JK Alternative Viewpoint

What is the nature of the ongoing struggle in Egypt and where is it today? Egyptian socialist Tamer Wageeh provides some answers
Traditional democratic transition literature tends to propose a transition formula that is based on procedural aspects like free and fair elections, political party pluralism, presence of a transitional justice system, etc.

However, although criticisms of this Schumpetric approach (in reference to the Austrian economist and political scientist Joseph Schumpeter) have multiplied in recent decades – to such an extent that many researchers considered the use of “fair elections” as a criterion for democratisation a logical fallacy – ignoring the substantive socio-economic dimension of democratization remained a basic characteristic of the democratic transition literature.
The matter becomes even more complex when democratic transition is spurred by a revolution, as is the case in Egypt.

By their very nature, revolutions revitalize social groups and allow them to breathe new, though I will not say it is necessarily fresh, air which puts the subaltern classes in the position of history-makers after being its objects for many long decades. This practically defies the theories of political engineering from above, and all what is associated to it, including all “transition” roadmaps, no matter how perfectly drawn or logical they are.

For example, Dr. Mohammad Al-Baradei might be entirely convinced that the “original sin” was disregarding his advice to put the “constitution first” as the key to a roadmap that ensures a safe and smooth democratic transition. However, I believe that those who follow the Egyptian revolution closely will agree that regardless of the procedural order the transition could have followed, it would have been impossible to avoid the fierce struggle among the different social classes and political forces that the revolution has unleashed after the old regime’s downfall. This means that it is useless to restrict one’s thoughts to the issue of right and wrong procedures without examining the nature of the ongoing fundamental struggle, and how to ensure that the democratic forces will ultimately triumph.

What is the nature of the ongoing struggle in Egypt? And where is it today?
We could perhaps say briefly that the current struggle is essentially between revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces. However, this begs the question as to who are these revolutionary and counter-revolutionary forces? I think that any rigid definition or prejudgment of these two terms will not do us any good here, since any accurate definition of a revolution and counter-revolution should be necessarily be based on a historical review of the changes in the concerned parties’ positions and loyalties, based on their respective social interests and political heritage accumulated over their long or short history.

The importance of a historical – as opposed to a static – review of the revolution’s path and its protagonists’ positions lies in the fact that it avoids classifying the concerned partiesunder predetermined categories. What it does instead is explain how their positions have changed or been revealed as the conflict between the main stakeholders has developed and deepened. It avoids, for example, levelling accusations at the Muslim Brotherhood of conspiring against the revolution from the very beginning, or describing Mohammad El Baradei and Hamdeen Sabbahi as pure revolutionaries whose loyalty to the revolution never wavered over the past two years. Each of these two parties has been part of a process that has put them, as it gradually deepened, face to face with the challenge of escalating structural changes that touched or conflicted with their interests and they, in response, has either contributed to them, wavered towards them, or clashed with them.

Through the fog of transition
Any revolutionary process, especially in its deeper forms like the case of Egypt, has two aspects. The first is unleashing the power of the submissive and repressed social classes from below. As indicated above, the revolution has been a gift to the downtrodden: a kind of rebaptism of them as active historical players. This does not necessarily mean that these classes have suddenly acquired a fully-fledged revolutionary consciousness or that they have smoothly become part of organizations that are capable of recruitment and mobilisation. What it means, instead, is that the historical era in which a particular political elite or class single-handedly decided, behind closed doors, in which direction society should go and how, has ended and given way to another era in which the collective will of the masses plays a role in shaping the present and the future.

This is not all, however. A revolution also involves a fundamental change on the part of the ruling regime, since all the ruling mechanisms nurtured by the dominating elite over the decades either stop functioning or become incapacitated. This dysfunctioning is more the explosion point of an accumulating process rather than an ahistorical rupture. In other words, the revolution is the final coup de grace for institutions that have long outlived their usefulness, just like Prophet Solomon’s stick that was gnawed-on by ants until it collapsed and revealed that he had actually died many years earlier.

In the context of this dual qualitative change – liberating the power and activism of the downtrodden and the collapse of the autocrats’ coercive mechanisms – the socio-political conflict, for long concealed from view, continues on new grounds. Here, positions are not rigidly or finally determined.

That is because in addition to all the hesitation and lack of experience that the revolution necessarily surprises us with, there are scores of convergences and turning points that the daily changing circumstances impose on the stakeholders.

In general, what has become clear with time, and through the thick fog of transition, is that while some want the revolution to continue, deepen and assume new dimensions that will ultimately tear-down the entire political, economic and social infrastructure, others are working hard to put an end to the revolution using a variety of means. Chief among these means is using the bourgeois democratic process as a means to an end; as a new situation brought about by the collapse of the old autocratic mechanisms which they use to paralyse the street and steer energies towards competition from above among forces that mostly belong to the interests of old world.

This explains why all the competing forces that seek to curb the revolution insist that the ideal world they envisage for Egypt is one in which the citizens need no longer to resort to collective action from below – strikes, demonstrations and direct actions like blocking roads and occupying institutions – but should only express themselves through the magical ballot box.

Democratic wedding
In the first days following the deposed president’s stepping down, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) – representative of the old regime’s repressive mechanisms which succeeded in escaping the revolutionary storm in the early stages – agreed with the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, with astonishing speed and smoothness, to quickly introduce limited constitutional amendments – mainly pertaining to the election of a new authority and drafting a new constitution – designed to bring the “transitional period” to an end within six months.

As it became clear later, the agreement’s intention was not essentially to end the transitional period, but rather to liquidate the revolution. These parties’ main interest was not to hand power over to the people, but to stop the fearsome monster of the street revolutionary momentum, as was revealed by their mantra: “the wheels of production need to start turning, and the ‘rightful revolutionary’ needs ‘to calm down’.”

Therefore, what these “warring brothers” had in fact agreed on was to oppose the revolution from below and to opt for procedural democracy from above. In other words, their aim was turn the rebellious masses into voters whose will can only be achieved through the ballot box, manifested in the form of elected parliaments dominated by powerful forces that have the funds, organisation and ideology to curb the revolutionary march.

The issue is not that there was a fundamental contradiction, necessarily and in all cases, between dynamic activism from below and ballot box democracy. Rather, the case was that at that particular revolutionary moment the ballot box represented another option – an opposing/alternative option – to the revolutionary upheaval whose role, believed the Brotherhood and the SCAF, had ended on February 11, 2011.

Thus, the March 19, 2011 referendum, touted by the reactionary forces as a “democratic wedding”, was held because the hegemonic forces believed it would bring, once and for all, an end to the trouble from below and restore to the state its lost prestige and role.

However, the surprise was that the revolutionary momentum revealed itself much too deep to be curbed by the referendum that granted the authoritarian alliance electoral legitimacy. And hence we witnessed in 2011 an un precedented wave of labour strikes and million-man marches that called, among other demands, for retribution, real democracy and social justice.

Also in 2011, we witnessed the famous July sit-in in Tahrir Square and the events of Mohammad Mahmoud Street that called on SCAF to hand power over to an elected civilian government.

Mohammad Mahmoud Street
The events of Mohammad Mahmoud have their own particular importance here, not only because they revealed – once again – the vitality of the revolutionary street, but also because – and of equal importance – they unmasked the fragility of the new authoritarian alliance between the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis and the military junta.

We said above that the agreement among members of the authoritarian alliance centred round ending the revolutionary process from below and launching a new political – electoral path that would pull the carpet from under the feet of the socio-political forces working to dismantle the dysfunctional old hierarchical arrangements that infiltrated every aspect of the country’s social life. However, this agreement among the authoritarian forces to absorb the revolutionary process and counter it from above was only one of the many aspects of the on-going struggle in the post-Mubarak era.

The other, contradictory and complementary, aspect was the conflict raging among the authoritarian forces themselves on sharing the spoils of power.

The right-wing civilian forces (many of whose symbols and strongmen became members of the Consultative Council established by the military after the events of Mohammad Mahmoud) had objected to authoritarian arrangements imposed by the Military-Brotherhood alliance since February 2011. This objection was not the outcome of a genuine democratic sense on their part as much as it was due to their unhappiness at being excluded and their fear that early elections will reveal their lack of a popular base.

This was the reason why the true radical democratic opposition to the Islamic-Military alliance got mixed up with a phoney right-wing opposition, equally authoritarian in nature, whose main concern and source of dissatisfaction was its exclusion from the new setup. This right-wing opposition pursued a dual path in applying pressure to achieve its interests. On the one hand, it cautiously took part in the mass movement against the Islamists-Military authoritarian alliance and, on the other, it tried hard during closed-door discussions to rearrange its deck vis-a-vis SCAF to keep the latter in power as long as possible, thinking that this would grant leverage versus the Islamists.

The Constitutional Principles Document, better known as El-Selmi Document (named after the then Deputy Prime Minister), was one of the outcomes of this civilian right-wing effort. The El-Selmi Document blatantly and openly instituted “military sovereignty”, first as a non-accountable or transparent force, and second as the arbiter between the different parties and the protector of legitimacy.

More importantly, the Document also imposed a selection system for members of the Constituent Assembly (assigned with the mission of drafting the new constitution) that limits the number of lslamists in it. It did that by predetermining the number of members from state and civil society institutions on which the Muslim Brotherhood has no influence, in clear violation of the Constitutional Declaration of March 2011, which stipulates that members of the Constituent Assembly should be freely chosen by members of the elected People’s Assembly.

In response, the lslamists staged the “Single Demand Friday” one of whose demands was the annulment of El-Selmi Document.
However, despite the seemingly democratic nature of the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands at the time – i.e., letting the ballot box decide – it was at the core a struggle over power, or rather, over the new regime’s arrangements between the lslamists, the military and the civil right-wing forces. The latter had come down on the side of the military dictatorship opposed to the ballot box, which required bribing the military among other, while the lslamists called for electoral democracy to the extent that it served their momentary interests.

In the end, El-Selmi Document fell and parliamentary elections were held; these were elections stained with the blood of the martyrs who fell in Mohammad Mahmoud Street.And although the lslamists won the majority of seats in the parliament, nothing changed save perhaps for boosting the latter’s confidence when they realised the extent of their popular base; a thing that allowed them to face-down the military six months later in the showdown over the presidency.

A mutual elimination struggle
Thus, El-Selmi Document and the events that followed revealed the fragility of the authoritarian alliances which were considered to be solid as a rock. From that point until Morsi side-lined SCAF from power after becoming president, in August 2012, the gap between the Muslim Brotherhood and SCAF kept getting wider. Each side knew that although it could not eliminate the other it still had to manoeuvre and struggle to expand its sphere of influence in the future power structure. In the meantime, the civilian right-wing tried to increase its influence as well using the best means at its disposal (in light of its poor performance in the elections), namely reaching out to parts of the old regime, especially SCAF.

