanctions regime against Iraq throughout the decade and into the 21^st century, and of course was happy to become the administrator of Kosovo after 1999. Its own credibility, and that of the states which dictated its policies, was destroyed when the enclave fell.

The activists of judicial and military supra-nationalism, Laughland points out, were therefore determined to make the genocide charge stick somewhere. “Genocide” offers them two key legal advantages in pursuit of the goal of creating a new international system no longer based on state sovereignty. The first is the low threshold of proof mentioned above. The second legal advantage of genocide — from the point of view of the project of creating a system of supranational coercive criminal law — is that genocide, unlike crimes against humanity, is the subject of a binding international treaty, the 1948 Genocide Convention.

The importance of the existence of a treaty, as opposed to the existence of a norm in mere “customary international law” — i.e. whatever judges or even academics say they think the law is — was illustrated with the landmark ruling in the British House of Lords against General Pinochet, issued on 24 March, 1999, (the day the bombs started raining down on Yugoslavia). Activists for universal jurisdiction ratione materiae were very excited by this ruling because it seemed to confirm that even heads of state could be put on trial when certain kinds of crimes were alleged against them. … Srebrenica, then, is an existential issue, not as much for Republika Srpska as for those activists who seek to consolidate once and for all that outcome which the former ICTY Prosecutor, Louise Arbour, said she had achieved in 1999: ‘We have passed from an era of cooperation between states to an era in which states can be constrained.’

Dr. Diana Johnstone, an American expert on the Balkans, has summed up the Arbour mindset neatly in a seminal “Counterpunch” article:

The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ is part of a dominant culture discourse that goes like this: We people in the advanced democracies have reached a new moral plateau, from which we are both able and have a duty both to judge others and to impose our ‘values’ when necessary. The others, on a lower moral plateau, must be watched carefully, because unlike us, they may commit ‘genocide.’ It is remarkable how ‘genocide’ has become fashionable, with more and more ‘genocide experts’ in universities, as if studying genocide made sense as a separate academic discipline… The subliminal message in the official Srebrenica discourse is that because ‘we’ let that happen, ‘we’ mustn’t let ‘it’ happen again, ergo, the United States should preventively bomb potential perpetrators of ‘genocide’.

But Why? — Questioning the received elite class narrative on “Srebrenica” is a good and necessary endeavor. The accepted Srebrenica story, influenced by war propaganda and uncritical media reports, is neither historically correct nor morally satisfying. The relentless Western campaign against the Serbs and in favor of their Muslim foes — which is what “Srebrenica” is really all about — is detrimental to the survival of our culture and civilization. It seeks to give further credence to the myth of Muslim blameless victimhood, Serb viciousness, and Western indifference, and therefore weaken our resolve in the global struggle euphemistically known as “war on terrorism.” The former is a crime; the latter, a mistake.

The involvement of the Clinton administration in the wars of Yugoslav succession was a good example of the failed expectation that pandering to Muslim ambitions in a secondary theater will improve the U.S. standing in the Muslim world as a whole. The notion germinated in the final months of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, when his Acting Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger said that a goal in Bosnia was to mollify the Muslim world and to counter any perception of an anti-Muslim bias regarding American policies in Iraq in the period leading up to Gulf War I. The result of years of policies thus inspired is a terrorist base the heart of Europe, a moral debacle, and the absence of any positive payoff to the United States.

Former U.S. Under-Secretary of State Nicholas Burns declared on February 18, 2008, a day after Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence: “Kosovo is going to be a vastly majority Muslim state… and we think it is a very positive step that this Muslim state, Muslim majority state, has been created today.” If it is intrinsically “a very positive step” that a “vastly Muslim state” is created on European soil that had been cleansed of non-Muslims, it is only a matter of time before similar blessings are bestowed on Americans.

If Western and especially U.S. policy in the Balkans was not meant to facilitate Jihad, the issue is not why, but how its effects paradoxically coincided with the regional objectives of those same Islamists who confront America in other parts of the world. “Srebrenica” provides some of the answers. The immediate bill is being paid by the people of the Balkans, but “Srebrenica’s” long-term costs will come to haunt the West for decades to come.

http://www.alternativeright.com/main/the-magazine/the-genocide-myth/

NATO RIP?

Ukraine’s announcement that it will pass a law that will bar the country from joining NATO has been greeted with barely concealed relief in Moscow, Paris, Berlin and Rome. It is also good news for the security interests of the United States. The time has come not only to give up on NATO expansion, but also to abolish the Alliance altogether.

Encouraging an impoverished, practically defenseless nation such as Ukraine to join a military alliance directed against the superpower next door, thereby stretching a nuclear tripwire between them, had never been a sound strategy. Article V of the NATO Charter states that an attack on one is an attack on all, and offers automatic guarantee of aid to an ally in distress. The U.S. would supposedly provide its protective cover to a new client, right in Russia’s geopolitical backyard, in an area that had never been deemed vital to America’s security interests.

From the realist perspective, accepting Ukraine into NATO would mean one of two things: either the United States is serious that it would risk a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say, the status of Sebastopol, which is insane; or the United States is not serious, which would be frivolous and dangerous.

President Clinton tried to evade the issue, over a decade ago, by questioning the meaning of words and asserting that Article V “does not define what actions constitute ‘an attack’ or prejudge what Alliance decisions might then be made in such circumstances.” He claimed the right of the United States “to exercise individual and collective judgment over this question.”

Such fudge cannot be the basis of serious policy. It evokes previous Western experiments with security guarantees in the region — leading to Czechoslovakia’s carve-up in 1938, and to Poland’s destruction in September 1939 — which warn us that promises nonchalantly given today may turn into bounced checks or smoldering cities tomorrow. After more than seven decades, the lesson of is clear: security guarantees not based on the provider’s resolve to fight a fully blown war to fulfill them, are worse than no guarantees at all. It would be dangerously naïve to assume that the United States, financially and militarily overextended, would indeed honor the guarantee under Article V, or assume responsibility for open-ended maintenance of potentially disputed frontiers (say in the Crimea) that were drawn arbitrarily by the likes of Khrushchev and bear little relation to ethnicity or history,

A necessary and successful alliance during the Cold War, NATO is obsolete and harmful today. It no longer provides collective security — an attack against one is an attack against all — of limited geographic scope (Europe) against a predatory totalitarian power (the USSR). Instead, NATO has morphed into a vehicle for the attainment of misguided American strategic objectives on a global scale. Further expansion would merely cement and perpetuate its new, U.S.-invented “mission” as a self-appointed promoter of democracy, protector of human rights, and guardian against instability outside its original area. It was on those grounds, rather than in response to any supposed threat, that the Clinton administration pushed for the admission of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary in 1996, and President Bush brought in the Baltic republics, Bulgaria, and Rumania in 2004.

Bill Clinton’s air war against the Serbs, which started 11 years ago (March 24, 1999), marked a decisive shift in NATO’s mutation from a defensive alliance into a supranational security force based on the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention.” The trusty keeper of the gate of 1949 had morphed into a roaming vigilante five decades later.

The limits of American power became obvious in August 2008. Saakashvili’s attack on South Ossetia’s capital, Tskhinvali, was an audacious challenge to Russia, to which she responded forcefully. Moscow soon maneuvered Washington into a position of weakness unseen since the final days of the Carter presidency three decades ago. The Europeans promptly brokered a truce that was pleasing to Moscow and NATO’s expansion along the Black Sea was effectively stalled, with no major Continental power willing to risk further complications with Russia. They understood the need for a sane relationship with Moscow that acknowledges that Russia has legitimate interests in her “near-abroad.”

America, Russia and NATO — The Soviet Union came into being as a revolutionary state that challenged any given status quo in principle, starting with the Comintern and ending three generations later with Afghanistan. Some of its aggressive actions and hostile impulses could be explained in light of “traditional” Russian need for security; at root, however, there was always an ideology unlimited in ambition and global in scope.

