Category Archives: US Foreign Policy

Europe, Russia, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Another Crimea? USG and UN and Europe Set to Invade Oklahoma, Yeeeehaw………

      

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“With radical U.S. government and United Nations schemes such as “sustainable development” and UN Agenda 21 being quietly implemented across America at all levels of government under a variety of names and pretexts, lawmakers in the Oklahoma House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly this week for legislation to protect the unalienable rights to private property and due process in the state. The “Oklahoma Community Protection Act,” which would nullify Agenda 21 and other outside assaults on individual rights in the state, now goes to the Oklahoma Senate…………”

Sometimes nothing can be more fun than to follow than some red state legislatures. They can be even fun-ner than the United States Congress and all the hot greenhouse effects some of its members emit. I am always on the lookout for new gems from the legislators of what the snobbish elites of the East Coast and Left Coast arrogantly (and I mean this: arrogantly) dismiss as “the fly-over states”. Sometimes they even seem to be the only force that stands between the Bible-belt and the universal application of Islamic Shari’a laws.
So now Oklahoma lawmakers worry about the Federal government and, get this, the United Nations taking over local property. The United Nations used to be the bogeyman of the American right in the old days of the Cold War. There was fear that the UN will become a world government and rule the USA. Many are still upset because foreign leaders are allowed to fly into New York to attend the UN meetings. Remember the outrage that Ahmadinejad or Qaddafi could breeze into into the city? Many wanted to keep them away, which also meant they had to keep away the United Nations and all the expenditures and prestige (and the unsavory foreign characters) that come with it.
Like I said, many on the right feared a plot to establish a world government. Imagine a world government elected by a bunch of Chinese and Africans and Russkies? Now the Oklahomans have acted, a bit late, but they have overlooked a new potent world government: the European Union. The EU has unilaterally decided that the last elected president of Ukraine is illegitimate and that the unelected man whom they appointed in his place is legitimate. They even have John Kerry and Barack Obama and John McCain and Wolf Blitzer and Fareed Zakaria going around saying exactly that: the elected leader is not legal, but the unelected leader is legal. How so? Because the EU said so.
Now how is that for a powerful world government?
Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Syria, United Nations International Organizations, US Foreign Policy

BYOT Party in Montreux: your Pocket Guide to Geneva on Syria………

      

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The Geneva (actually Montreux) conference on Syria was finally held, after many false starts. Ministers, princes, potentates, and rebels all showed up. They say nearly thirty countries and organizations were invited, or just
crashed the party. It is not clear why 30, unless they mean all the
disparate and desperate Syrian opposition groups and militias and
various Arab potentates. The countries and parties and their interests
could have been represented by only three parties: Secretary Kerry for the
Friends of the Syrian Opposition, the Syrian regime, Russia for the
Friends of the Syrian Regime, and Secretary General Moony of the UN. Oh,
make that four parties: I left out France, since the French still have
the usual Anglo-Saxon complex and need to have their own representative.
It was like a BYOT party at some college. Here is a summary of the highlights and the various positions:

  • The Syrian Opposition (some of it) to Bashar Al Assad: ‘Step down and let us take over’.
  • The Qatari Minister: ‘Yeah, you’re supposed to be a dead man walking. Three years now!’.
  • Syrian government reps: ‘ForgetAboutIt! We are running in the elections‘.
  • Saudi Prince Saud Al Faisal (to Saudi-appointed Al Jarba of the Syrian SNC): ‘Your Excellency Mr. President‘
  • Syria’s Waleed Al Mu’allim (muttering): ‘LOL, president of the Syrian-Turkish border?’
  • Ahmad Al Jarba: ‘LOL in your Baathist eye. I am the legitimate president of the SNC. Ask His Highness the Prince. It says so on my Twitter account @PresidentJarba’.
  • Secretary John Kerry: ‘We are here to negotiate the overthrow of Al Assad and the easing into power of the opposition, wtf they are‘.
  • Ban Ki-Moon (of the UN): ‘It is a good thing I withdrew my invitation to the Iranians. They would have disrupted the conference, and we would not have gotten any results‘.
  • Hassan Rouhani of Iran: ‘Davos is fun-ner than Montreux or Geneva. Cooler egotistical bastards here, but count your fingers after every handshake‘.
  • Al Zawahri from some cave in Pakistan: ‘Next year or the year after in Geneva‘.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, France, Iran, Syria, United Nations International Organizations, US Foreign Policy

Syria: the Strange Ban Ki-Moon Geneva Rollercoaster Ride, Hollande’s Polygamy………..