The presidential election in mid-2012 was yet another round in the struggle among the authoritarian forces. This became amply clear when efforts to agree on a consensus candidate of any shape or form failed miserably. Thus, when the military and the Brotherhood failed to agree on a single candidate, the latter decided to nominate first Khairat Al Shater, then Mohammad Morsi in a step that came as a surprise to many. The lslamists – the Brotherhood and the Salafis – also failed to agree on a joint candidate, which left the Brotherhood with Morsi and the Salafis split between Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh and Hazem Abu Ismail.

Finally, the civilian and/or revolutionary forces also failed to agree on a single candidate, which meant that Hamdeen Sabbahi, Aboul Fotouh and Khaled Ali had to compete against one another.

On the other hand, it became clear that the problem with the presidential elections was that they were held at a time when the public was totally exhausted after one-and-a-half years of street battles, without any palpable improvement in the lot of the country’s poor and marginalised. It was the exact contrary; the escalating political crisis and increasing poverty and unemployment rates fostered anti-revolutionary sentiments among the poor and marginalised, in both the cities and the countryside.

Therefore if, as mentioned before, we see the revolution as a mutual elimination struggle between street democracy and ballot box democracy, then the presidential elections came at a time when street democracy had become increasingly exhausted. This meant that large sectors of the population had, to a great extent, given up on change from below and saw the ballot box as the last chance to escape a bottleneck that seemed to have no end.

The first round of the elections saw the collapse of the political middle ground; the fact that Amr Mousa and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, whom most observers thought had the best chance of winning, failed to garner enough votes was a reflecti on of the acute division in the Egyptian street.

However, the presidential election was also a reflection of the “last chance” syndrome that compelled a majority of voters to endorse more radical and less nuanced options, with the hope that they would bring more concrete solutions to a crisis without end.

The result was the shock the re-election round. In that round, the two big candidates who are most distant from the Revolution, Mohammad Morsi and Ahmad Shafiq, competed for the presidency in a contest that caused even larger sectors of the population to lose hope in the ballot box democracy; this happened at a time when collective street democracy from below had already begun to seem useless and unproductive.

The Elite’s paradox
Some thought that Morsi’s victory in the presidential elections–especially after his Constitutional Declaration of August 2012 which side-lined SCAF from power without opposition – would bring the troubled transitional period to an end. Here was a man who secured behind him the biggest organization in the country and who succeeded in reaching power and eliminating all competitors. So it is over and there is nothing left to do.

Now, after all has been said and done, we can say this view was a rather hasty and premature. Stability has two faces each of which feeds on and reproduces the other: the cohesiveness of authority and submission of the submissive.

How does authority become cohesive; is it by fulfilling the wishes of the rebellious masses which have imposed itself on the scene by force? Perhaps. Is it by using, or uniting with, other fascist or quasi-fascist movements that use extraordinary repression to eradicate all the seeds of rejection and rebellion? Perhaps.

Is it because the powerful ruling and owning class has unified itself behind a single alternative? Perhaps. But Perhaps it is also a mixture of all of the above, which is what all successful autocrats have done. They always mix repression with concession in context of unifying the apparatuses of repression behind them. Nothing of the sort has so far happened in Egypt, and it is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future.

Let us first look at the option of “fulfilling the wishes of the masses.” Did Morsi do that? Is he capable of doing that? Of course not…

The Muslim Brotherhood in its entirety is part of the ugly neoliberal world. Whether through its leadership structure (from Hassan Malek to Khairat Al Shater), its opportunistic deformed reform history and its tendency to reconcile itself to the old world to which it belongs, the Brotherhood is trying to resolve the socio-economic crisis by increasingly resorting to neoliberal methods: budgetary austerity, price rises, subsidy reductions, reconciliation with the business community and signing agreements with imperialist financial and monetary institutions like the International Monetary Fund. This is formula designed to impoverish the poor and enrich the rich.

Who expects that such a formula would calm the social and labour movement? Who expects it to be a formula for a new social contract that would end tensions and open a new page without any ill-will?

As to “widespread repression”, despite the savagery of the police, the number of people killed in recent months and all the mistreatment on the streets and at police stations, the repression never rose to the level necessary to quell public activism or end the increasing instability. Morsi is borrowing all Mubarak’s old tactics; but who says that Mubarak and his methods are any good in today’s world? At a time when state institutions are crumbling under the revolution’s weight, restoring control and authority requires much more than just putting a professional repressive machine in motion. This explains why the ruling classes need fascism, whether populist or military, in order to end the instability that typically plagues the ruling authority following a massive revolution or rebellion.

Could Morsi and his coterie blatantly become themselves a fascist apparatus? Of course not; this would require a fundamental change in the Brotherhood’s vision, nature and mainstay, something that is neither envisaged nor possible.

On the other hand, could the present or potential ruling authority ally itself with fascist or quasi fascist movements to eradicate the revolution and all popular rejection? I do not think so, for this would require widespread agreement in the corridors of power and within the governance system and the old regime; an agreement whose impossibility is revealed by the endless infighting and wrangling between the Brother hood and the military, the Brotherhood and the Salafis and the Brotherhood and the civilian right-wing forces.

It is here that the other side of the coin comes clearly into focus: the cohesiveness of the authoritarian forces and of the ruling classes in general. The Constitutional Declaration of November 22, 2012, and the ensuing multi-layered struggle, have shown how fragile the fleeting moment of general stability, between August and November of that same year, really was.

After scoring good results in the presidential election (despite Morsi’s ultimate success),the civilian opposition, including its right-wing, was able to reconstitute itself in the form of new parties, including, among others, Hizb el-Dustour, the Popular Current, Strong Egypt and the Congress Party.

The explosion of November 22 pushed most of these forces (with the exception of Strong Egypt) to form a new coalition: the National Salvation Front (NSF). NSF proved capable of large scale mobilisation from among the upper, middle and lower classes, as well as among some sections of the poor and dispossessed (Al-harafish). And despite its failure to dislodge the Muslim Brotherhood (and the Salafis) from power, and despite its right-wing nature, NSF proved that it was able, to an extent, to destabilise the Brotherhood and impose itself as a part of the power game.

However, the NSF is just another right-wing force. It’s not a radical substitute for the Brotherhood; it is almost the same old wine poured into new bottles. So the struggle from above continues and instability continues. This is where the classical dismemberment that afflicts post socio-populist revolutionary stages appears. Forces that mostly do not belong to the revolution dominate the political sphere and strongly compete for positions of influence in a rotten institutional structure, against a backdrop of entrenched and continuing social instability. While the competition continues, authoritarian voices are raised higher and higher calling for an “end to the instability farce” and for “governing with an iron fist.” But no one is capable of doing that.

This is the paradox which the Egyptian ruling elite finds itself in today. It is a paradox which I believe could last quite a long time regardless of the marginal adventures and turns in the road.

What further exacerbates the situation is that the Salvation Front has burned the traditional liberal and leftist opposition, in the literal sense of the word. For after raising radical slogans calling for the immediate downfall of Morsi, his constitution and entire political structure, and after allying itself with the remnants of the old regime and the extremist neoliberal right-wing, it turned around and reopened the door to contacts with Morsi’s regime and its policies, by taking part in the referendum on the constitution and by discussing the option of a national salvation government. And the zigzags continue.

All this was taking place in the absence of a cohesive revolutionary force capable of opposing this track and providing an alternative to Morsi and his right-wing opposition. This has cost the radical mass movement the political leadership it is most in need of at a time of deep instability and despair.

The revolution remains
After all that, the question that begs itself is: what is left of the revolution? My answer is: a lot, a great lot, is left.

History teaches us that despite the apparent sombre conditions, Egypt’s current situationis open to three future possibilities. The first is the rise of a fascist/quasi-fascist/security state capable of resolving the situation even if partially (Hitler, Mussolini or even Putin). In this scenario the elements of the governing alliance will probably not change; what will change is the balance and distribution of roles among the alliance’s elements.

The second possibility sees the current state of instability continue for a relatively long time, similar to what we see in Pakistan today, and saw before that in Germany’s Weimar Republic.

The third possibility is a new popular rebellion which, in my opinion, is the most likely scenario, even if we pass through a momentary and futile authoritarian period.

What motivates me here is not childish revolutionary optimism that has no basis in reality, but rather the fact that Egypt is not alone in the world and that the political struggle is not disconnected from its structural socio-economic roots. We are living a moment in which the neoliberal system, that imposed itself in the early 1980s, is experiencing a long and deep crisis. We are also living a moment in which capitalism, which formed the basis of the system’s stability for thirty years, from the 1940s and 1970s, cannot experience a new major revival.

Egypt that is witnessing instability today and does not look to know how to complete its democratic transition is the very same Egypt that is getting ready for a new revolutionary round. Neither were the masses defeated, nor was the crisis resolved or the authority capable of being authoritarian; what we have is a vicious circle that will keep revolving until the new revolutionary wave hits our shores, be it tomorrow or in the next few years.

This article was published first on the Arab Reform Initiative website and is available to download (Adobe PDF | 160kb)

http://www.counterfire.org/index.php/articles/analysis/16396-crisis-without-end-egypts-democratic-transition

Two major terrorists’ attacks took place almost simultaneously: in Boston, two alleged Chechen terrorists set off bombs during the annual Boston Marathon killing three people and injuring 170; in Venezuela, terrorist-supporters of defeated presidential candidate, Henrique Capriles, assassinated 8 and injured 70 supporters of victorious Socialist Party candidate Nicolas Maduro, in the course of firebombing 8 health clinics and several Party offices and homes. In the case of Boston, the terrorist spree resulted in one further fatality – one of the perpetrators; in Venezuela, some of the terrorists are under arrest but their political mentors are still free and active – in fact they are now presented as ‘victims of repression’ by the US media.

By examining the context, politics, government responses and mass media treatment of these terrorist acts we can gain insight into the larger meaning of terrorism and how it reflects, not merely the hypocrisy of the US government and mass media, but the underlying politics that encourages terrorism.

Context of Terrorism: From Chechnya to Boston : A Dangerous Game

Chechnya has been an armed battleground for over two decades pitting the secular Russian State against local Muslim fundamentalist separatists. Washington , fresh from arming and financing Muslim jihadis in a successful war against the secular Soviet-backed Afghan regime in the 1980’s, expanded its aid program into Central Asian and Caucasian Muslim regions of the former Soviet Union .

Russian military might ultimately defeated the Chechen warlords but many of their armed followers fled to other countries, joining armed, extremist, Islamist groups in Iraq , Pakistan , Afghanistan and later Egypt , Libya and now Syria . While accepting Western, especially US arms, to fight secular adversaries of the US Empire, the jihadis’ ultimate goal has been a clerical (Islamic) regime. Washington and the Europeans have played a dangerous game: using Muslim fundamentalists as shock troops to defeat secular nationalists, while planning to dump them in favor of neo-liberal ‘moderate’ Muslim or secular client regimes afterwards.