At first, the United States tried to appease and accommodate the Soviets (1943-46), then moved to containment in 1947, and spent the next four decades building and maintaining essentially defensive mechanisms — such as NATO — designed to prevent any major change in the global balance.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russia has been trying to articulate her goals and define her policies in terms of “traditional” national interests. The old Soviet dual-track policy of having “normal” relations with America, on the one hand, while seeking to subvert her, on the other, gave way to naïve attempts by Boris Yeltsin’s foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev to forge a “partnership” with the United States.

By contrast, the early 1990s witnessed the beginning of America’s futile attempt to assert her status as the only global “hyperpower.” The justification for their project was as ideological, and the implications were as revolutionary as anything concocted by Zinoviev or Trotsky in their heyday. In essence, the United States adopted her own dual-track approach. When Mikhail Gorbachev’s agreement was needed for German reunification, President George H.W. Bush gave a firm and public promise that NATO wound not move eastward. Within years, however, Bill Clinton expanded NATO to include all the former Warsaw Pact countries of Central Europe. On a visit to Moscow in 1996, Clinton even wondered if he had gone too far, confiding to Strobe Talbott, “We keep telling Ol’ Boris, ‘Okay, now here’s what you’ve got to do next — here’s some more [sh-t] for your face.'”

Instead of declaring victory and disbanding the alliance in the early 1990s, the Clinton administration successfully redesigned it as a mechanism for open-ended out-of-area interventions at a time when every rationale for its existence had disappeared. Following the air war against Serbia almost a decade ago, NATO’s area of operations became unlimited, and its “mandate” entirely self-generated. The Clinton administration agreed that NATO faced “no imminent threat of attack,” yet asserted that a larger NATO would be “better able to prevent conflict from arising in the first place” and – presumably alluding to the Balkans — better able to address “rogue states, the poisoned appeal of extreme nationalism, and ethnic, racial, and religious hatreds.” How exactly an expanded NATO could have prevented conflicts in Bosnia or Chechnya or Nagorno Karabakh had remained unexplained.

Another round of NATO expansion came under George W. Bush, when three former Soviet Baltic republics were admitted. In April 2007, he signed the Orwellian-sounding NATO Freedom Consolidation Act, which extended U.S. military assistance to aspiring NATO members, specifically Georgia and Ukraine. Further expansion, according to former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, was “historically mandatory, geopolitically desirable.” A decade earlier, Brzezinski readily admitted that NATO’s enlargement was not about U.S. security in any conventional sense, but “about America’s role in Europe – whether America will remain a European power and whether a larger democratic Europe will remain organically linked to America.” Such attitude is the source of endless problems for America and Europe alike.

President Obama and his foreign policy team have failed to grasp that a problem exists, let alone to act to rectify it. There has been a change of officials, but the regime is still the same – and America is still in need of a new grand strategy. Limited in objectives and indirect in approach, it should seek security and freedom for the United States without maintaining, let alone expanding, unnecessary foreign commitments.

The threat to Europe’s security does not come from Russia or from a fresh bout of instability in the Balkans. The real threat to Europe’s security and to her survival comes from Islam, from the deluge of inassimilable Third World immigrants, and from collapsing birthrates. All three are due to the moral decrepitude and cultural degeneracy, not to any shortage of soldiers and weaponry. The continued presence of a U.S. contingent of any size can do nothing to alleviate these problems, because they are cultural, moral and spiritual.

NATO: unnecessary and harmful — In terms of a realist grand strategy, NATO is detrimental to U.S. security. It forces America to assume at least nominal responsibility for open-ended maintenance of a host of disputed frontiers that were drawn, often arbitrarily, by Communist dictators, long-dead Versailles diplomats, and assorted local tyrants, and which bear little relation to ethnicity, geography, or history. With an ever-expanding NATO, eventual adjustments — which are inevitable — will be more potentially violent for the countries concerned and more risky for the United States. America does not and should not have any interest in preserving an indefinite status quo in the region.

Clinton’s 1999 war against Serbia was based on the his own doctrine of “humanitarian intervention,” which claimed the right of the United States to use military force to prevent or stop alleged human rights abuses as defined by Washington. This doctrine explicitly denied the validity of long-established norms — harking back to 1648 Westphalia — in favor of a supposedly higher objective. It paved the way for the pernicious Bush Doctrine of preventive war and “regime change” codified in the 2002 National Security Strategy.

The Clinton-Bush Doctrine represented the global extension of the Soviet model of relations with Moscow’s satellites applied in the occupation of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Ideological justification was provided by the Brezhnev Doctrine, defined by its author as the supposed obligation of the socialist countries to ensure that their actions should not “damage either socialism in their country or the fundamental interests of other socialist countries.” “The norms of law cannot be interpreted narrowly, formally, in isolation from the general context of the modern world,” Brezhnev further claimed. By belonging to the “socialist community of nations,” its members had to accept that the USSR — the leader of the “socialist camp” — was not only the enforcer of the rules but also the judge of whether and when an intervention was warranted. No country could leave the Warsaw Pact or change its communist party’s monopoly on power.

More than three decades after Prague 1968 the USSR was gone and the Warsaw Pact dismantled, but the principles of the Brezhnev Doctrine are not defunct. They survive in the neoliberal guise.

In 1991 the Maastricht Treaty speeded up the erosion of EU member countries’ sovereignty by transferring their prerogatives to the Brussels regime of unelected bureaucrats. The passage of NAFTA was followed by the 1995 Uruguay round of GATT that produced the WTO. The nineties thus laid the foundation for the new, post-national order. By early 1999 the process was sufficiently far advanced for President Bill Clinton to claim in The New York Times in May 1999 that, had it not bombed Serbia, “NATO itself would have been discredited for failing to defend the very values that give it meaning.” This was but one way of restating Brezhnev’s dictum that “the norms of law cannot be interpreted narrowly, formally, in isolation from the general context of the modern world.”

Like his Soviet predecessor, Clinton used an abstract and ideologically loaded notion as the pretext to act as he deemed fit, but no “interests of world socialism” could beat “universal human rights” when it came to determining where and when to intervene. The key difference between Brezhnev and Clinton was in the limited scope of the Soviet leader’s self-awarded outreach. His doctrine applied only to the “socialist community,” as opposed to the unlimited, potentially world-wide scope of “defending the values that give NATO meaning.” The “socialist community” led by Moscow stopped on the Elbe, after all. It was replaced by the “International Community” led by Washington, which stops nowhere.

The subsequent Bush Doctrine still stands as the ideological pillar and self-referential framework for the policy of permanent global interventionism. It precludes any meaningful debate about the correlation between ends and means of American power: we are not only wise but virtuous; our policies are shaped by “core values” which are axiomatic, and not by prejudices.

The Axis of Instability — The mantra’s neocon-neolib upholders are blind to the fact that, after a brief period of American mono-polar dominance (1991-2008), the world’s distribution of power is now characterized by asymmetric multipolarity. It is the most unstable model of international relations, which — as history teaches us — may lead to a major war.

As I wrote in takimag.com a year ago, during the Cold War the world system was based on the model of bipolarity based on the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). The awareness of both superpowers that they would inflict severe and unavoidable reciprocal damage on each other was coupled with the acceptance that each had a sphere of dominance or vital interest that should not be infringed upon. Proxy wars were fought in the grey zone all over the Third World, most notably in the Middle East, but they were kept localized even when a superpower was directly involved. Potentially lethal crises (Berlin 1949, Korea 1950, Cuba 1963) were de-escalated due to the implicit rationality of both sides’ decision-making calculus. The bipolar model was the product of unique circumstances without an adequate historical precedent, however, which are unlikely to be repeated.