      

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A strange series of events regarding the Syrian civil war this past weekend:

  • Late weekend United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon gives a presser and invites Iran to attend the Geneva talks on Syria, surprising some of the “Friends of the Syrian Opposition”.
  • The Obama Administration professes surprise and sort of objects strongly, only sort of.
  • Saudi princes and other potentates object strongly but not openly.
  • Their proxy Mr. Al Jarba objects (he calls himself, I think rather presumptuously, @PresidentJarba on Twitter). Opposition groups and militias and gangs and kidnappers threaten to boycott the meeting and keep Assad in power for five more years.
  • Mufti Shaikh Al Al objects, or he should if he knows what is good for him. But he declines to issue a fatwa.
  • The Israelis probably object on the principle that whatever helps Iran is bad for them, and vice versa. Or maybe I just think so, my knee-jerk reaction.
  • Al Qaeda and its Syrian fronts also object, or so I assume. 
  • Francois Hollande of France probably also objects, as does his current main squeeze, his former main squeeze, and his future main squeezes (the French can be more polygamous than we can be, and often they are, but they don’t admit it).
  • My suspicious mind is almost certain that the prime minister of Bahrain (44 or so years in office and going) also objects strongly through his corpulent foreign minister who is also his nephew or cousin. I still can’t figure out WTF he has got to do with all this.
  •  
  • So, guess what happens next? Bingo! Ban Ki-Moon suddenly implodes: he discovers overnight that maybe Iran should not attend Geneva. He withdraws his invitation for Iran to the Geneva meeting on Syria. A dis-invitation under pressure.
  • The Iranians, who would love to attend, act as if they are not interested in attending. They go further: after being dis-invited they claim that that they would not attend a meeting
    that imposes conditions and prerequisites on them.
  • Saudi semi-official Alarabiya headlines that now the Syrian ‘opposition’ groups will attend Geneva, some of them for the talks, others to buy good Swiss chocolate at duty-free prices. Actually they would attend or not if and when their Saudi bosses tell them to.
  • End of the story for now, until the next Syria meeting later this year. Or maybe sometime next year, or the year after.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, France, Saudi Arabia, Syria, US Foreign Policy

Vice President of Syrian National Coalition: SNC to Attend Assad’s Funeral in Montreux………

      

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“The main Syrian opposition group in exile promised on Saturday that it will not “compromise” its principles after it finally decided to attend the peace talks in Switzerland next week. “We will go to Geneva 2 without compromising any principles of our revolution,” Ahmed al-Jarba, head of the Syrian National Coalition, told reporter in a press conference in Istanbul. Jarba said that President Bashar al-Assad’s regime will “enter its funeral,” when attending the conference……………”

Mr. Jarba is going to Geneva because he was told to do so by his foreign bosses. He can’t help using Baathist jargon (mainly Iraqi Baathist jargon like the talk about ‘funerals’, etc)) when talking about the regime, but that comes from a lifetime of growing up listening to them.
 
He now calls himself ‘President Jarba’ on his Twitter account @PresidentJarba), something that might piss off a certain Saudi prince as well as Bashar Al-Assad and many opposition militia commanders. He is actually the vice president of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), representing only some of the Syrian opposition, especially part of the Saudi faction, but hardly all of it. Everyone knows that the SNC has a king and a president, neither of whom is named Jarba. That the king of the Syrian National Coalition is named Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz, that the ‘president’ of SNC is Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.

Bandar’s lifelong ambition now is to liberate Syria for Saudi-style freedom and democracy and tolerance and human rights. That might be opposite to the Iranian and Russian ambition which is also to keep Syria for their own style of freedom and democracy and human rights. Both goals are also different from the ambition of French president Francois Hollande who doesn’t give a rat’s derrière about Syrian freedom but whose goal is to keep the Saudis buying weapons and other goods from socialist France in the name of freedom and democracy and human rights, as well as ‘liberté, égalité, infidélité’.
All this means that the Syrian people are now trapped into an unprecedented sectarian confessional regional proxy war, which means they are now truly screwed, more than ever.