This cynical policy has backfired everywhere – including in the US . Fundamentalists in Afghanistan took state power after the Soviets pulled out. They opposed the US , which invaded Afghanistan after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and have successfully engaged in a 12 year war of attrition with Washington and NATO, spawning powerful allies in Pakistan and elsewhere. Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan serve as training bases and a ‘beacon’ for terrorists the world over.

The US invasion of Iraq and overthrow of President Saddam Hussein led to ten years of Al Qaeda and related-clerical terrorism in Iraq , wiping out the entire secular society. In the case of Libya and Syria , NATO and Gulf State arms have greatly expanded the arsenals of terrorist fundamentalists in North and Sub-Sahara Africa and the Middle East . Western-sponsored fundamentalist terrorists were directly related to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington and there is little doubt that the recent actions of the Chechen bombers in Boston are products of this latest upsurge of NATO-backed fundamentalist advances in North Africa and the Middle East.

But against all the evidence to the contrary, Chechen terrorists are viewed by the White House as “freedom fighters” engaged in liberating their country from the secular Russians … Perhaps after the Boston terror attack, that appraisal will change.

Venezuela : Presenting Terrorism as “Peaceful Dissent”

The candidate of the US backed and financed opposition, Henrique Capriles, has lived up to his reputation for violent politics. In the run-up to his failed candidacy in the Venezuelan presidential election on April 15, his followers sabotaged power lines causing frequent national blackouts. His supporters among the elite hoarded basic consumer items, causing shortages, and repeatedly threatened violence if the election went against them.

With over 100 international observers from the United Nations, European Commission and the Jimmy Carter Center there to certify the Venezuelan elections, Capriles and his inner circle unleashed their street gangs, who proceeded to target Socialist voters, campaign workers, health clinics, newly-built low-income housing projects and Cuban doctors and nurses.

The “white terror” resulted in 8 deaths and 70 injuries. Over 135 right-wing street thugs were arrested and 90 were charged with felonies, conspiracy to commit murder and destroy public property. Capriles, violent political credentials go back at least a decade earlier when he played a major role in the bloody coup which briefly overthrew President Hugo Chavez in 2002. Capriles led a gang of armed thugs and assaulted the Cuban embassy, ‘arresting’ legitimate Cabinet ministers who had taken refuge. After a combined military and popular mass movement restored President Chavez, Capriles was placed under arrest for violence and treason. The courageous Venezuelan Attorney General, Danilo Anderson, was in the process of prosecuting Capriles and several hundred of his terrorist supporters when he was assassinated by a car bomb – planted by supporters of the failed coup.

Though Capriles electoral propaganda was given a face-lift – he even called himself a candidate of the “center-left” and a supporter of several of President Chavez’s “social missions”, his close ties with terrorist operatives were revealed by his call for violent action as soon as his electoral defeat was announced. His thinly veiled threat to organize a “mass march” and seize the headquarters of the electoral offices was only called off when the government ordered the National Guard and the Armed Forces on high alert. Clearly Capriles’ terror tactics were only pulled back in the face of greater force. When the legal order decided to defend democracy and not yield to terrorist blackmail, Capriles temporarily suspended violent activity and regrouped his forces, allowing the legal-electoral face of his movement to come to the fore.

Responses to Terror: Boston and Venezuela

In response to the terrorist incident in Boston, the local, state and federal police were mobilized and literally shut down the entire city and its transport networks and went on a comprehensive and massive ‘manhunt’: the mass media and the entire population were transformed into tools of a police state investigation. Entire blocks and neighborhoods were scoured as thousands of heavily armed police and security forces went house to house, room to room, dumpster to dumpster looking for a wounded 19 year old college freshman. A terror alert was raised for the entire country ad overseas police networks and intelligence agencies were involved in the search for the terrorist assassins. The media and the government constantly showed photos of the victims, emphasizing their horrific injuries and the gross criminality of the act: it was unthinkable to discuss any political dimensions to the act – it was presented, pure and simple, as an act of political terror directed at ‘cowering the American people and their elected government’. Every government official demanded that anyone, even remotely linked, to the crime or criminals face the full force of the law.

On the other hand and coinciding with the attack in Boston, when the Venezuelan oppositionist terrorists launched their violent assault on the citizens and public institutions they were given unconditional support by the Obama regime, which claimed the killers were really ‘democrats seeking to uphold free elections’. Secretary of State Kerry refused to recognize the electoral victory of President Maduro. Despite the carnage, the Venezuelan government did not declare martial law: at most the National Guard and loyalist police upheld the law and arrested several dozen protestors and terrorists; many of the former – not directly linked to violence – were quickly released. Moreover, despite the internationally certified elections by over 100 observers, the Maduro government conceded the chief demand for an electoral recount – in the hope of averting further right-wing bloodshed.

US Media Response

All the major Western news agencies, including the principle ‘respectable’ print media (Financial Times, New York Times and Washington Post) converted the Venezuelan political assassins into ‘peaceful protestors’ who were victimized for attempting to register their dissent. In other words, Washington and the entire media came out in full force in favor of political terror perpetrated against an adversarial democratic government, while invoking a near-martial law state for a brutal, but limited, act of terror in the US . Washington apparently does not make the connection between its support of terrorism abroad and its spread to the US .

The US media has blocked out discussion of the ties between Chechen terrorist front groups, based in the US and UK, and leading US neoconservatives and Zionists, including Rudolph Giuliani, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adleman, Elliott Abrams, Midge Dector, Frank Gaffney and R. James Woolsey – all leading members of the self-styled ‘American Committee for Peace in Chechnya’ (re-named Committee for Peace in the Caucasus after the horrific Beslan school massacre). These Washington luminaries are all full-throated supporters of the ‘war on terror’ or should we say supporters of ‘terror and war’ (“Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons” by former FBI official Coleen Rowley 4/19/13). The headquarters and nerve center for many ‘exile’ Chechen leaders, long sought by Russian authorities for mass terrorist activities, is Boston, Massachusetts – the site of the bombing – another ‘fact’ thus far ignored by the FBI and the Justice Department, perhaps because of long-standing and on-going working relations in organizing terrorist incidents aimed at destabilizing Russia.

Former Presidential candidate and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, after the bombing, stated that Chechens ‘were only focused (sic) on Russia ’ and not on the US (his Chechens perhaps). Interpol and US intelligence Agencies are well aware that Chechen militants have been involved in several Al Qaeda terrorist groups throughout South and Central Asia as well as the Middle East . The Russian government’s specific inquiries regarding any number of suspected Chechen terrorists or fronts have been given short shrift – apparently including the activities of one Tamerlan Tsarnaev, recently deceased.

(As a historical aside (and perhaps not unrelated), the Boston-based FBI was notorious from the 1970’s through the 1990’s for protecting a brutal gangster hit man, James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, as a privileged informant, while he murdered dozens of individuals in the New England area.)

The Deeper Meaning of the War on Terrorism

US support for Venezuelan terrorists and their political leader, Henrique Capriles, is part of a complex multi-track policy combining the exploitation of electoral processes and the clandestine funding of NGO’s for “grass roots” agitation of local grievances, together with support for ‘direct action’ including ‘trial runs’ of political violence against the symbols and institutions of social democracy. The versatile Capriles is the perfect candidate to run in elections while orchestrating terror. Past US experience with political terror in Latin America has had a boomerang effect – as evident in the Miami-based Cuban terrorist engagement with numerous bombings, gun-running and drug trafficking within the USA, especially the 1976 car bombing assassination of the exile Chilean Minister Orlando Letelier and an American associate on Embassy Row in the heart of Washington, DC – an action never characterized as ‘terrorism’ because of official US ties to the perpetrators.

Despite financial, political and military links between Washington and terrorists, especially fundamentalists, the latter retain their organizational autonomy and follow their own political-cultural agenda, which in most cases is hostile to the US . As far as the Chechens, the Afghans and the Al Qaeda Syrians today are concerned, the US is a tactical ally to be discarded on the road to establishing independent fundamentalist states. We should add the scores of Boston victims to the thousands of US citizens killed in New York , Washington , Libya , Afghanistan and elsewhere by former fundamentalist allies of the US .

By siding with terrorists and their political spokespeople and refusing to recognize the validity of the elections in Venezuela , the Obama regime has totally alienated itself from all of South America and the Caribbean . By supporting violent assaults against democratic institutions in Venezuela, the White House is signaling to its clients in opposition to the governments of Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador – that violent assaults against independent democratic governments is an acceptable road to restoring the neo-liberal order and US centered ‘regional integration’.

Conclusion

Washington has demonstrated no consistent opposition to terrorism – it depends on the political goals of the terrorists and on the target adversaries. In one of the two recent cases – the US government declared virtual “martial law” on Boston to kill or capture two terrorists who had attacked US citizens in a single locale; whereas in the case of Venezuela , the Obama regime has given political and material support to terrorists in order to subvert the entire constitutional order and electoral regime.

Because of the long-standing and deep ties between the US State Department, prominent neo-con leaders and Zionist notables with Chechen terrorists, we cannot expect a thorough investigation which would surely embarrass or threaten the careers of the major US officials who have long-term working relations with such criminals.

The White House will escalate and widen its support for the same Venezuelan terrorists who have sabotaged the electrical power system, the food supply and the constitutional electoral process of that country. Terror, in that context, serves as its launch pad for a full scale assault against the past decade’s social advances under the late President Hugo Chavez.

Meanwhile, in order to cover-up the Chechen-Washington working alliance, the Boston Marathon bombing will be reduced to an isolated act by two misguided youths, lead astray by an anonymous fundamentalist website – their actions reduced to ‘religious fundamentalism’. And despite an economy in crisis, tens of billions of more dollars will be allocated to expand the police state at home, citing its effectiveness and efficiency in the aftermath of the bombings while secretly sending more millions to foment ‘democratic’ terror…in Venezuela .

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals, including the American Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology, Social Research, and Journal of Peasant Studies. He has published over 2000 articles in nonprofessional journals such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the Nation, Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy, New Left Review, Partisan Review, TempsModerne, Le Monde Diplomatique, and his commentary is widely carried on the internet. His publishers have included Random House, John Wiley, Westview, Routledge, Macmillan, Verso, Zed Books and Pluto Books. He is winner of the Career of Distinguished Service Award from the American Sociological Association’s Marxist Sociology Section, the Robert Kenny Award for Best Book, 2002, and the Best Dissertation, Western Political Science Association in 1968. His most recent titles include Unmasking Globalization: Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century (2001); co-author The Dynamics of Social Change in Latin America (2000), System in Crisis (2003), co-author Social Movements and State Power (2003), co-author Empire With Imperialism (2005), co-author)Multinationals on Trial (2006).

http://www.countercurrents.org/petras290413.htm

SO FAR it is a matter of a few military tents, a handful of shivering soldiers and a disagreement over a remote and never-demarcated line in the Himalayas. Yet a lengthening stand-off between Chinese and Indian soldiers in a disputed part of Ladakh reflects a profound problem: already it ranks as the most serious confrontation between the Asian giants since the late 1980s.