The most stable model of international relations that is both historically recurrent and structurally repeatable in the future is the balance of power system in which no single great power is either physically able or politically willing to seek hegemony. This model was prevalent from the Peace of Westphalia (1648) until Napoleon, and again from Waterloo until around 1900. It is based on a relative equilibrium between the key powers that hold each other in check and function within a recognized set of rules. Wars do occur, but they are limited in scope and intensity because the warring parties tacitly accept the fundamental legitimacy and continued existence of their opponent(s).

If one of the powers becomes markedly stronger than others and if its decision-making elite internalizes an ideology that demands or at least justifies hegemony, the inherently unstable system of asymmetrical multipolarity will develop. In all three known instances — Napoleonic France after 1799, the Kaiserreich in 1914, and the Third Reich after 1933 — the challenge could not be resolved without a major war. Fore the past two decades, the U.S. has been acting in a similar manner. Having proclaimed itself the leader of an imaginary “international community,” it goes further than any previous would-be hegemon in treating the entire world as the American sphere of interest. Bush II is gone, but we are still stuck with the doctrine that allows open-ended political, military, and economic domination by the United States acting unilaterally and pledged “to keep military strength beyond challenge.”

Any attempt by a single power to keep its military strength beyond challenge is inherently destabilizing.  Neither Napoleon nor Hitler knew any “natural” limits, but their ambition was confined to Europe. With the United States today, the novelty is that this ambition is extended literally to the whole world. Not only the Western Hemisphere, not just the “Old Europe,” Japan, or Israel, but also unlikely places like Kosovo or the Caucasus, are considered vitally important. The globe itself is now effectively claimed as America’s sphere of influence

The U.S. became the agent of revolutionary dynamism with global ambitions, in the name of ideological norms of “democracy, human rights and open markets,” and NATO is the enforcement mechanism of choice. That neurotic dynamism is resisted by the emerging coalition of weaker powers, acting on behalf of the essentially “conservative” principles of state sovereignty, national interest, and reaffirmation of the right to their own spheres of geopolitical dominance. The doctrine of global interventionism is bound to produce an effective counter-coalition. The neoliberal-neoconservative duopoly still refuses to grasp this fact. Ukraine’s decision to give up its NATO candidacy makes a modest but welcome contribution to the long-overdue return of sanity inside the Beltway “foreign policy community.”

Swiss Minarets

Swiss voters approved a constitutional amendment banning the construction of new minarets last November, to the howls of bien-pensant rage at home and abroad.  The proposal was supported by 57.5 percent of the participating voters and 22 of the 26 Swiss cantons.  It was originally drafted in May 2007 by a group of conservative politicians, known as the Egerkingen Committee, after the federal supreme court overrode the objections of the local community and approved the construction of a minaret by the Turkish Cultural Association in the northern town Wangen bei Olten.

The ensuing campaign by the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) at the local level against the erection of new minarets was blocked by cantonal authorities who claimed that the demands were unconstitutional.  A federal popular initiative was launched instead; such initiatives, which require at least 100,000 signatures, are not subject to judicial review.  The Egerkingen Committee argued that the construction of a minaret has no religious meaning: “Neither in the Qur’an nor in any other holy scripture of Islam is the minaret expressly mentioned.  It is more a symbol of [a] religious-political power claim.”  The initiators quoted an eminent Islamist, current Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who declared in a 1997 speech that “mosques are our barracks, domes our helmets, minarets our bayonets, believers our soldiers—and this holy army guards my religion.”

The Swiss elite class was indignant.  The government opposed the initiative from the outset because it supposedly violates human rights and contradicts the alleged “core values” of the Swiss constitution.  The Federal Assembly voted 129 to 50 last spring to recommend to Swiss voters that they vote “no.”  The local Amnesty International chairman said the minaret ban “aims to exploit fears of Muslims and encourage xenophobia.”  Business associations expressed fears for Swiss commercial interests abroad.  A statement from the Swiss Catholic Bishops Conference claimed the ban would “hinder interreligious dialogue” and added, somewhat lamely, that the construction of minarets was already regulated by Swiss building codes.  The Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches repeated similar platitudes.  The president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, Dr. Herbert Winter, recalled the dark days when “we were not allowed to construct synagogues or cupola roofs.”

The reaction in the Muslim world was predictable and uninteresting.  The Eurocrats’ reaction, just as predictable, contained the alarming hint that a judicial annulment of the decision was desirable and probably inevitable.  French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the ban amounted to religious oppression and expressed hope that the Swiss would reverse the decision.  Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the result was a sign of prejudice and questioned why such a decision was put to a referendum in the first place.

Legal experts opposing the ban claim that the narrowly aimed language of the referendum question violated the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights, and Switzerland is party to both.  They place special hopes in Article 9 of the European Convention, which says, “Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs shall be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of public safety, for the protection of public order, health or morals, or the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.”  The first complaint to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg was filed by Algerian-born Hafid Ouardiri, the former spokesman for the Geneva mosque, who says he is acting on behalf of all Swiss who feel the way he does about the decision.

Ulrich Schlüer, the SVP deputy who led the ban campaign, points out that the European Court had recently ruled against permitting crucifixes in classrooms of Italian schools.  “It now appears that Christian towns are not supposed to use Christian symbols,” he said.  “But we are supposed to have Muslim symbols.”  The SVP insists that allowing the Strasbourg court to overturn the referendum result would breach the popular sovereignty that underpins Swiss democratic institutions and tradition.

The upholders of diversity, tolerance, etc., will not be impressed by “institutions” and “tradition.”  They want each European nation to adopt, or at least to accept, a vote of no confidence in itself.  They will probably succeed in having a panel of judges—recruited from the same stratum as themselves, and sharing the same pathologies—declare the Swiss vote illegal.  But that is not important.  What matters is that the gap between them and the people will continue to grow wider by the day, from Denmark to Italy, from Holland to Austria.  The underground dialogue on the true nature of Islam, and the threat it presents to Europe’s nations and societies, is the only dialogue there is.  It can no longer be stifled by judicial fiat, even if the Swiss vote is abrogated, and even if Geert Wilders is sent to jail after his forthcoming trial in Amsterdam.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s latest book is The Krajina Chronicle: A History of the Serbs in Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia.

Fisk Misses the Target

The great British journalist Robert Fisk wrote a few days ago: Why Avigdor Lieberman is the worst thing that could happen to the Middle East. Fisk is usually wonderful and knowledgeable, but now he was mistaken. He’s got carried away by Lieberman-bashing, this popular pastime of Left Zionists. Indeed you may condemn Lieberman and still be admitted by every Jewish and Zionist organisation – precisely because Lieberman (and other hardcore Jewish nationalists) is of little importance.

There is a worse thing that happens in the Middle East right now, and that is Ehud Barak, the Labour Party leader, as a Defence Minister in Netanyahu government. While a narrow right-wing government of Netanyahu and Lieberman would be a world pariah, isolated and hesitant, the same government with Ehud Barak at a top slot will be fully accepted by the international community. Now, overcoming objections, Barak had forced his decimated party to join the government coalition. He will stay as the Defence Minister, with disastrous consequences for the region.

Ehud Barak is the man who just a few months ago attacked Gaza; he is fully responsible for the atrocities committed there. While Avigdor Lieberman’s talk is certainly irresponsible and panders to the worst instincts of Israelis, his bark is considerably worse than his bite. Ehud Barak heaped scorn on Lieberman for never having actually shot anyone. He never squeezed a trigger in anger, quipped Barak, while he did.

Indeed, Barak, Livni and Netanyahu are united by their past: all three were (are?) professional assassins. Livni, as we had learned just before the Election Day, served in the Kidon, the Mossad assassination unit. She was a professional killer, and allegedly poisoned an Arab scientist at a Paris lunch. Barak made his name renown when he murdered an unarmed civilian, a Palestinian poet Kamal Nasir in Beirut. Netanyahu served in Sayeret Matkal, the Tsahal assassination unit.