BTW: don’t hold your breath about Geneva (actually Montreux). There will be no agreement of course; it is a place to see and to be seen. Perhaps there may be only a deal to meet again in, say, six months which will be extended to nine or twelve months.
Cheers
mhg

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AIPAC, Iran, Israel, MENA, US Congress, US Foreign Policy, War on Iran

U.S. Senate Goes Knesset, Declares Netanyahu ‘War President’ of America……

      

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“Today the Senate is about to vote Israel a virtual blank check – for war on Iran. Reads Senate bill S.1881: If Israel is “compelled to take military action in legitimate self-defense against Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” the United States “should stand with Israel and provide … diplomatic, military and economic support to the Government of Israel in the defense of its territory, people and existence.” Inserted in that call for U.S. military action to support an Israeli strike on Iran, S.1881 says that, in doing so, we should follow our laws and constitutional procedures. Nevertheless, this bill virtually hands over the decision on war to Bibi Netanyahu who is on record saying: “This is 1938. Iran is Germany.”……….” Is this the man we want deciding whether America fights her fifth war in a generation in the Mideast? Do we really want to outsource the decision on war in the Persian Gulf, the gas station of the world, to a Likud regime whose leaders routinely compare Iran to Nazi Germany?……………”


Also sprach Pat Buchanan, one of the few independent voices in U.S. media and politics that does not kneel to AIPAC and to what he has called the “Israeli amen corner”. At issue is independence: the U.S. Congress (both houses) is doing the bidding of the Israeli right-wing prime minister, and acts against the long-term interests of the United States. This bill (S. 1881) would effectively make the Israeli politician the “decider” of war and peace for America.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Iran, Iraq, Syria, US Foreign Policy, WMD

From Iraq to Syria to Iran: the Quest for a Smoking Gun or a Mushroom Cloud or a Slam Dunk or……..

      

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“A series of revelations about the rocket believed to have delivered poison sarin gas to a Damascus suburb last summer are challenging American intelligence assumptions about that attack and suggest that the case U.S. officials initially made for retaliatory military action was flawed. A team of security and arms experts, meeting this week in Washington to discuss the matter, has concluded that the range of the rocket that delivered sarin in the largest attack that night was too short for the device to have been fired from the Syrian government…………..”

Could this be a case of déjà vu all over again (Iraq, Iran, Syria, etc)?Could we be revisiting the same story again this year or next in Iran? You betcha it could and we could.

It is true that this does not prove anyone’s innocence or guilt in the Sarin gas attacks. Yet the suspicion of the whole Sarin claim was there from the outset, at least as far as I am concerned. Even some UN WMD official suggested earlier that the rebels may have used Sarin, but then she went silent. The story and video clips were broadcast initially in Saudi semi-official Alarabiya network, in both cases of reported gas use. Western media picked it up quickly and it became “the story” of the time. The U.S. Congress took it from there.
 

I have expressed doubt from the beginning, and not only because I automatically suspect almost anything that is publicized by Saudi media (I do, I also suspect many things that are published in official Iranian media). Several things did not smell right, were neither halal nor kosher, including the timing: these claims (and revelations) always cam right after the Syrian opposition had suffered big military defeats or were about to be ejected from strategic positions (Qusayr, etc). It also did not make sense to use WMD to kill a few dozen civilians, when bombing and bullets had done the same grizzly “job” in the past without an international outcry and outrage. But all this is not new: I and others have pointed this out during the past year.

No wonder the Obama administration for long insisted on only saying that “Sarin was used in Syria“, without specifying the regime or the opposition as the user. That lasted until it came under pressure from congressional microphone-macho type (of both parties) and the Saudi princes and potentates.
This new report is not conclusive, yet neither were the other reports, apparently. But the long quest continues: for the Smoking Gun, the Mushroom Cloud, the Slam Dunk, the Lost Ark………


Cheers
mhg

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Lebanon, Libya, MENA, US Foreign Policy

Ronald Reagan and Obama: Reckless in Beirut, Cautious in Benghazi………

      

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Writing on the Lebanese adventures of Ariel Sharon and the American forces in Beirut and the bombing of the U.S. Marines and French barracks and the embassy in 1983 has reminded me of a more recent event. Three major bombings in Beirut in 1983 killed tens of U.S. diplomats and CIA agents as well as hundreds of U.S. Marines and French soldiers.
Which begs a comparison with the more recent ‘event’ in Benghazi, Libya. The recent battle cry (one of them) of the Republican Party has been: “Benghazi, Benghazi!” Four good men died in Benghazi. Yet in 1983, hundreds of Marines and tens of diplomats and spooks were killed in Beirut. The Marines died because the Reagan administration recklessly inserted them in the middle of the Lebanese civil war, placing their barracks right among the warring confessional and sectarian militias and hereditary warlords of Lebanon.
So, Mr. Obama hears this squawk of: “Benghazi, Benghazi….. Four good men died in Benghazi!” to contend with. Did Mr. Reagan have to face squawks of: “Beirut, Beirut…….Hundreds of good men and women died in Beirut!”?