India accuses its neighbour to the north-east of sending troops some 19km past a line of actual control (LAC), in the Despang area of Ladakh, a part of Jammu & Kashmir state that is wedged between Tibet proper and the vale of Kashmir. They have reportedly been there for more than two weeks. Now a small number of Indian soldiers have set up camp within a stone’s throw of their Chinese counterparts. Though there is no sign yet of escalation—and would seem to be little prospect of it—nor have the sides found a way to walk back.
The confrontation is taking place in an unpopulated district, but one that matters symbolically. Some 4,000km of the boundary between China and India remains unsettled, so tests in any particular spot along its course carry immense significance. Speculative reports suggest the area may also be rich in uranium. It is also, from the Chinese perspective, close to the Tibetan Autonomous Region and so significant for the government in Beijing as it tries to assert full political and military control over a troubled patch of its sovereign territory.

Inside India the predominant explanation for the stand-off—among bloggers, retired generals, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), television commentators and newspaper columnists—is that China is entirely to blame. The incursion is seen simply as China putting pressure on militarily weaker India, presumably to extract concessions such as a freeze on the number of troops it deploys along the border, or some block on India’s development of bunkers, roads or other structures on its own side of the frontier. Any such freeze would leave Chinese forces, which are established on a plateau, in a much stronger position. They already enjoy the benefit of all-weather roads, railway lines and other structures that connect them to the rest of China.

Some in this predominant Indian camp speculate that the cross-border incursion could have been led initially by an adventurous, lowish-ranking member of the People’s Liberation Army, to which China’s new political leadership subsequently acquiesced. Others in the commentariat prefer to emphasise that Indian weakness, including the feebleness of its road and military infrastructure in the Himalayas, practically invite regular Chinese assertiveness.

It has been widely noted that leaks about the incursion came from India’s defence forces, while its diplomats appeared to try to hush it all up. One reliably hawkish Indian commentator, Brahma Chellaney, lashes out at India’s mild-mannered leaders as being unable to speak up themselves with any strength. Hawks, by and large, want India to retaliate by making remarks about China’s behaviour inside Tibet, essentially raising questions about the legitimacy of Chinese rule there. By contrast the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and his foreign minister, Salman Khurshid, are playing down the dispute in Ladakh (and stay entirely mum on Tibet). Mr Khurshid has compared the Chinese incursion to a pimple on an otherwise unblemished face.

A related but subtler response sees the current confrontation as being only partly about India’s relative weakness and partly as a Chinese reaction to India’s trying (even if in a limited way) to assert itself. One military analyst, Ajai Shukla, sees China behaving just as it did during two previous episodes of tension on the border, when India pushed forward. First in the 1950s, then again in the 1980s, India attempted to increase its military capacity along the disputed border. China reacted the first time by invading, which resulted in a brief border war in 1962 and the humiliation of India, as well as the destruction of what had been cordial relations. That war also cost China: marking it out as an aggressive power on the rise. The second time, in the 1980s, a confrontation on the border led eventually to a visit to China by Rajiv Gandhi, then India’s prime minister—and an improvement in ties.

This time around, says Mr Shukla,

China has clearly signalled its discomfort with India’s troop build-up, submitting a draft proposal for a freeze on troop levels that will solidify and make permanent India’s disadvantage along the LAC.
He argues that India should respond by offering to keep talking; refusing such a freeze; and getting on meanwhile with building roads and other military infrastructure, as fast as it can.

It is hard, in fact, to see what China actually hopes to achieve with the incursion. Its foreign-ministry spokesmen continue to deny any wrongdoing. They deny, too, accusations that Chinese helicopters crossed into Indian-controlled airspace in an attempt to resupply their soldiers. A series of proposed diplomatic meetings are set to go ahead, with Mr Khurshid due in China and China’s prime minister, Li Keqiang, in India, both next month. (Though India’s opposition parties are growing increasingly vocal against these trips.)

Just what is going on is far from clear. China has so many other difficulties elsewhere around its perimeter—relations with Japan and the Philippines souring, for example; violent tension in its far-western province of Xinjing—it seems odd timing to choose to add another clash. Nor is it obvious that China could welcome the most likely domestic outcome in India: a stronger call for more spending on military capacity along the border. India’s reliance on a nuclear deterrent may now look insufficient: there are already calls for it to spend more on conventional forces, too, and they are likely to grow louder.

Last, worsening bilateral relations would be at odds with broader gains between the countries in other fields. The value of bilateral trade, skewed heavily in China’s favour, has grown from just $2.9 billion a year at the start of the millennium to some $66 billion annually. China and India appear to co-operate as members of the BRICS group of countries, for example sharing a proposal to establish a new global development bank. And even along the disputed border, the two countries have established limited mechanisms for managing their disagreements peacefully. It looks unlikely that China’s new leaders wish to jeopardise all this. Thus its soldiers and tents will presumably be withdrawn before too long. The stakes, if they should not, look as high and dangerous as Himalayan peaks.

(Picture credit: Wikimedia Commons)

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/04/india-and-china-square

Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie speaks in Tehran, July 2009 (Yalda Moaiery / Courtesy Reuters)
The Power Struggle Begins in Iran
On June 14, Iran will hold a presidential election. If the acrimony and fraud of the 2009 election was not enough to cast a pall over this vote, then the ongoing power struggle between Supreme Leader Aytollah Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad surely is. Term limits prevent Ahmadinejad from running for reelection, but he refuses to leave office quietly — he has been grooming his chief of staff and close confidant, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, as a successor. Khamenei does not like either Ahmadinejad or Mashaei, seeing them as part of a “deviant faction” that stands in the way of clerical rule. It is a nasty squabble without any heroes, and regardless of who wins, the real loser will be democracy in Iran.

For a period of five days next month, from May 7 to May 11, Iran’s Guardian Council will vet the candidates, choosing who can and cannot run. Mashaei has not yet officially announced his candidacy, since this can be done only during those days, after which the council has ten days to rule on his candidacy.

Mashaei, a young-looking 53-year-old, has a broad range of experience in Iranian government and society. An electrical engineer by training, he worked after the 1979 revolution in Kurdistan and the Iranian province of Western Azerbaijan for the Revolutionary Guards’ intelligence division. He also held positions in the Ministry of Intelligence, as chief of a special department dealing with Kurdistan; the Ministry of the Interior, as a general manager; and on government radio. He got to know Ahmadinejad while working for the Tehran municipality when Ahmadinejad was the city’s mayor.

Ahmadinejad and Mashaei are clashing with the clerical establishment, but that does not mean that they are fighting for democracy and secular rule. Mashaei filled several different posts during Ahmadinejad’s first term, from 2005–9, and was appointed vice president at the beginning of the second term. Mashaei’s promotion led to protests on the part of the “sources of emulation,” the primary religious authorities followed by pious Shiites, and the faqihs (Islamic jurists). In July 2009, Khamenei requested that Mashaei be removed from office, but Ahmadinejad refused to dismiss him. Khamenei’s office insisted, writing to Ahmadinejad that the appointment was “contrary to your interests and those of the government and will cause division and dismay among your admirers. You must declare this appointment null and void.”

The supreme leader ultimately got his way, and Mashaei resigned. Ahmadinejad still wanted him around, though, so he appointed him to be his chief of staff in September 2009. Once again, the so-called principlists, hard-liners who support Khamenei, raised their voices in protest, but Mashaei was able to stay on.

Ahmadinejad and Mashaei are clashing with the clerical establishment, but that does not mean that they are fighting for democracy and secular rule. Ahmadinejad is a dictator just like Khamenei. One by one, he has removed the principlist forces and those close to Khamenei from his government, surrounding himself with a loyal coterie. The principlists believe that Mashaei is the guiding hand behind this purge, and they worry that his readiness to buck the conservatives on political, cultural, and social positions presents a grave threat to the Islamic Republic.

What is it about Mashaei that the clerical establishment finds so threatening? First is his defense of Iranian nationalism over Islamism as the guiding force of the country. “Islamism has run its course,” he said in 2004 and repeated in 2008. He also opposes forcing women to wear veils in public. In January 2011, he pointedly asked, “If the veil was not required, what percent of ladies would use it?”

Another of Mashaei’s controversial moments came in July 2008, when he declared that “Iran today is friends with the people of America and Israel,” a statement meant to distinguish himself from the mainstream politics of the Islamic Republic. This matter set off such an uproar that Khamenei delivered a pointed response to Mashaei in a sermon several months later: “This is not right,” he retorted. ”It is illogical. Who are the people of Israel? They are the same people who seize houses, seize land, who seize farms, who seize trade. This is the rabble of Zionist elements.”

The spat extends to the religious sphere, too. Iran’s clerics consider themselves to be governing in the stead of the Twelfth Imam, a messianic figure in Shiism, according to the principle of wilayat al-faqih (guardianship of the jurist). The clergy claims a monopoly on relations with the imam, but Mashaei insists that he, too, has had direct contact with him. The clerics do not like such rivals, so they have accused Mashaei of witchcraft, saying that he acts on commands from satanic genies and has bewitched Ahmadinejad. In mid-2011, 25 of Mashaei’s associates were arrested on charges of practicing witchcraft and economic corruption and sent to prison.

It is against this backdrop that Ahmadinejad began publicly pushing Mashaei’s candidacy several months ago. In December 2012, he appointed Mashaei to head the Non-Aligned Movement’s secretariat, calling him “a monotheist, a believer, pure, patient, of limpid heart and mind, loving and committed to divine values and every person on earth.” This appointment caused a big commotion in Tehran, since it was considered a sign of public support by the president for Mashaei. The specific post is not in and of itself significant — it is purely ceremonial — but Ahmadinejad used it as an opportunity to praise Mashaei effusively and make it clear that Mashaei was his chosen successor, provoking widespread objections by conservatives who felt that the president was taking advantage of his position. What is more, critics argued that the praise with which he described his confidant should be reserved for the Prophet Muhammad and not bestowed on a deviant such as Mashaei.

Ahmadinejad and Mashaei’s opponents continue to depict them as opponents of the Islamic Republic and clerical rule. The pair seems to believe that, far from harming them, this characterization might help them win over the country’s pro-democracy movement and urban middle class.

The problem for them, however, is that they have no credentials whatsoever when it comes to democracy and human rights. The urban middle class and the opponents of clerical rule may be happy with the damage that this regime infighting has inflicted on Khamenei — unlike former Presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Muhammad Khatami, Ahmadinejad has publically stood up to the supreme leader and ignored many of his orders. But they are fully aware of the damage Ahmadinejad and his comrades have done to Iran. Under Ahmadinejad and Mashaei, the country has become even more of an international pariah. All their outrageous slogans against Israel have played right into the hands of Israel’s right-wing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has mobilized the West against Iran and regularly urges a military strike. Although the paralyzing economic sanctions that the West brought down on Iran are the result of Khamenei’s demagogic attacks on Israel and the United States, Ahmadinejad’s extreme rhetoric did not help. The people of Iran want peace and a democratic regime, not war and paralyzing economic sanctions.