Naturally Lieberman has to be more violent in his talk in order to compete with these murderers for public attention. But he still killed nobody. All his threats were just so much of hot air aimed for internal consumption.

You do not have to rely upon my opinion: the ex-chairman of Meretz, Mr Yossi Beilin revealed that the PNA strongman Mohammed Dahlan told him: “there are two people the Israeli peace camp doesn’t understand and is missing out on big time: Aryeh Deri and Avigdor Lieberman. These two could be the key to peace, but instead of drawing them closer, you are pushing them away.” Indeed, the Moroccans under Deri and the Russians under Lieberman could come to peace with Palestinians, if the ruling minority, white Ashkenazi old-timers’ elite would ever consider peace a real option. An important task for free media is to unmask the real obstacle to peace and to avoid falling into the trap of scapegoating an outsider, Lieberman.

Meanwhile, it is Barak (rather than Lieberman or Netanyahu) presents the great and immediate danger to the region. Clear-sighted Hebrew poet Yitzhak Laor reminded in Haaretz:

“It was only during Netanyahu’s term as prime minister that Israel did not embark on any operation of razing villages and towns, including killing civilians, like Operation Accountability (1993), Operation Grapes of Wrath (1996), the Second Lebanon War (2006) and Operation Cast Lead – all wars by center-left governments.

Benjamin Netanyahu is always reminded of one sin: opening the Western Wall Tunnel in 1996. On the other hand, he is never reminded that the violent confrontation did not deteriorate into a bloodbath …it did not become another operation that resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of people handicapped and a multitude of refugees.

Four years after the Western Wall Tunnel incident in the fall of 2000, Ehud Barak, the angel of peace who rose to power with the left’s overwhelming support in order to get rid of the “warmongering Netanyahu,” took advantage of Ariel Sharon’s provocation at the Temple Mount. Barak ordered the army to pull out one of its pre-prepared plans and suppress what turned into the second intifada.

The half a million rounds during the first months of the intifada, even before the suicide bombings started, were fired on orders of a government of the left. And the leftists – in the street, in academia and in the literary world – continued to support Barak and his war.”

Far from being a fascist, Lieberman carries out a secular-liberal agenda. Shahar Ilan of Haaretz advised the leftist Meretz to turn to “the secular public of the middle class, those for whom the separation of religion and state, religious coercion, the discrimination along bloodlines, and the Haredi extortion trouble it no less than the peace process… those who voted for Nir Barkat, those who conquered Jerusalem with a bang and swept away Haredi rule in the city… The list of the oppressed of Israeli society includes 300,000 who are not affiliated with any religion, cannot marry here and whose path to Judaism is blocked by the rabbinical establishment. It includes hundreds of thousands of couples who divorce and are forced to endure a humiliating process in the rabbinical courts.”

These people did not go to Meretz – they went to Lieberman and to his secular-liberal banner. This is not a value judgment: secularism can be cruel enough, as it was under Lenin and Ataturk. Nir Barkat, the new secular-liberal Mayor of Jerusalem, began his term by destroying Arab houses in Silwan. Another secular-liberal voice, Mr Nehemia Shtrasler of Haaretz, called the child allowances “anti-Zionist” as 40% of the funds went to the Arabs, and 60% to observant Jews.

Lieberman is rather a comic figure. His stunt of demanding that Palestinians swear loyalty to the Jewish state was lifted wholesale from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. “All the enlisted men and officers on combat duty had to sign a loyalty oath to get their map cases from the intelligence tent, a second loyalty oath to receive their flak suits and parachutes from the parachute tent, a third loyalty oath for the motor vehicle officer, to be allowed to ride from the squadron to the airfield in one of the trucks. Every time they turned around there was another loyalty oath to be signed. They signed a loyalty oath to get their pay from the finance officer, to obtain their PX supplies, to have their hair cut by the Italian barbers.” This proposal of Lieberman had no chance to succeed, bit it gave Lieberman a hefty share of publicity.

Why an experienced reporter Fisk made these mistakes of judgment? He had heard Lieberman refers to Chechnya as to a positive example, and understood it as a threat: “behave, or we shall do to you what the Russians did to Chechens”. Mistake again: the Palestinians would love to find themselves in the position of the Chechens.

The bloody and cruel Moscow’s campaign against Chechnya separatists should not obscure the advantages of the Chechens: they are citizens of Russia; they are free to move all over Russia and go abroad and come back. There are Chechens in many top spots in Russia, including the ex-Parliament Speaker. The majority of Palestinians has no citizenship of Israel and can’t move or work, or even travel abroad. Among others, Israel is preventing the director general of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, Shawan Jabarin, from travelling to the Netherlands to accept a prize. The Supreme Court confirmed the Shin Bet’s decision. The Chechens travel freely; Chechnya is not a Bantustan; the Chechens enjoy support of the West, as opposed to the Palestinians.

Fisk compares Lieberman with the Yugoslav Serb leaders. Again, a hollow comparison. Many accusations against the Yugoslav Serbs were debunked by marvelous Diana Johnstone, while the crimes committed in the Balkans by the British, German and American bombers became well known. Fisk calls Lieberman “a Russian nationalist”, but this shows only the eternal British suspicion of Russians.

Lieberman is not a dreamboat; but he is not an ogre as presented by the Israeli elites, and anyway he is of little importance. We should rather fear mainstream Israeli politicians, first of all Ehud Barak, who is likely to attack Iran in order to stay in power.

Bosnia, Hillary’s Playground

At a time when the U.S. power and authority are increasingly challenged around the world, the incoming team sees the Balkans as the last geopolitically significant area where they can assert their “credibility” by postulating a maximalist set of objectives as the only outcome acceptable to the United States, and duly insisting on their fulfillment. We have already seen this pattern with Kosovo, and it is to be expected that we’ll see its replay in Bosnia under the new team.

Hillary Clinton intends to place the Balkans, and specifically Bosnia, near the top of her list of foreign priorities. Barack Obama’s foreign policy and national security team includes a number of influential figures, and notably Vice-President-elect Joseph Biden, who are committed to the establishment of a centralized, unitary Bosnian state dominated by Muslims. Mrs. Clinton’s commitment to that goal is of an altogether different order of magnitude, however.

Her “framework for peace” in the Balkans is the same as her husband’s: unqualified support for Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo against their Christian neighbors. During the primaries Mrs. Clinton listed a number of fact-free, Balkan-related foreign-policy “accomplishments” based on her husband’s legacy. Among them she repeatedly invoked her “dangerous” trip to Bosnia in 1996, when she was supposedly threatened by Serb sniper fire – although the Bosnian war had ended six months earlier and video footage shows smiling schoolchildren greeting her in Tuzla. Her exact reasons for wanting to abolish the Bosnian Serb Republic are likely personal and psychological rather than rational, but her motives are less important than the fact that this is indeed what she wants.

There have been strong pressures from the West, ever since the signing of the Dayton Accords 13 years ago, to reduce the authority of the Republika Srpska, to question its legitimacy and to label it a “genocidal creation” unworthy of existence. Prime Minister Milorad Dodik was able to weather the latest storm – caused by the pro-Muslim slant of the “international high representative” (i.e. unelected governor, jointly appointed by Brussels and Washington) Miroslav Lajcak and his crew – but the political momentum in Washington has taken an alarming turn for the Serbs in general and for the Republika Srpska (RS) in particular.

A hint of what is to come was provided by the Clinton family confidante Richard Holbrooke, slated for a key role at State under new management. Together with the former Bosnian “high representative” Paddy Ashdown, he authored an alarming article, “The Bosnian Powder Keg,” published in several key daily newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic on 22 October 2008. Anticipating Obama’s victory, Holbrooke and Ashdown presented a plea that “the new US administration gets engaged” and renews its pledge “to Bosnia’s survival as a state, by maintaining an effective troop presence and … finding ways to untie Bosnia’s constitutional knot.” This last phrase is a clear code word for the liquidation of the entities.