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Bahrain, GCC, Persian Gulf, US Foreign Policy

Chuck Hagel Going Gulf Native: Support for “Unique” Political Reform in Bahrain………

      

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“The United States, he vowed, will continue to guard “the free flow of energy and commerce” from the Persian Gulf and keep Iran nuclear-free, through the presence of 35,000 US military personnel or the (as-yet-unproven) regional missile defense system. Hagel also trumpeted the American commitment to “political reform” in the gulf region. But the Pentagon chief uttered not a word about the hundreds of Bahrainis languishing in prison—many without adequate medical care—for demanding the very rights he says they deserve. Bahrainis have engaged in nearly daily demonstrations against the Al Khalifa monarchy for the past three years. This resistance started on Valentine’s Day, 2011, when thousands gathered at the Pearl Roundabout in the capital city, Manama, to demand free and fair elections, real power for the popularly elected lower house of Parliament, the release of political prisoners and an end to government corruption. From the beginning, the monarchy has sought to suppress this activism with home raids, torture, show trials and lengthy prison sentences……………….”

It says: “Hagel also trumpeted the American commitment to ‘political reform’ in the gulf region”. Oh, it would be fun if he said that publicly in Riyadh. It would be even fun-ner if he said it wearing native attire (Gulf dishdasha or Saudi thobe and shmagh): the security agents would then suspect him of a native seeker and reform, converging on him. Then he would discover how truly reform-minded the ruling families of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia are.

Cheers
mhg

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Arab Revolutions, Saudi Arabia, Syria, US Foreign Policy

Bandar Goes to Washington, May Seek Syrian Presidency…….

      

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AlQuds AlArabi of London (reportedly still Qatari-financed), reports that chief of Saudi Intelligence Prince Bandar Bin Sultan Al-Saud is heading to the United States for medical treatment. It doesn’t say what ails him, but if afterwards he goes to Morocco for recuperation, that would be an ominous sign. Other princes reportedly have ended their Moroccan recuperation ‘feet first’, as the saying goes.
The daily also reports that the prince, who is the effective leader of the Syrian opposition and Lebanon’s March 14 bloc, will use the trip to smooth over Saudi-American relations. Among topics to be discussed: the Arab Peace Initiative for Israel-Palestine (actually it was a Thomas Friedman Initiative which the Saudis hijacked), Syria (Saudis want to show that they can also selectively side against some of the Jihadis fighting against Al-Assad, even as the opposition continues its happy disintegration). The report claims that relations between Washington and Riyadh warmed up after American officials, finally, announced that Iran will not be attending the Geneva 2 conference on Syria. Having apparently blocked Iran from attending Geneva (on Syria but not on the nuclear issue), the Saudi goal now is to prevent Bashar Al-Assad from running for president next year, presumably for fear that he might defeat Prince Bandar in the election…………

Cheers
mhg

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CIA, Espionage, Iran, US Foreign Policy

From Langley with Love and Mutual Contempt: the Strange Odyssey of Bob Levinson……….

      

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                           Video:
A Kenny G Holiday

“An American man who went missing in Iran more six years ago had been working for the CIA in what U.S. intelligence officials describe as a rogue operation that led to a major shake-up in the spy agency and his family receiving a secret, multimillion-dollar settlement. Bob Levinson, an ex-FBI agent, traveled to the Iranian Island of Kish in March 2007 to investigate corruption at a time when he was discussing the renewal of a CIA contract he had held for several years. He also inquired about getting reimbursed for the Iran trip by the agency before he departed, according to former and current U.S. intelligence officials. …………. But months after Levinson’s abduction, e-mails and other documents surfaced that suggested he had gone to Iran at the direction of certain CIA analysts who had no authority to run operations overseas…………….”

This has always seemed like a baffling case. I had thought there was something odd (rather fishy?) about Mr. Levinson’s case: it was never made clear who in Iran was holding him and why. For years both American and Iranian officials danced around the story of his disappearance gingerly, avoiding details. Odd that the Iranians, if they have him, did not announce it, given the series of assassinations of their scientists and academics in recent years. Given that they must have ‘interrogated’ him and got whatever he knows. And what about that odd picture in an ‘orange’ prison suit and chains and the brief message?
This story may explain part of the mystery, although it may be difficult convincing the Iranians that he was sent by “rogue” elements within the CIA. You see, Iranian officials are as ready to believe American officials as American officials are ready to believe Iranian officials. Hard to believe that the contempt is mutual, almost shocking, no?
Can there be more to this story, another angle not divulged? Some Iranians may think so. I suspect there is and I don’t even consider myself a conspiracy theorist. I just hope for his sake that it is not as bad as it can be.

Cheers
mhg

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