How will the power struggle play out? If Mashaei is allowed to run, and manages to win, Ahmadinejad might be tempted to follow the Putin-Medvedev model. Just as Dmitry Medvedev was installed as president of Russia for a term, only to cede his place back to Vladimir Putin, Ahmadinejad would love to let Mashaei have a turn as president and then reassume power.

But it is virtually certain that Mashaei will be disqualified. As a result, Ahmadinejad may choose to stand up to Khamenei by dismissing the minister of the interior (who is responsible for running the elections), declaring that the elections will not be held, or resigning from the presidency.

If Ahmadinejad were to try to cancel the elections, Khamenei would directly intervene and decree that they be held. It is unlikely that the governors, who are in charge of the elections in the provinces and are directly appointed by Khamenei, would bet on a losing horse and take Ahmadinejad’s side in such a struggle, thus jeopardizing their political future.

Of course, Ahmadinejad could also attempt to come to some sort of accommodation with Khamenei, which would necessitate his submitting to the supreme leader’s demands, holding elections without Mashaei, and stepping down from power at the end of his term. If he did that, Khamenei might refrain from punishing Ahmadinejad and his allies for insubordination.

Even on the off chance that Mashaei is allowed to run, the cards are stacked against him. Knowing this, Ahmadinejad has considered backing another candidate. But Khamenei will never permit a reformist or one of Ahmadinejad’s allies to become president. For now, events are moving quickly, and who will ultimately win the presidency is anybody’s guess.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/139352/akbar-ganji/meet-ahmadinejads-chosen-successor?page=show

To scan the list of major American supporters of the Chechen secessionist movement, which at some points can hardly be distinguished from Chechen terrorists financed by U.S. allies Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is to be reminded of some of the most notorious U.S. Cold War players.

Evidence is mounting that the accused dead Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev, allegedly killed during an April 19 shootout with police in Watertown, Massachusetts, became a «radicalized» Muslim while participating in a covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize Russia’s North Caucasus region… The ultimate goal of the CIA’s campaign was for the Muslim inhabitants of the region to declare independence from Moscow and tilt toward the U.S. Wahhabi Muslim-run governments of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The Western corporate media largely ignored an important story reported from Izvestia in Moscow: that Tamerlan Tsarnaev attended seminars run by the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, a group affiliated with the neo-conservative think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, between January and July 2012. The U.S. media reported that during this six month time frame, Tsarnaev was being radicalized by Dagestan radical imam «Abu Dudzhan», killed in a fight with Russian security forces in 2012. Tsarnaev also visited Dagestan in 2011.

However, in documents leaked from the Georgian Ministry of Internal Affairs’ Counterintelligence Department, Tsarnaev is pinpointed as being in Tbilisi taking part in «seminars» organized by the Caucasus Fund, founded during the Georgian-South Ossetian war of 2008, a war started when Georgian troops invaded the pro-Russian Republic of South Ossetia during the Beijing Olympics. Georgia was supported militarily and with intelligence support by the United States and Israel, and the American support included U.S. Special Forces advisers on the ground in Georgia. The Georgian intelligence documents indicate Tsarnaev attended the Jamestown Foundation seminars in Tbilisi.

The Jamestown Foundation is part of a neo-conservative network that re-branded itself after the Cold War from being anti-Soviet and anti-Communist to one that is anti-Russian and “pro-democracy.” The network not only consists of Jamestown and the Caucasus Fund but also other groups funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and George Soros’ Open Society Institute (OSI).

Georgia has become a nexus for the U.S. aid to the Russian opposition trying to oust President Vladimir Putin and his supporters from power. In March [2010], Georgia sponsored, with CIA, Soros, and British MI-6 funds, a conference titled ‘Hidden Nations, Enduring Crimes: The Circassians and the People of the North Caucasus Between Past and Future.’ Georgia and its CIA, Soros, and British intelligence allies are funneling cash and other support for secessionism by ethnic minorities in Russia, including Circassians, Chechens, Ingushetians, Balkars, Kabardins, Abaza, Tatars, Talysh, and Kumyks».

The March 21, 2010 conference in Tbilisi was organized by the Jamestown Foundation and the International School of Caucasus Studies at Ilia State University in Georgia. If Georgian counter-intelligence documents have Tamerlan Tsarnaev attending Jamestown conferences in Tbilisi in 2011, could the Russian FSB have tracked him to the Jamestown Hidden Nations seminar in March 2010? In any event, a year later the FSB decided to contact the FBI about Tsarnaev’s ties to terrorists.

The first Russian request to the FBI came via the FBI’s Legal Attache’s office at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in March 2011. It took the FBI until June of 2011 to conclude that Tamerlan posed no terrorist threat but it did add his name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which monitors financial information such as bank accounts held abroad and wire transfers. In September 2011, Russian authorities, once again, alerted the U.S. of their suspicions about Tamerlan. The second alert went to the CIA. By September 2011, Russian security agencies were well aware that the Hidden Nations seminar held a year earlier was a CIA-sponsored event that was supported by the Mikheil Saakashvili government in Georgia and that other similar meetings had been held and were planned, including the one that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was to attend in Tbilisi in January 2012.

At some point in time after the first Russian alert and either before or after the second, the CIA entered Tamerlan’s name into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list (TIDE), a database with more than 750,000 entries that is maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia.

The Jamestown Foundation is a long-standing front operation for the CIA, it being founded, in part, by CIA director William Casey in 1984. The organization was used as an employer for high-ranking Soviet bloc defectors, including the Soviet Undersecretary General of the UN Arkady Shevchenko and Romanian intelligence official Ion Pacepa. The Russian domestic Federal Security Bureau and the SVR foreign intelligence agency have long suspected Jamestown of helping to foment rebellions in Chechnya, Ingushetia, and other north Caucasus republics. The March 21 Tbilisi conference on the north Caucasus a few days before the Moscow train bombings has obviously added to the suspicions of the FSB and SVR.

Jamestown’s board includes such Cold War era individuals as Marcia Carlucci; wife of Frank Carlucci, the former CIA officer, Secretary of Defense, and Chairman of The Carlyle Group [Frank Carlucci was also one of those who requested the U.S. government to allow former Chechen Republic 'Foreign Minister' Ilyas Akhmadov, accused by the Russians of terrorist ties, to be granted political asylum in the U.S. after a veto from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments], anti-Communist book and magazine publisher Alfred Regnery; and Caspar Weinberger’s Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Kathleen Troia «KT» McFarland. Also on the board is former Oklahoma GOP Governor Frank Keating, the governor at the time of the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing.

Cooperating with Jamestown in not only its north and south Caucasus information operations, but also in Moldovan, Belarusian, Uighur, and Uzbekistan affairs, is George Soros’s ubiquitous Open Society Institute, another cipher for U.S. intelligence and global banking interests. Soros’s Central Eurasia Project has sponsored a number of panels and seminars with Jamestown.

Russian security indicated in their first communication with the FBI that Tamerlan Tsarnaev had changed drastically since 2010. That change came after the Hidden Nations conference in Tbilisi. U.S. support for Chechen and North Caucasus secession came as a result of a public statement on August 2008 by GOP presidential candidate John McCain that «after Russia illegally recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Western countries ought to think about the independence of the North Caucasus and Chechnya».

Upon becoming President in 2009, Barack Obama adopted McCain’s proposal and authorized CIA support for North Caucasus secessionists and terrorists with money laundered through the USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, Soros’s Open Society Institute, Freedom House, and the Jamestown Foundation. In January 2012, Obama appointed a Soros activist and neocon, Michael McFaul of the right-wing Hoover Institution at Stanford University, as U.S. ambassador to Moscow. McFaul immediately threw open the doors of the U.S. embassy to a variety of Russian dissidents, including secessionists from the North Caucasus, some of whom were suspected by the Russian FSB of ties to Islamist terrorists.

Whether Tamerlan Tsarnaev was always a CIA asset and participated in a “false flag” operation in Boston and became an unwitting “patsy” in a CIA plot, much like “U.S. Marine “defector” to the Soviet Union Lee Harvey Oswald became a “patsy” in President Kennedy’s assassination, or he was indeed radicalized in an attempt to infiltrate him into the ranks of the Caucasus Emirate and decided to defect and carry out a terrorist attack against the United States may never be known. If the latter is the case, Tsarnaev is much like Osama Bin Laden, once a CIA fighter in the field in Afghanistan who allegedly decided to launch a jihad against the United States. If Tsarnaev was a “patsy” like Oswald, that might explain the setting off of an incendiary device at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston ten minutes after the twin bombings at the Boston Marathon. After Boston Police stated the fire was caused by an explosion, the Boston Fire Department went into cover-up mode and tried to claim the fire could have been caused by someone tossing a cigarette on to flammable material.
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/04/26/the-ties-that-bind-washington-to-chechen-terrorists.html

When you leave a seed from a tree to grow in a pagoda, it seems so small at first. But you know you must cut it out before it grows and destroys the building.”

These spoken words are a metaphor for the destruction of Myanmar’s minority Muslim community. Such a threatening statement of intent would be ominous when spoken by anyone. But when the speaker is a pleasant-looking Buddhist monk with a shaved head and wrapped in saffron robes giving an interview to the BBC in the peaceful surroundings of a temple, the words contain the surreal threat of potential genocide.

At a critical political and social juncture, Myanmar is on a slippery slope of ethnic and religious violence. The March 2013 riots

against the Muslim population in which reports indicate at least 43 deaths and more than 1,300 burnt homes is evidence that the violence against minorities is only worsening and expanding with the government and international community doing little to stop it.

Buddhist monks reportedly instigated and participated in the violence, which targeted mosques and Muslim neighborhoods. Images have surfaced of Muslims with raised hands being forced out of the town of Meiktila in central Myanmar with local monks standing by, weapons in hand. A movement led by monks has encouraged local people to shop only in Buddhist-owned stores that display the number 969, a symbol of Buddhist teachings, and to boycott trade with Muslims, whom they have bizarrely blamed for dominating the local economy.

The similarities between these actions and the treatment of minority Jews in Germany during the 1930s are striking, actions which if left unchecked could result in a similar sort of genocide. And yet the one voice of promise and hope for these people, Aung San Suu Kyi, the heroine of democracy and human rights, remains largely silent. The oppression of the Muslim community, particularly the Rohingya of western Myanmar, represents the latest challenge for a country still struggling to emerge from the darkness of decades of authoritarian military rule.

Over the past three decades, Muslim Rohingya have been systematically pushed out of their homes by government authorities and subjected to widespread violence that has led to the complete negation of their rights and identity. They have become a stateless minority facing what can only be described as a form of genocide. Many hundreds of thousands have fled as refugees to neighboring countries, where they are met with neglect or outright hostility.