Holbrooke was the chief U.S. negotiator at Dayton in 1995. He boasted a year later: “We are re-engaged in the world, and Bosnia was the test.” This “we” meant the United States, not “the West” or “the international community.” The interventionists prevailed then, their narrative dominates the public commentary now, and they are coming back to the White House tomorrow.

Heralding the new spirit, the New York Times headlined “Fears of new ethnic conflict in Bosnia” on December 13. Presented as an analytical feature, the article was in fact a pro-Muslim plea for more American intervention to “unify” Bosnia-Herzegovina as the only way to avoid another war. The article further claimed that “leaders across Bosnia expressed hope that Mr. Obama would be more engaged in Bosnia than President Bush has been,” whereas in reality such hopes are entertained only in the Muslim camp. Its clear purpose was to start preparing the political and ideological ground for the new Administration’s policy of “untying Bosnia’s constitutional knot.”

Hillary Clinton’s commitment to cutting that knot should not be doubted. It is fortunate, however, that there is little appetite in Europe for rekindling the Balkan powder keg. Several attempts by Washington to impose risky or even reckless strategies on its European partners have failed lately, most notably an attempt by the Bush administration. to put Ukraine and Georgia on fast track to NATO membership by offering them Membership Action Plans (MAPs).

Trusting Europeans to be reasonable is not enough. A long-overdue proactive PR and diplomatic strategy by the RS authorities is urgently needed. Prime Minister Dodik should act to improve the flow of information to the RS authorities that warrant a response, especially the challenges to its status and legitimacy. It is, indeed, absurd for the United States to wage a “war on terror” and at the same time to return to Bosnia Algerian-born militants released from Guantanamo.

In addition, the government in Banja Luka needs to take an active interest in the ongoing as well as forthcoming cases at The Hague Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), and specifically to help with their funding. It is clear that unfavorable outcome of those cases – especially the ones including charges of “genocide” – would be eagerly used by the enemies of the RS to renew calls for abrogating Dayton.

Every time people like Ashdown and Hollbrooke regurgitate the old mantra about disruptive Serbs and virtuous “Bosniaks,” it is necessary to reassert that the RS is an essential factor of stability in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Western Balkan region, and that those calling for its liquidation (under whatever name) are effectively aiding and abetting the forces of global jihad.

All along, an old question remains unanswered by the unitary Bosnia partisans: If Yugoslavia was untenable and eventually collapsed under the weight of the supposedly insurmountable differences among its constituent nations, how can Bosnia – the Yugoslav microcosm par excellence – develop and sustain the dynamics of a viable polity? Mrs. Clinton may go on supposing ex hypothesi that if there is a “Bosnia” there must be a nation of “Bosnians,” and she may even try to impose her vision on that long-suffering corner of the Balkans. That she will fail goes without saying. The only question concerns the price of that failure, and the identity of those footing the bill.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Dr. Trifkovic is Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute, and Director of the Institute’s Center for International Affairs. He has a BA (Hon) in international relations from the University of Sussex (UK), a BA in political science from the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and a PhD in history from the University of Southampton (UK).
www.trifkovic.mysite.com

U.S. Foreign Policy: Grim Continuity Guaranteed

Barack Obama’s selection of Joseph Biden as his Vice President, Hillary Clinton’s appointment to State, Robert Gates’ retention at the Pentagon, and the selection of General James Jones as head of the National Security Council point to the President-elect’s willful blindness to the collapsing economic foundation of the American hyperpower. His key appointees all share a vision – a grand strategy of sorts – that guarantees an unwelcome continuity of this country’s foreign and security policies in the next four years.

That vision is deeply flawed. What America needs is a new grand strategy. Limited in objectives and indirect in approach, it should seek security and freedom for the United States in a stable model of global co-existence that does not threaten the securi noted recently,

in the case of foreign policy, the American people and the world should get the “change” they were promised because the foreign policy challenges are not unprecedented. The problems are known. What works is known. And it is not the policy of the Clinton administration hawks… The new Obama team seems caught up in the facile calls for force: Vice President-elect is proud of demanding force in Bosnia, Kosovo and Darfur. supported the . The candidate for UN ambassador, Susan Rice, is an outspoken hawk.

If the Obama administration was serious about the rhetoric of “change” in world affairs, it could start by withdrawing all U.S. troops from Europe and the Far East in the next four years. Some 150,000 American soldiers who are still based in Germany, South Korea, and Japan are not needed, and their continued presence is a hindrance to greater stability in both regions.

The threat to Europe’s security does not come from Russia or from a fresh bout of instability in the Balkans. The real threat to Europe’s security and to her survival comes from Islam, from the deluge of utterly unassimilable Third World immigrants, and from collapsing birthrates. All three are caused entirely by the moral decrepitude and cultural degeneracy of “Old Europe,” not by any shortage of soldiers and weaponry. The continued presence of a U.S. contingent of any size in Ramstein or Naples can do nothing to alleviate these problems, because they are largely spiritual.

As it happens, none of Obama’s national security quartet are committed to a withdrawal. The key figure on this issue, former and future Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, has frozen plans for any further reducing U.S. forces in Europe. In November of last year, when the issue last came up for review, he decided to maitain 40,000 U.S. soldiers in Germany and Italy – twice as many as had been planned for retention by his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld under a drawdown that began in 2005.

This is unfortunate. A speedy withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe facilitates the emergence of an effective European defense force (long advocated by France), and if it causes the weakening and eventual demise of NATO, both Europe and America will be better off. Instead of declaring victory and disbanding the alliance in the early 1990’s, the Clinton administration successfully redesigned it as a mechanism for openended out-of-area interventions at a time when every rationale for its existence had disappeared. Following the air war against Serbia almost a decade ago, NATO’s area of operations became unlimited, and its “mandate” entirely self-generated.

Unfortunately, Biden, Clinton, Gates and Jones are all NATO-for-ever enthusiasts. They refuse to acknowledge that, in terms of a realist grand strategy, NATO has become positively detrimental to U.S. security. As it expands eastwards, it forces the United States to assume at least nominal responsibility for open-ended maintenance of a host of disputed frontiers that were drawn often arbitrarily by communists, Versailles diplomats, and assorted local tyrants—and which bear little relation to ethnicity, geography, or history. America should not underwrite the freezing in time of a post-Soviet outcome in the Crimea or Abkhazia that is neither stable nor necessarily “just” or “democratic.” With an ever-expanding NATO, eventual adjustments will be more potentially violent for the countries concerned and more risky for the United States, which does not and should not have a vested interest in preserving an indefinite status quo in the region.

In the Middle East, a realist strategy would give up on trying to make the region “as it should be,” rather than dealing with it as it is. Iraq, in particular, forces us to accept the anarchic nature of the world. She is not ripe for any democratic transition, she can be managed for as long as her realities are accepted, and she needs to be left to her own devices. Her Islamic cultural and spiritual heritage precludes her adoption of a political system based on the notion of popular sovereignty.

A realist global strategy demands safeguarding our primary interests in the Middle East, which means preserving our continued access to oil resources, preventing regional actors from acquiring weapons of mass destruction, and countering the terrorist threat that emanates from the region. Ameliorating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a secondary interest. As for opening the region to trade, encouraging more pluralist forms of governance, promoting the rule of law, etc.—these may be worthy objectives, but they are none of our concern. Try explaining that to VP Biden or Mrs. Clinton.

The development of a coherent anti-jihadist strategy in Washington should go hand in hand with demystifying the relationship between the United States and Israel, which should be redefined in terms of mutual interests. Our interest demands the destruction of global jihad in all its forms and the continued existence of the state of Israel, but both of these imperatives are based on geopolitical rather than emotional, moral, or scriptural grounds.