For over a year, the authors have attempted to raise a clarion call of justice for these people. If Myanmar is sincere about its democratic reform program, the government must begin to move towards integrating its diverse population into becoming an inclusive state. To date, this has not happened as the divide between the majority and minority has widened in the reform environment.

Hostility against the Rohingya led by the neighboring Buddhist Rakhine erupted in widely reported violence in June 2012, leading to over 1,000 Rohingya deaths and massive displacement according to Rohingya human rights groups. (The official 180 death toll is considerably lower.) Entire villages were burned to the ground and an estimated 125,000 Rohingya were forcibly displaced without access to humanitarian aid.

A Human Rights Watch report released this week described the campaign as state-supported “ethnic cleansing”, noting that local police and security forces “assisted the killings by disarming the Rohingya of their sticks and other rudimentary weapons they carried to defend themselves”.

President Thein Sein said in July 2012 that he would not recognize the Rohingya as Myanmar nationals and stated his desire to turn over the entire ethnic group to the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees for resettlement in other countries. Despite such statements, he has won high international praise for his democratic reforms, including receipt earlier this week of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group’s top peace prize award.

Reflecting the government’s perspective, the international press has widely projected the situation as a symmetrical clash between two groups, variously Buddhist versus Muslim or Rakhine versus Rohingya. That simplistic characterization, however, masks the truth. The situation is better framed in the context of a sustained campaign of government oppression against the Rohingya where security forces have been complicit in attacks.

Despite their widespread persecution and suffering, the perspective of Rohingya is largely ignored in the Burmese-language media – or they have even been blamed for their own plight. The government’s perspective and unwillingness to effectively arrest the violence has worsened the problem, witnessed last month in the brutal Buddhist monk-instigated riots that killed at least 43 Muslims in the country’s central region.

Role reversal
Amid the most recent slaughter of innocent Muslim men, women and children, the local media published photographs of Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and pro-democracy darling of Western governments, fraternizing with military generals at the annual Armed Forces Day parade. Now a member of parliament, Suu Kyi is increasingly more associated with the military-led political establishment than democratic resistance.

Despite her moral authority and international fame, Suu Kyi has remained curiously silent on the ethnic cleansing of Muslim Rohingya and the denial of their rights and citizenship, a campaign of violence which is now spreading to other Muslim communities across the country.

When asked about the situation of the Rohingya in a BBC interview last year, Suu Kyi responded, “I am urging tolerance but I do not think one should use one’s moral leadership, if you want to call it that, to promote a particular cause without really looking at the sources of the problems.” In the interview, she also said that she had not seen any “statistics” showing that the Rohingya had been denied Myanmar citizenship.

Speaking at Yangon University during an official visit last November, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the “dignity” and suffering of the “innocent” Rohingya people, a position few inside of Myanmar have been willing to take. Instead, they are frequently labeled by the majority as “illegal immigrants”.

In times of crisis, the great leaders of history have spoke out to challenge popular opinion. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, and Nelson Mandela all possessed a moral vision and stood up publicly for their ideals, some at the expense of their lives. Like Suu Kyi, Mandela spent significant time in prison for his political beliefs.

Unlike her, Mandela was able to transcend personal politics upon his release and through his work towards national reconciliation for all of South Africa’s people emerged as more than a political leader. By vacillating on the spreading ethnic and religious violence, Suu Kyi’s status as a source of moral authority has become vulnerable. If she does not make an effort to reach out to the country’s many minority communities, including persecuted Muslims, which group will next be targeted with impunity?

For a country with 135 different ethnic groups and various other religious communities, this is a dangerous game that threatens to undermine efforts to create a stable and open democracy. The cycle of animosity and violence between the Buddhist-Burman majority and marginalized minority communities, which was systematically built up in divide-and-rule fashion under military rule, will be difficult to break in Myanmar without a Mandela-like figure.

Myanmar remains a land of paradoxes. It is a largely Buddhist nation, a faith known above all for its teachings of peace and tranquility. Yet in recent weeks Buddhist monks have led violent riots against minority Muslim communities. The country’s greatest force for human rights and democracy, Suu Kyi, was imprisoned by the previous military junta for her political activities but now sits among them viewing a military parade while minority Muslims are targeted in outrageous pogroms.

This current dilemma represents an important test for Suu Kyi, and how she responds will significantly influence the country’s future direction. Many hope that she will choose to transcend her own political position and, like Mandela, work to peacefully unite all of the country’s diverse people. Her silence amid the ongoing and systematic violence against the minority Rohingya and other Muslims has so far been deafening.

Akbar Ahmed is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington, DC and former Pakistani High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Harrison Akins is the Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International Service. He assisted Akbar Ahmed on his latest book The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (Brookings 2013).

(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/SEA-01-230413.html

We need to understand what the Syrians want, fear, believe, and why they act in the way they do. It is not an easy task. But it is the only way if you really hold that the future of Syria must be in the hands of the Syrian people and not in the hands of external powers.

Opinions are divided on the Syrian crisis between those who view it as a revolution, and those who view it as a civil war. We believe that there is no fundamental contradiction between civil conflict and revolution. Revolution inevitably bears elements of civil conflict; moreover, there is an aspect of civil conflict that must not be overlooked in all revolutions.       

There is a tragic fact about the Syrian case which is undeniable; that there are Syrians fighting and killing other Syrians on Syrian soil. Obviously, denying or ignoring these facts on the ground will harm the revolution. Rather, what is required is to pose the following questions; what is the nature of the civil conflict in Syria? What is the relationship between the revolution and civil conflict? And does this conflict overshadow the revolution?  

On the nature of the civil conflict in Syria
The civil conflict taking place in Syria is not a purely sectarian one. The international community and media (in particular the western media) exaggerate the extent to which the conflict can be so described. An arrogant Orientalist set of views refuses to understand Syrians, or Arabs in general, In terms other than those of their sectarian identities.  According to this reading, sectarian war is the inevitable destiny of Syrians. Furthermore, according to this reading, sectarian identities are essentialist and static, lying outside history and Independent of any socio-economic context. We reject this reading.

Not every civil conflict is necessarily sectarian or religious. The Spanish Civil War was a conflict between the supporters of the Republic and the fascist followers of Franco. The Russian Civil War erupted in the context of the revolution against the Tsar. To a certain degree, the aforementioned applies as well to both Libyan and Yemeni Revolutions.

The situation in Syria is closer to the previous examples than to a fully-fledged sectarian civil war. Contrary to the Orientalist view, the Middle East does not bear a special characteristic that makes it vulnerable to a purely sectarian conflict. One of the most significant reasons behind civil conflict in Syria is the uprising of Syrians against a new feudal class that had enslaved them entirely. For instance, the majority of Muslim Sunni rebels are driven by an inclination towards social justice and revenge against these feudalists, rather than exclusively by a sense of Sunni sectarianism. On the other hand, the feudal ruling class includes different sects; the ruling family and its retinues who belong to the Alawite sect enjoy the largest share of wealth and influence. This overlap between the socio-economic on one hand and the sectarian on the other hand demands in-depth study. 

In Syria, Syrians are fighting for different political projects, and not for sectarian projects disguised as political ones. Certainly some parties have religion-oriented political projects, and some others have sectarian ones. Also there is sectarian “rhetoric” from both ends of the conflict. Nevertheless, the civil conflict cannot be reduced to a sectarian one. These conflicts have multiple dimensions such as internal sectarian, religious, ethnic, territorial, class-related tensions and so forth, in addition to external factors, such as regional and international political demands.

Nevertheless, sectarian tension should be acknowledged; particularly Sunni-Alawite hostilities. Also, there are indicators of a longterm civil conflict.

Between the revolution and the “absurd” civil war?

The term “civil war” had been adopted by western media to refer to the situation in Syria. It is also frequently used by the United Nations, the UN Security Council and international organizations, as well as in the statements, which are aiming to put an end to the violence, of Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN peace envoy to Syria. The term is also used by some Arabs and Syrians.   

If we examine the descriptions of the Syrian conflict as a ‘civil war’, a particular picture of events emerges: it paints the Syrian conflict as an even battle between two sides, with each trying to achieve power through violence. These two sides are represented as receiving support from regional and international powers, which in turn have different interests of their own. It is thus a proxy warfare on Syria’s land, where Syrians are used as pawns in a cold war between these powers, and where innocent people are paying the price.   

On the other hand, the Syrian factions are waging a sectarian war; radical Sunnis opposed to other sects. It is often admitted that the ruling regime, which represents Alawites and other sects (including some ethnic minorities according to some accounts) is horrible and barbaric. Yet, it is only as barbaric as Assad’s opponents who represent the Sunni radicalism and Jihadi Groups through to Al-Qaeda. The international community (including powers that support or oppose the regime) fears that the radical Sunnis will oppress, if not annihilate, the other sects if they succeed in toppling Assad’s regime.

This, then, is the “civil war” with all its viciousness. According to this view, the Syrian state will be entirely destroyed unless the parties of the conflict reach an agreement. There is no winner of a civil war but devastation, and the only solution in Syria is negotiations.

We will call this portrayal: the ‘absurd civil war’.  In contradistinction to this narrative, what we believe is really happening in Syria is a popular revolution against a tyrannical regime. Therefore, we object to the aforementioned description for the following reasons:

Firstly, it Implies equality between the executioner and the victim, and this leads to the disappearance of any ethical significance of this struggle. Additionally, it ignores the historical genesis of the conflict and their sequence; from the Daraa children’s incident, to the peaceful demonstrations that had spread gradually gathering hundreds of thousands in the cities of Hama & Der Ezzor, to the sit-ins of Douma, Omari mosque in Daraa and the Clock Square in Homs; besides dozens of people tortured to death in arbitrary detention, and hundreds of incidents that proved the regime’s unwillingness, or inability, to change its conduct. Furthermore, it generally overlooks the modern history of Syria since the coup of 8 March 1963, through the “Corrective Movement”, the bequeathing of power to Bashar Al-Assad, and the rejection of political partnership with any Syrian constituency by the Baath Party and the ruling family.

Besides this, we believe that the Syrian Revolution cannot be viewed apart from the other revolutions of the Arab Spring. The Syrian Revolution is part of a public movement that spread over the region in pursuit of liberation from tyrannical and corrupted regimes. It requires that we disregard this, and focus only on the ongoing battles between the regular army and the Free Syrian Army, to be able to exclusively label the situation in Syria a civil war.

Secondly, with regard to these battles and the nature of the conflict, it is important to remember that, up to this moment at least, there is no war in Syria in the traditional sense that we would understand “war”. There are armed groups fighting a regular state’s army which is equipped with military aircrafts, tanks, armored vehicles, ballistic missiles and chemical weapons. The regime used most of these arms in targeting both unarmed civilians and armed rebels alike, and without differentiation whatsoever. The battle in Syria is not even close to a battle between two equivalent arsenals. With this in mind, we have repeatedly stated that it is inaccurate to label the armed rebels as a “Free Syrian Army”. The term “Armed Popular Resistance” corresponds more accurately to the Syrian case. 