In the Far East, the threat to South Korea’s and Japan’s security is potentially more real, but it can and should be handled by those two very capable and affluent nations. A continued U.S. defense shield over them is unjustified. The dangers of our continued military presence vastly exceed any possible benefits. Japan and South Korea should finally become mature, self-reliant powers. For decades, they chose to focus on economic development at the expense of military strength, secure in the protection provided by the United States. Only by removing her tripwire can America finally force them to upgrade their militaries and to assume the full economic and political burden of their own defense. A policy of disengagement may include a green light to both to develop limited nuclear capabilities as a deterrent to North Korea’s and China’s arsenals.

The challenge that the rise of China presents to the United States is more pressing than any other global issue except for the ever-present threat of jihad. Beijing is rapidly becoming a regional power of the first order, the Asian superpower that will need to be contained or appeased. Presently, the bone of contention is the status of Taiwan. Many Taiwanese would prefer to sever all links with the mainland so that Taiwan can become an independent state. Beijing says that it will not allow that to happen. To condone Taiwan’s separation would be tantamount to accepting the status of a second-class power, with serious implications for the future status of Tibet and for the restive Muslim-populated Sinkiang-Uighur province in the far west of the country.

China is an ancient power, coldly hostile to outsiders, steeped in Realpolitik, and indifferent to the notion that diplomacy is or should be guided by any motive other than self-interest. Her neighbors will be hard pressed to negotiate the terms and conditions of an acceptable relationship with Beijing that fall short of China’s outright hegemony. To keep her ambitions in check, it is necessary to halt further American investment in the Chinese economy, to reverse the outsourcing that has thus far obtained, and to erect trade barriers against the continuing deluge of Chinese-made products in American stores. It is also necessary to provide Taiwan—in addition to Japan and South Korea—with top-notch defensive arsenals, including nuclear weapons.

The alternative is to accept, with the best possible grace, the rise of China as a first-order power. A reigning power is naturally disinclined to look on benignly as another rises, but the fact remains that a conflict between America and China is not inevitable. The relationship will need to be managed skillfully—with more reciprocity in the field of trade and exchange rates—but its essential ingredient will be our acceptance of Taiwan as part of China. Taiwan will be eventually reintegrated (preferably with all kinds of safeguards and special-status provisions), and it is in the American interest to facilitate peaceful reunification.

The geopolitical equation of containing and confronting China in northeastern Asia and jihad everywhere else would also demand better relations with India and Russia. India is China’s sole natural rival in Asia and a neglected ally in the “War on Terror,” but no strategic relationship can be effected so long as Pakistan continues to be perceived in Washington—mistakenly—as an essential regional ally. Islamabad is guilty of nuclear proliferation as well as aiding and abetting Islamic terrorism of the kind that hit Bombay a month ago.

Improving our relations with Russia, by accepting the legitimacy of her strategic interests in the former Soviet Union, is even more pressing. It is critically important for us to prevent the emergence of an alliance between other powers that would be directed against our interests. The ongoing improvement in Russo-Chinese relations does not have the character of a formal alliance as yet, but it may lay the groundwork for one, so long as the September 2002 Bush Doctrine remains in force.

Most of our disputes with Russia over the past two decades, including the crisis in Georgia last August, tensions over the missile-defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic and over pipelines bypassing Russia, constant demands for NATO expansion, designs in Central Asia, and support for Kosovo’s independence have resulted from our refusal to accept the validity of any Russian claims and the legitimacy of any Russian interests. This will not change under Obama’s “new” team.

The rest of the world, in a new grand strategy, should be left to its own devices. In Latin America benign neglect invariably produces better results than “engagement.” As for Africa, the entire continent is irrelevant to our geostrategic, economic, or any other rationally definable interest. Both regions are neither assets nor threats, provided that the tens of millions of would-be migrants to the Western world are held in check.

Strategy is the art of winning wars, and grand strategy is the philosophy of maintaining an acceptable peace. America is good at the former and often confused on the latter. Making the world safe for democracy (Wilson 1917) or fighting freedom’s fight ordained by history (Bush 2002) may be dismissed as tasteless yet harmless rhetoric as long as there is a viable realist design in the background. No such design exists, however, among Obama’s key foreign policy and national security appointees. The new team in the White House is unlikely to grasp that a problem exists, let alone to act to rectify it. Exceptionalist hubris has been internalized at both ends of the duopoly to such an extent that no change appears possible.

A new grand strategy demands disengagement abroad and closing the migratory floodgates at home. For this to happen, it is necessary to break the power of the neoliberal-neoconservative regime in Washington. We cannot predict when or how this will happen, but happen it will. A polity based on an evil lie may last years (the Third Reich), or decades (the Soviet Union), or even centuries (the Ottoman Empire), but it can never smother the seeds of its own destruction.

The notion of America as a real, completed nation, a state with definable national interests that ought to be the foundation of its diplomacy, is as valid today as it was at the time of George Washington’s famous warning. Exceptionalist claims and millenarian utopias are as contrary to this country’s traditions and true interests today as they were in April 1861, April 1917, or December 1941. It is unfortunate that this truth will be rediscovered only after a lot more blood and treasure is wasted in pursuit of unlimited, unattainable objectives.

With Joseph Biden, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and James Jonesin charge, there will be no true debate in Washington on the ends and uses of American power. The ideologues’ resistance to any external checks and balances on the exercise of that power will be upheld. Obama’s new team and Bush’s outgoing one may differ in some shades of rhetoric, but they are one regime, identical in substance and consequence. Its leading lights will go on disputing the validity of the emerging balance-of-power system because they reject the legitimacy of any power in the world other than that of the United States, controlled and exercised by themselves. They will scoff at the warning of 1815, 1918, or 1945 as inapplicable in the post-history that they seek to construct.

They will confront the argument that no vital American interest worthy of risking a major war is involved in Russia’s or China’s near-abroad with the claim that the whole world is America’s near-abroad.

It is vexing that the new team is taking over at a particularly dangerous period in world affairs: the return of asymmetrical multipolarity. Following a brief period of post-1991 full-spectrum dominance, for the first time after the Cold War the government of the United States is facing active resistance from one or more major powers. More important than the anatomy of the South Ossetian crisis last August, or the Taiwanese crisis three years from now, is the reactive powers’ refusal to accept the validity of Washington’s ideological assumptions or the legitimacy of its resulting geopolitical claims. At the same time, far from critically reconsidering the Bushies’ hegemonsitic assumptions and claims, the key decision-makers in the Obama Administration will continue to uphold them.

Their ambition, unlimited in principle, will remain unaffected by the ongoing financial crisis, just as Moscow’s Cold War expansionism was enhanced, rather than curtailed, by the evident shortcomings of the Soviet centrally planned economy. Come what may, they will not allow the reality of global politics to interfere with their world outlook, “neoliberal” or “neoconservative,” but hegemonic and irrational at all times.

Dr. Srdja Trifkovic is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Dr. Trifkovic is Foreign Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, published by The Rockford Institute, and Director of the Institute’s Center for International Affairs. He has a BA (Hon) in international relations from the University of Sussex (UK), a BA in political science from the University of Zagreb (Croatia), and a PhD in history from the University of Southampton (UK).
www.trifkovic.mysite.com

Role of Alleged CIA Asset in Mumbai Attacks Being Downplayed

The role in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month of an underworld kingpin that heads an organization known as D-Company, has known ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and who is alleged to have ties with the CIA is apparently being whitewashed, suggesting that his capture and handover to India might prove inconvenient for either the ISI or the CIA, or both.

It was Dawood Ibrahim who was initially characterized by press reports as being the mastermind behind the attacks. Now, that title of “mastermind” is being given to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi by numerous media accounts reporting that Pakistan security forces have raided a training camp of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which evidence has indicated was behind the attacks. Lakhvi was reportedly captured in the raid and is now in custody.