Thirdly, and despite the recent dominance of the military aspect of the Syrian Revolution, the exclusive portrayal of the situation in Syria as a civil war means also ignoring the forms of civic and non-violent movement which still represent a fundamental component of the public movement against the regime. In addition to the demonstrations that are still taking place nationwide when possible, there are various forms of civic activities in the fields of relief, media and political organization. In the areas that are still controlled by the regime these activities are conducted undercover, whereas they are better organized and taking place publicly in the areas administrated by the rebels. Hundreds of networks and youth groups are active in the field of documentation and relief; some of them are active in the legal and political fields as well, in addition to contributing to the dozens of newspapers and publications that are edited and distributed inside Syria. Most of these Syrians do not consider themselves involved in an absurd war, but rather as advocates of a democratic political project.         

What is happening in Syria was and continues to be a popular revolution against an oppressive totalitarian regime. If it is a revolution, the solution lies in ending the dictatorship. If it is purely a civil war, the solution then lies in negotiations between two equal sides, and maybe leaning towards a political-sectarian quota system!

In most revolutions, there are some people who stand by repression or take a neutral position, for different reasons. There are no pure revolutions within which all people are fully unified, suddenly and without struggle, to get rid of the ruling regime. Some revolutions are easier than others for many different reasons. But there are no revolutions without forms of civil conflict, without losers, without opportunists, without passive people, and without martyrs.

Rebels must not, under any pretext, deny the signs of civil conflict and the distortions created by sectarian alignments. This will only make things worse. No one should feel the need to show a brighter image of what is occurring, because what is happening in Syria is not an “absurd” civil war, but rather a prolonged revolution in various phases of struggle. It is the longest and harshest road to the restoration of freedom. 

‘Proxy war’

As for what is called the ‘proxy war’, the term is misleading, and encourages analysts to focus on the interests of external powers in Syria, and judge what is going on according to the complexities of these interests. We, on the other hand, recommend that we must start our discussion with an internal approach. The external elements, in principle are secondary, in the sense that if you care about the future of Syria, you need to start from what Syrians want.

We need to understand what the Syrians want, fear, believe, and why they act in the way they do. It is not an easy task. But it is the only way if you really hold that the future of Syria must be in the hands of the Syrian people and not in the hands of external powers. Even if we can’t change the attitudes of external powers (Russia, America, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc.), we need to make it clear that what is at stake, from a moral point of view, is the aspirations of the Syrians.

We don’t claim in this article to present a geopolitical analysis of the so called ‘proxy war’ in Syria. That analysis is beyond the scope of this article. But we claim that if you  look at what is going on inside Syria you find that the use of the term ‘civil war’ is problematic. We would argue that the internal approach shows that the term ‘absurd proxy war’ is problematic too. However, this needs more discussion, as there are more presumptions involved in the use of this term than the ones we tackled here.

An Arabic version of this article was published on The republic website on 24 February 2013.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/mohammad-al-attar-odai-al-zoubi/syria-revolution-or-civil-war

Europe’s anti-austerity popular revolt is not benefitting the political parties of the authentic left that should be reaping electoral support from disaffected workers, pensioners, and students. Instead, the parties of the far-right, which are in lockstep with the corporate-fascist goals of multinational banks and corporations, are gaining in strength. The parties of the far right stand to upend Europe’s bourgeois supranational infrastructures in favor of a group of nationalist governments that will continue to take their orders from the international mega-corporations and banks that have always been more favorably disposed toward fascist regimes than democratic conservative or even bourgeois socialist governments.

It is ironic that many nations are drifting toward fascism as a result of severe austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and, in the case of Europe, the European Central Bank. The corporate-owned media provides fascist parties like Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece with massive coverage while actual left-progressive parties like SYRIZA in Greece receive minimal coverage. In fact, SYRIZA’s leader, Alexis Tsipras, was criticized by much of the corporate media for attending the funeral of Venezuela’s socialist president Hugo Chavez. While the corporate media expresses doubt that Tsipras could ever become a Greek Chavez — a leftist leader willing to kick out NATO once and for all and move Greece into a progressive socialist camp where the ultra-wealthy are forced to give back what they have stolen from the Greek people — the fascist Golden Dawn is given more of a chance of achieving political power. And that would be fine for the tax-avoiding Greek billionaires who have hidden their wealth abroad while Greek workers, pensioners, the disabled, and students have been forced into penury by the dictates from the bankers in Frankfurt, London, Brussels, and Washington.

Although Golden Dawn has espoused anti-Semitic rhetoric, it, like other European fascist parties puts anti-Islamic activism ahead of anti-Semitism and, in so doing, has found common cause with pro-Israeli Islamophobes around Europe and in the United States, Israel, and other Western countries. The confluence of neo-Nazism and Islamophobic movements was seen in the network that Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik participated. The network included pro-Israeli fascists in England, the Netherlands, Poland, and Germany.

Golden Dawn, whose 18 members of the Greek Parliament always garner media attention when they engage in their antics, is more likely to threaten violence against Muslim Turks and Albanians than against Jews.

Golden Dawn’s Hungarian counterpart, Jobbik, or the Movement for a Better Hungary, has elected 43 members in the Hungarian National Assembly. Jobbik claims it is neither left nor right. However, its policies are clearly neo-fascist. Although Jobbik parliamentarians and leaders have often engaged in anti-Semitic publicity stunts, the party is clearly more anti-Roma and anti-Muslim. In fact, one of its leaders, Csanad Szegedi, was discovered to have Jewish roots. Hungarians have no reasonable avenues on the left to express their anger. The Hungarian Socialist Party, the successor to the party that ruled Hungary during communist rule, has become a bourgeois party of the «center-left», in other words, it has become a playground for the globalist troublemakers and interlocutors of George Soros’s Open Society Institute and its non-governmental organization (NGO) affiliates.

Soros and his allied globalists have always worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency and the central and supranational bankers to suppress the authentic progressive left and provide an impetus to fascist political parties and movements.

A CIA Directorate of Intelligence report dated December 13, 1983, foresaw the imposition of global austerity on the working class. The report outlined the CIA’s policies, which continue to exist today: «In France and Italy, Socialist-led governments are attempting at least to restrain the further growth of social welfare spending. Conservative and Christian Democratic governments in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark are committed to trimming welfare benefits and reducing the state’s social and economic role.’ Why was the CIA so excited about austerity in Western Europe in the 1980s. The CIA report answers that question: social welfare spending was impacting military spending by the NATO nations. And when it comes to guns over butter, the CIA prefers spending on the guns. The CIA was a contrivance of Wall Street and the global bankers and it acts as a global centurion for the interests of the elites.

The CIA report actually contains a section called «National Austerity Programs», which trumpets West German cuts in family allowances, a change in student grants to loans, delayed pension increases, decrease in the state’s share in unemployment insurance and pension contributions, cuts in unemployment benefits, and a pay freeze for civil servants. The CIA also championed Margaret Thatcher’s policies in the United Kingdom to «reduce the state’s overall economic role.» The CIA praises Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi for higher charges for health care, an increase in the retirement age, and limiting Italy’s «generous» disability program. Craxi, a «socialist», became a close friend of Italy’s media mogul, Silvio Berlusconi, who himself would become Prime Minister of Italy as a neo-fascist. In 1994, Craxi escaped to Tunisia to avoid a 27-year prison sentence for corruption and he enjoyed the protection of the equally-corrupt Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali.

Belgium’s center-right Prime Minister Wilfried Martens was commended by the economists of Langley for his «crisis» austerity program that cut real wages in the public and private sectors and spending on social security, education, and unemployment insurance. Dutch Prime Minister Rudd Lubbers was praised for freezing social security benefits, trimming social welfare benefits, and reducing the government’s share of pension contributions. Danish Prime Minister Poul Schlueter was lauded for toughening criteria for unemployment compensation and public assistance and reductions in government subsidies to non-profit housing.

The CIA was alarmed that opinion polls in Western Europe showed that most people, including those who identified themselves as conservative, were opposed to social welfare cuts and increases in defense spending. As the Cold War ended, the CIA and the forces of global capitalism and suppression of the working class would find a new enemy to replace the Communist bloc: international terrorism. Social welfare spending cuts remained high on the globalists’ chopping blocks. Today, President Barack Obama has adopted the Republican right-wing’s desire to slash government spending on the three pillars of the traditional Democratic Party’s social safety net program: Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Obama has proven, once again, that he is the multiracial and politically-engineered product of the CIA’s «creative leadership» recruitment program of the 1970s and 80s. As a racial minority Democratic president, Obama is clearly in a position to eradicate the social welfare programs of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson that no white president, Democratic or Republican, could carry out successfully. Obama has, therefore, fulfilled the desires of the international elites that were identified over two decades ago.

Other CIA economic reports closely followed the IMF-imposed austerity programs around the world. The CIA was more concerned about IMF-dictates compliance by Argentina, the Philippines, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Morocco, Algeria, Senegal, and Brazil than in the effects the austerity programs had on the middle class and poor. Even the communist countries of Yugoslavia, Romania, East Germany, and Hungary were targeted for austerity with a view their state economies would soon come crashing down. On CIA documents are the names of the architects of the shakedown of the world’s working class: Paul Wolfowitz, Leo Cherne, Morton Abramowitz, Michael Armacost, Alan Greenspan, and members of the Federal Reserve Board: a virtual cesspool of neo-conservatives and globalists.

The progressive left in Europe, the United States, and other nations now stands against the coordinated efforts of the globalist super-entities of the banks, IMF, World Bank, European Union, Pentagon, CIA, NATO, and the other centurions of the ultra-wealthy. For many people who have simply no where to go to vent their spleens, the left has either been compromised, co-opted, or emaciated and the far-right stands ready to sound the clarion call, not for the interests of the masses but for the bottom line of the global capitalists.
http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/04/16/europe-fascist-drift-will-only-benefit-bankers-and-the-elites.html

Project Syndicate
 Summary
 
Prime Minister Erdogan has conceived of an audacious plan based on a realignment between Turks and Kurds to enhance Ankara’s regional standing and extend his political dominance at home.Related Topics
 

A Transformed Turkey: What is the Role for Ankara as a Regional Power?Erdoğan’s plan, however, depends on ending Turkey’s 30-year conflict with its own Kurdish population. As a result, the Erdoğan government has decided on negotiations with Abdullah Ocalan, the jailed leader of the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK), the armed Kurdish resistance movement.

The hope is to agree on a new, more liberal constitution that will strengthen the rights of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority and include substantial devolution of power to regional governments. In return, the PKK is expected to end its three-decade-long fight against the Turkish state. On March 21, at a mass rally attended by almost one million people in the southeastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir, Ocalan delivered a message of peace from his prison cell. He called for the end to armed struggle, and invited the PKK’s fighters to leave the country.