At the same time Ibrahim’s role is being downplayed, Lakhvi’s known role is being exaggerated. Initial reports described him as the training specialist for LeT, but the major media outlets like the New York Times and the London Times, citing government sources, have since promoted his status to that of commander of operations for the group.

The only terrorist from the Mumbai attacks to be captured alive, Azam Amir Kasab, characterized Ibrahim, not Lakhvi, as the mastermind of those attacks, according to earlier press accounts.

Kasab reportedly told his interrogators that he and his fellow terrorists were trained under Lakhvi, also known as “Chacha”, at a camp in Pakistan. Indian officials also traced calls from a satellite phone used by the terrorists to Lakhvi.

But the phone had also been used to call Yusuf Muzammil, also known as Abu Yusuf, Abu Hurrera, and “Yahah”. And it has been Muzammil, not Lakhvi, who has previously been described as the military commander of LeT. It was an intercepted call to Muzammil on November 18 that put the Indian Navy and Coast Guard on high alert to be on the lookout for any foreign vessels from Pakistan entering Indian waters.

Kasab told his interrogators that his team had set out from Karachi, Pakistan, on a ship belonging to Dawood Ibrahim, the MV Alpha. They then hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, to pass through Indian territorial waters to elude the Navy and Coast Guard that were boarding and searching suspect ships.

Although the MV Alpha was subsequently found and seized by the Indian Navy, there have been few, if any, developments about this aspect of the investigation in press accounts, such as whether it has been confirmed or not that the ship was owned by Ibrahim.

Upon arriving off the coast near the city, they were received by inflatable rubber dinghies that had been arranged by an associate of Ibrahim’s in Mumbai.

The planning and execution of the attacks are indicative of the mastermind role not of either Lakhvi or Muzammil, but of Ibrahim, an Indian who is intimately familiar with the city. It was in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) that Ibrahim rose through the ranks of the underworld to become a major organized crime boss.

At least two other Indians were also connected to the attacks, Mukhtar Ahmed and Tausef Rahman. They were arrested for their role in obtaining SIM cards used in the cell phones of the terrorists. Ahmed, according to Indian officials, had in fact been recruited by a special counter-insurgency police task force as an undercover operative. His exact role is still being investigated.

One of the SIM cards used was possibly purchased from New Jersey. Investigators are looking into this potential link to the US, as well.

Dawood Ibrahim went from underworld kingpin to terrorist in 1993, when he was connected to a series of bombings in Bombay that resulted in 250 deaths. He is wanted by Interpol and was designated by the US as a global terrorist in 2003.

It’s believed Ibrahim has been residing in Karachi, and Indian officials have accused Pakistan’s ISI of protecting him.

Ibrahim is known to be a major drug trafficker responsible for shipping narcotics into the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), most Afghan opium (or its derivative, heroin, which is increasingly being produced in the country before export) is smuggled through Iran and Turkey en route by land to Europe; but the percentage that goes to Pakistan seems to mostly find its way directly to the UK, either by plane or by ship.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of opium, a trend that developed during the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort to oust the Soviet Union from the country, with the drug trade serving to help finance the war.

The principle recipient of CIA-ISI funding was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, one of the major drug lords. Hekmatyar has since joined with the Taliban in the insurgency effort to expel foreign forces from the country – not the Soviet Union, this time, but the US.

A Taliban ban on the cultivation of opium poppies in 2000 resulted in the near total eradication of the crop. But since the US overthrow of the regime in 2001, Afghanistan has once again become the world’s leading producer of opium, surpassing all previous records.

While Hekmatyar chose to side with anti-government forces, a number of other warlords involved in the drug trade were members of the Northern Alliance to whom the CIA doled out cash in the US effort to overthrow the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks.

One such warlord is Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was appointed Chief of Staff of the army under the government of Hamid Karzai, and who has been described in US intelligence’s own files as a “Tier One Warlord”.

That list includes a number of other high ranking officials within the Afghanistan government, including former defense minister and parliament member Marshal Mohammad Fahim, Interior Minister for Counter-Narcotics General Mohammad Daoud, and former governor of Helmand province (now by far the largest producer of opium) Sher Mohammed Akhundzada.

Although government officials parroted by the mainstream media tend to characterize the Afghan opium trade as being controlled by the Taliban, in fact the estimated drug profits of all anti-government elements (AGEs) is a mere fraction of the trade’s total estimated export value. The UNODC estimated the export value this year at $3.4 billion. Of that, AGEs profited between $250-470 million, less than 14% of the total trade. Moreover, what fraction of that percentage has gone specifically to the Taliban as opposed to other AGEs is unknown.

Furthermore, while the Taliban profits from the production of opium through ushr, a 10% tax on all agricultural products, and possibly through a protection racket in which it receives compensation for providing security along smuggling routes, the UNODC has acknowledged that there is little indication that the Taliban itself is responsible for either the actual production or trafficking of the drug.

This is an inconvenient truth for the US, which has so far managed through its propaganda efforts to successfully obfuscate the truth about the Afghan drug trade and portray the Taliban as being almost wholly responsible.

A known drug trafficker, Dawood Ibrahim is naturally also involved in money laundering, which is perhaps where the role of gambling operations in Nepal comes into the picture.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, wrote last month after the Mumbai attacks that Ibrahim had worked with the US to help finance the mujahedeen during the 1980s and that because he knows too much about the US’s “darker secrets” in the region, he could never be allowed to be turned over to India.

The recent promotion of Lakhvi to “mastermind” of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen similarly reported that according to intelligence sources, Dawood Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu, Nepal. A deal had been made earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to India, but the CIA was fearful that this would lead to too many of its dirty secrets coming to light, including the criminal activities of high level personnel within the agency.

One theory on the Mumbai attacks is that it was backlash for this double-cross that was among other things intended to serve as a warning that any such arrangement could have further serious consequences.

Although designated as a major international terrorist by the US, media reports in India have characterized the US’s past interest in seeing Ibrahim handed over as less than enthusiastic. Former Indian Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani wrote in his memoir, “My Country My Life”, that he made a great effort to get Pakistan to hand over Ibrahim, and met with then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State) to pressure Pakistan to do so. But he was informed by Powell that Pakistan would hand over Ibrahim only “with some strings attached” and that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would need more time before doing so.

The handover, needless to say, never occurred. The Pakistan government has also publicly denied that Ibrahim is even in the country; a denial that was repeated following the recent Mumbai attacks.

Others suspected of involvement in the attacks and named among the 20 individuals India wants Pakistan to turn over also have possible connections to the CIA, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of LeT, and Maulana Masood Azhar, both veterans of the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort.

Azhar had been captured in 1994 and imprisoned in India for his role as leader of the Pakistani-based terrorist group Karkut-ul-Mujahideen. He was released, however, in 1999 in exchange for hostages from the takeover of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was hijacked during its flight from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India and redirected to Afghanistan. After Azhar’s release, he formed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which was responsible for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that led Pakistan and India to the brink of war. LeT was also blamed for the attack alongside JeM.

Both LeT and JeM have links to the ISI, which has used the groups as proxies in the conflict with India over the territory of Kashmir.

Hafiz Saeed travelled to Peshawar to join the mujahedeen cause during the Soviet-Afghan war. Peshawar served as the base of operations for the CIA, which worked closely with the ISI to finance, arm, and train the mujahedeen. It was in Peshawar that Saeed became the protégé of Abdullah Azzam, who founded an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) along with a Saudi individual named Osama bin Laden.

MAK worked alongside the CIA-ISI operations to recruit Arabs to the ranks of the mujahedeen. The ISI, acting as proxy for the CIA, chose mainly to channel its support to Afghans, such as Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The U.S. claims the CIA had no relationship with MAK, but bin Laden’s operation, which later evolved into “al-Qaeda”, must certainly have been known to, and approved by, the CIA.

But there are indications that the CIA’s relationship with MAK and al-Qaeda go well beyond having shared a common enemy and mutual interests in the Soviet-Afghan war. A number of al-Qaeda associates appear to have been protected individuals.

Branches of MAK existed elsewhere, including in the United States. The US Treasury Department lists one of MAK’s aliases as Al-Kifah. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, served as a recruitment center during the 1980s, but its operations did not end after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Kifah was also a recruitment center for efforts by extremist groups in the Balkans.

Just as in Afghanistan, the US also had mutual interests with Bosnian Muslims and extremist groups acting in the Balkans. MAK had since evolved into al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, which had links to groups operating in Bosnia. Despite an arms embargo against such groups, they managed to obtain weapons and supply shipments in which the US at best looked the other way and at worst played an active role.

The operations to arm al-Qaeda linked groups in Bosnia were carried under the watch of then director of the US European Command Intelligence Directorate Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Hayden subsequently served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and is currently the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, which is the head of the CIA.

A former official at the US consular office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Michael Springman went public after 9/11 to explain how his office was used by the CIA to bring recruits to the US for training during the 1980s.

The Jeddah office is where most of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas to enter the US.

Two other of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were in fact known to the CIA and were being monitored. Despite being known al-Qaeda operatives, they were allowed to enter the US under their real names and neither the FBI nor the State Department were notified.

The US explains this as the result of the CIA losing the terrorists’ trail when they travelled to Thailand after an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. But this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny since it was known that they had obtained visas to enter the US. Thus, even if the CIA did in fact lose track of the terrorists, standard procedure should have dictated that the FBI and State Department be alerted.

The 9/11 Joint Inquiry and subsequent 9/11 Commission were apparently satisfied with the CIA’s explanation that it lost al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, and nobody was ever held accountable for the “mistake” of knowingly allowing two known al-Qaeda operatives on the terrorist watchlist to enter the United States unhindered.

Upon arriving in the US, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were assisted by an individual under FBI surveillance for his possible connections to terrorist groups and, furthermore, even lived in a house rented from an FBI informant. But the FBI claims that it didn’t know anything about the men, despite them using their real names and being listed in the phone book, because the CIA hadn’t informed them the two were in the country. The Joint Inquiry report described this as perhaps the single greatest missed opportunity to break up the 9/11 operation and prevent the attacks.

Additionally, it was in fact the CIA who not once, but at least on six separate occasions, approved a visa, including from the office in Jeddah, for or the entry of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh”, into the US, despite his known connection to terrorist acts in Egypt, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and despite having been on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist. This, too, was described as a series of “mistakes” after the government was forced to admit that it had occurred – an explanation that the New York Times, which reported this information in a series of articles, seemed to find perfectly satisfactory.

Many, however, find such incompetency and coincidence theories to be simply not credible, preferring instead alternative, oftentimes much more plausible, conspiracy theories.

The Blind Sheikh had also travelled to Peshawar during the mujahedeen effort, and was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s top asset during the Soviet-Afghan war. He later became the spiritual head of the terrorist group that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a plot which the FBI had known about in advance through two or more informants.

One of the informants served as a bodyguard for the Blind Sheikh and was made responsible for obtaining materials to make the bomb with. Tape recordings he secretly made of conversations with his FBI handlers reveal that the original sting operation involved a plan to replace a chemical used in making the bomb with an inert simulant that would render it inoperative. But this plan was withdrawn by a supervisor at the FBI and the terrorist cell was allowed to go ahead and make a real bomb – which was then used to blow up the World Trade Center.

Another notable character connected to Al-Kifah training and recruitment efforts for al-Qaeda is Ali Mohammed. He also happened to be an in FBI informant, a CIA asset, and a member of the special forces in the US Army. It is Ali Mohammed whom some suspect of actually being the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing. He was later charged in connection to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but has since seemingly disappeared off the map.

After the 9/11 attacks, the investigation into the financing of the attacks led to Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin. According to Indian officials, a joint investigation with the FBI revealed evidence that it was at the direction of the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, that Omar Sheikh transferred $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Florida.

Omar Sheikh, a known associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured and imprisoned in India for his role in the kidnapping of American and British nationals in 1994. He was released in 1999 along with Maulana Massod Azhar in exchange for the hostages from Flight 814. According to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, Omar Sheikh was also an agent of Britain’s spy agency, MI6, for whom he served in operations in the Balkans.

Omar Sheikh’s role in the 9/11 attacks has also been downplayed. Mention of him in the media instead focus on his role as the man responsible for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He is currently being held in Pakistan on charges relating to Pearl’s murder.

After Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks became known publicly, Musharraf quietly replaced him and the whole affair was hushed up in the US. When a reporter from a foreign news agency asked then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice whether she was aware of the reports that the ISI chief had financed the hijackers and was in Washington meeting with high level officials at the time of the attacks, she denied having seen “that report” and protested that, “he was certainly not meeting with me.”

Interestingly, the White House website transcript of the press briefing censored the words “ISI chief” from the reporter’s question, despite the words clearly being audible in the video of the briefing.

The 9/11 Commission also acted to whitewash Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the attacks. Despite the question of the ISI chief’s involvement being included on a list of items for the Commission to investigate from families of the victims of the attacks, the Commission’s report made no mention of it, either to confirm or deny the information, which, despite having received zero coverage in the US major media (with the one exception of a citation of a report from the Times of India in a blog on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website), was widely reported internationally (as well as in US alternative media).

Rather, the 9/11 Commission simply acted as though such reports didn’t exist. Despite Bob Graham, one of the chairs of the earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry, publicly stating that he was surprised by the evidence of foreign government involvement (he added that this information would not be made public for another twenty or thirty years when it would be due for release to the national archives), the 9/11 Commission report arrived at the opposite conclusion, saying there was no evidence of any such involvement and, moreover, that the question of who financed the attacks was “of little practical significance”.

Another former head of the ISI is now being privately accused by the US of involvement with the group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, according to reports citing a document listing former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and four other former heads of Pakistan’s intelligence agency as being involved in supporting terrorist networks. The individuals named have been recommended to the UN Security Council to be named as international terrorists, according to Pakistan’s The News.

The document has been provided to the Pakistan government and also accuses Gul, who was head of the ISI from 1987-1989, of providing assistance to criminal groups in Kabul, as well as to groups responsible for recruiting and training militants to attack US-led forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban.

Hamid Gul responded to the reports by calling the allegations hilarious. The US denied that it had made any such recommendations to the UN.

But the US has similarly accused the ISI of involvement in the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul last July. This was unusual not because of the allegation of an ISI connection to terrorism but because it was in such stark contrast with US attempts to publicly portray Pakistan as a staunch ally in its “war on terrorism” when the country was under the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf.

The US attitude toward Pakistan shifted once an elected government came to power that has been more willing to side with the overwhelming belief among the public that it is the “war on terrorism” itself that has exacerbated the problem of extremist militant groups and led to further terrorist attacks within the country, such as the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last year or the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in September. While the world’s attention has been focused on the attacks in Mumbai, a bomb blast in Peshawar last week killed 21 and injured 90.

While the purported US document names Gul and others as terrorist supporters, another report, from Indian intelligence, indicates that the terrorists who carried out the attacks in Mumbai were among 500 trained by instructors from the Pakistan military, according to the Sunday edition of The Times. This training of the 10 known Mumbai terrorists would have taken place prior to their recent preparation for these specific attacks by the LeT training specialist Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny.

Jeremy R. Hammond is a regular columnist for Novakeo.com

Jeremy R. Hammond is the editor of Foreign Policy Journal (www.foreignpolicyjournal.com), a website providing news, analysis, and opinion commentary from outside the standard framework offered by government officials and the mainstream corporate media. His articles have also been featured in numerous other online publications. He can be reached at:

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