For Erdoğan, the stakes could not be higher. Erdoğan envisions putting the constitutional changes and the terms of peace to a national referendum, a linkage that would transform Turkish politics. If the negotiations succeed, he will be remembered for his historic role in bringing peace, and will likely stand a better chance of realizing his presidential ambition, having gained parliamentary support for revising the constitution from the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party.

If negotiations fail, however, Erdoğan will be held responsible for any deterioration in the security environment that results. A recently leaked account of Ocalan’s strategy highlights the risk, for it cites the PKK leader as threatening the government with full-scale war.

At the same time, the Turkish government is pursuing a separate path of negotiations, through a rapprochement with another Kurdish authority – the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. The grand vision is to integrate Iraqi Kurdistan into the Turkish economy.

Turkey already supplies most of the KRG economy’s imports, which accounted for 70% of Turkey’s almost $11 billion in exports to Iraq last year. But it is the incipient energy deal between Turkey and the KRG that is set to build the foundation for a real strategic alliance.

The undisclosed deal is believed to grant Turkey substantial concessions to explore new oil and gas fields in northern Iraq, as well as preferential rates for energy exports to Turkey. In return, Turkey is to help the KRG build pipeline infrastructure that will allow oil and gas to be exported to Turkey without relying on Iraq’s national pipeline, which is controlled by the central government in Baghdad.

Within the Turkish government, this opening is viewed as an immense opportunity to reduce Turkey’s heavy dependence on energy imports. In addition to securing energy supplies, the deal would help Turkey to overcome its chronic current-account deficit: roughly 70% of the country’s $84 billion trade deficit is due to the import bill for energy supplies.

For the KRG, the deal would secure the region’s future economic wealth without holding it hostage to an increasingly unsympathetic Iraqi government. Under Iraq’s constitution, the Kurdish region is entitled to 17% of the country’s oil and gas revenues. But the distribution of proceeds from hydrocarbons is irregular, and the central government has accumulated significant arrears. The KRG hopes that a deal with Turkey would allow it to obtain more regular and predictable hydrocarbon revenues.

But the United States remains adamantly opposed to such a deal between Turkey and the KRG, claiming that it would undermine Iraq’s stability and fuel secessionist tendencies in the north. In late February, during his overseas trip, which included a stop in Ankara, US Secretary of State John Kerry reiterated these concerns in his talks with his Turkish counterparts.

America’s fears are not shared in Turkish government circles, where the deals between the US oil giants Exxon and Chevron and the KRG are seen as proof that America is more concerned about its share of the pie in northern Iraq than it is about alleged threats to that country’s stability. Not surprisingly, Erdoğan’s government has decided to pay little heed to US government concerns.

The sectarian strains that are now rending societies across the Middle East are likely to change the regional map. Erdoğan has now developed a plan that would take advantage of this development, ensure his political control, and lock in energy security for his country. He envisions a new regional order under Turkish leadership, based on a realignment between Turks and Kurds that underpins a strategic partnership for exploiting the region’s last untapped energy resources.

This article was originally published in Project Syndicate.

http://carnegieeurope.eu/2013/04/11/erdogan-s-kurdish-gambit/fzhg

One wet, chilly February morning, Ali Zaoui climbed into his car in Algeria’s capital, drove 300 miles south into the desert, and knocked on the door of a three-bedroom house in the oasis city of Ghardaïa. Zaoui was well known to the occupants. They were the parents of the then most wanted man in North Africa, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, the one-eyed Islamist commander who had masterminded the hostage siege in January at a natural-gas plant in his native Algeria. The attack resulted in the deaths of 38 foreigners, including managers and specialists of Western oil companies. It was Algeria’s worst terrorist attack in years, and the worst ever for the global oil industry, anywhere. Zaoui, a veteran anti-terror fighter for Algeria’s security services, had spent years coaxing armed militants to surrender under an amnesty program and had come to know Belmokhtar’s parents well over five years of trying to persuade one of Algeria’s most fearsome jihadists to surrender. He never had won over Belmokhtar. But Zaoui thought they had an understanding: Don’t target Algeria.

That deal was now dead. Zaoui was fuming. “I told his mother, ‘Tell him to give up, or he will die, and we will send you his body,’” he says, sitting in a café in Algiers on his return, slumped by fatigue after his long journey. “He did not respect our truce.”

Days later, on March 2, Zaoui woke to stunning news: Chad’s military leaders were claiming that they had killed Belmokhtar in battle, in the remote Agrar des Ifoghas mountains along Algeria’s borderlands with Mali. His warning to Belmokhtar’s frantic mother had been correct: Her son would not survive the biggest terror attack of his career. “There is no need for me to visit them again,” he told me by phone from Algiers, after Belmokhtar’s death. “It is over.”

And yet, the country’s terror threat remains. In spite of the apparent killing of Belmokhtar (his body has still not been found) the rising power of North Africa’s jihadists is having a continued and profound impact on the terror mastermind’s homeland. Algeria is the region’s economic powerhouse, and the biggest country in Africa. And until now, the oil-rich country thought it had dodged an Arab Spring-style upheaval by imposing tight order through its quasi-military regime and spending millions appeasing disgruntled citizens. Algeria has been so calm, in fact, that Western officials had almost forgotten its proven potential for violence. But the calm was an illusion, as was clear from the hostage siege in January. Trouble has come not from inside, however—there has been no major pro-democracy uprising among Algeria’s 37.4 million people—but from the outside in the form of the region’s tumult, which is closing in on Algeria and rocking the political system that has held sway for 50 years.

The primary threat to Algeria’s stability comes from the region’s resurgent Islamists. Leaders of the region’s al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM)—Belmokhtar was allied with AQIM—have become rich over the past several years from drug trafficking and ransom payments, and with that money they have bought military-grade weapon stocks acquired when the former Libyan dictator, Muammar Gaddafi, was toppled from power and his weapons looted and sold on the black market.

To Algeria’s south, Islamists took over the northern part of Mali, which in January prompted France to enter the war there, driving back the Islamists. The war in Mali forced Algeria into an alliance with its old nemesis France, with which it has had decades of tensions. French jets used Algerian air space as they made their way towards targets in Mali. Algeria after decades of sticking to a policy of not getting embroiled in its neighbors’ conflicts, gave tacit permission to American drones to operate on its borders with Mali, and at In Amenas during the siege, further highlighting Algeria’s ties to the West.

Now comes the question: Can Algeria’s regime ride out the instability, or will it crack under the pressure, adding yet more upheaval to the region, in a country with billions in Western investments and from which U.S. imports last year were worth nearly $1 billion? And will these outside pressures prompt internal unrest?  Already, Algeria’s youth—70% of the country is under 30—are clamoring for jobs, houses, and better lives and griping about the aging men in power. Says Fayçal Métaoui, political columnist for al-Watan newspaper in Algiers, “People are patient. But they have their limits.”

For years, Algerians have largely accepted the ruling system, in which the military holds huge sway, guiding key decisions behind the scenes through the President, and leaving the elected parliament a “facade,” as opposition Member of Parliament Mostefa Bouchachi puts it. One can hardly blame Algerians for accepting this deal for so long. Many spent their youth witnessing the horrific conflict of the 1990s, which erupted after the military scrapped the results of Algeria’s 1991 elections, which was won by Islamist political parties, some of whom favored imposing strict Shari’a law on the country.Since then, Algeria’s government has pumped the message that it rescued the country from Islamic terrorism, an argument that has some basis in truth.

But after Mali’s conflict and the hostage crisis, the government’s claim—that terrorism would ensue if there were a change in Algeria’s political structure—seems painfully flawed.

With the government seeming off balance, it is possible that the spark for revolt could yet emerge. Algeria is not inoculated against mass protest. In January 2011, inspired by young Tunisians, Algerians poured into the streets to demand political change but they were heavily outnumbered by security forces. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika raced to defuse the crisis, announcing more direct elections, ending the 20-year state of emergency, and committing millions of dollars to addressing the grievances of young Algerians. He offered long-term loans at 1% interest, up to tens of thousands of dollars, effectively giving money away in a program that remains in effect. He promised to build 2.4 million new houses, addressing one of the loudest complaints among young Algerians, who say they are forced to delay marriage, since they cannot move out of their parents’ overcrowded apartments.

Two years on, those houses have been slow in coming. State-run television stations trumpet blueprints of new projects, but delivery dates remain vague. When the government recently announced that unemployment rates had plummeted from 20% in 2000 to 11% in 2010, Algerians dismissed the news as not credible. And a steady brain drain among bright, ambitious young Algerians suggests that Algeria’s calm isn’t necessarily because people are satisfied.

For the West, an upheaval in Algeria—whether driven by terrorism, popular discontent or a combination of the two—could be disastrous. Algeria is many times bigger than tiny Tunisia, or even than Libya or Egypt. With 12.2 billion barrels in oil reserves and 159 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, it is a key OPEC member. Its biggest trading partner is the U.S., with more than $15.25 billion in trade last year, followed by Italy and Spain, which lie a spitting distance from Algeria’s Mediterranean shore. And unlike Mali, Algeria has long-term, multi-billion-dollar partnerships with Western enterprises, including the U.S. oil company Anadarko, Italy’s ENI, France’s Total, and many others.

For the U.S. and Europe—which have pushed for civil rights and democracy in this corner of the world, Algeria is a case apart. Its autocratic regime looks better placed to protect Western business interests, whose overthrow could unleash perilous chaos—including perhaps powerful jihadist groups. That is why so little is said about the lack of freedoms in the country. “The alternative could be a lot worse,” says Vicki Huddleston, former U.S. ambassador to Mali and until 2011, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs. “If Algeria destabilizes, then AQIM will be up there very fast.”

Partly because Algeria forbids foreign militaries from operating on its soil, the Pentagon has acknowledged that it is operating Predator drones from a base in next-door Niger, allowing it to keep an eye on Algeria’s 4,500 miles of borders with its mostly volatile neighbors. Those drones will need to keep watch in all directions. On Feb. 2, two weeks after the In Amenas siege ended, tribesmen in southern Algeria arrested armed militants trying to sneak across the Mali border. Two days later, deep inside Algeria near the northeast border with Tunisia, about 50 attackers disguised as soldiers laid siege to a military barracks, in an operation that reportedly involved militants from both sides of the border.

The fate of Belmokhtar remains unresolved. Since his body has never been handed to Algerian officials, some fear a ruse concocted by terror groups to conceal his escape. Ali Zaoui, the counter-terrorism operative in Algiers, thinks that is unlikely. He says tribal leaders in the borderlands of Algeria and Mali have confirmed Belmokhtar’s death. If true, Algeria’s terror threat did not die with him.

http://world.time.com/2013/04/01/the-rising-power-of-north-africas-jihadists-rattles-algeria/