Autumn is little more than a month away, and so far it has been a bizarre summer. The national conventions of the duopoly proved to be non-events. If not for WikiLeaks' release of DNC emails, the only news would have been Bernie's abject surrender to the forces against which he had led his electoral revolt. (Jeffrey St. Clair had a hilarious piece over the weekend, "Roaming Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics," about Sanders purchasing a new waterfront house in Vermont.)
Since the close of the Democratic convention, each day Trump has been relentlessly attacked on the frontpage of The New York Times. This morning it is a story about how Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort received over $12 million from ousted Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych's Party of Regions. This seems more like the junta in Kiev doing a solid for the U.S. permanent government that approved the 2014 coup, a permanent government that is all in for Hillary, than anything particularly illuminating about Manafort. U.S. politicos, both Democratic and Republican, sell their services abroad for top dollar. There was even a Hollywood movie starring Sandra Bullock, Our Brand is Crisis (2015), about it.
Bob Miller was good enough to provide some links in his comments yesterday: a terrific interview with author Russ Bellant, "Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret," that appeared in The Nation shortly after the coup in Kiev, and a PDF of an old issue of Covert Action Information Bulletin, "Friendly Enemies: The CIA in Eastern Europe."
It is a sordid story, but a vital one to understand. After World War Two -- Mae Brussell says negotiations were underway before Germany's surrender -- the U.S. recruited Nazi spymaster Reinhard Gehlen to run its anti-Soviet operation in Eastern Europe. Bellant says that Nixon after his election as president actually brought the old Gehlen organization out of the shadows and into the sunshine of Republican National Committee. There were no frontpagers about that, were there?
In an environment where the duopoly is splintering, a great deal of energy is being expended to reanimate old shibboleths, chief among them is Russophobia. It seems wasteful and pitiful to me, and time will tell if it actually works. One thing seems certain. Hillary appears to be home free. A foolproof rule of thumb is that the candidate who leads two weeks following the last national party convention always wins. Unless we want to argue that 2016 is a black swan, Trump loses.
Anything more of substance about Clinton Foundation influence peddling at Hillary's State Department will be drowned out by the rising Russophobia noise blared by the deep state.
The full-court press of propaganda against Putin continues. Listening to NPR is like listening to old-time Soviet radio or Radio Free Europe. One hand clapping/slapping all the time. No other side. There are more reasons than just a reinflated Cold War meme to the anti-Russian propaganda, though. The US has tried to control the world's energy and large amounts of both energy resources and energy customers exist throughout Eurasia. Russia sits on large portions of it. Russia supplies energy to Europe, a lot of it through pipelines that stretch across the Ukraine.
ReplyDeletePoland has recently built a billion-dollar LNG terminal which sits unused now. The US has been building LNG terminals along the East Coast for all the fracked natural gas that it wants to export. Of course, controlling Russia's oil and gasfields would be ideal, and that's what US corporatists had planned for after the collapse of the USSR. Meanwhile, Ukraine's continued hostility towards Russia has put the trans-Ukrainian gas lines in jeopardy. Russia has tried to sidestep the problem, first with the South Stream, which was blocked by the EU (with much US arm-twisting), and likewise with a second North Stream.
There are two other options. One was the Turk Stream which would have brought Russian gas across Turkey. With Erdogan's estrangement from NATO there are hints of it starting up again. Another pipeline, which Assad approved, was a gas line from Iran, across Iraq and Syria to the Mediterranean. As I recall, that was approved by the three countries right before the magical appearance of ISIS.
The other pipeline proposed to bring gas to Europe was a line from Gulf States, across Iraq and Syria, either going into Turkey or to the Mediterranean. That was turned down by Assad in favor of the Iranian ("Shia") gas pipeline.
Thus the war.
I find it interesting that a lot of information has surfaced recently on Zbigniew Brzezinski's work during the Carter Administration to destabilize the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan using Salafists (read: Mujahadeen/al Qaeda/The Brotherhood/ISIS) with our SAM missiles. In an issue of Covert Action Quarterly (I'm guessing around 1995) there was a story about Brzezinski and Unocal execs negotiating with the Taliban for the TAPI pipeline, running from Turkmenistan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to India. It was at that moment in history when American manufacturing jobs were being exported to India under Clinton. Thus TAPI would provide energy for factories in India where American jobs went.
Negotiations broke down between Colin Powell and the Taliban in the summer of 2001 and the rest, as they say, is history. I'll let the readers connect the dots.
The Chechen uprising (again, with Salafists) against Russia has CIA fingerprints. You can google the story of Graham Fuller's son-in-law, Ruslan Tsaerni (name sound familiar?), using Fuller's address back in the nineties to run a Chechen support operation. The overall strategy has been to disrupt and block Russia from the European energy market in favor of the US and US allies. Expect Dagestan, Georgia and other countries in the region to be targets for destabilization, as well as attempts to block Russian gas from passing through Tibet to China.
Hillary Clinton, as our next President, will continue these wars of economic conquest in the name of peace and democracy. Will the cut of the pie for the bottom 80% of Americans get any bigger? Nothing in Clinton's past points to it.
Thanks for the excellent comments, Bob. At a certain point all the "Great Game" stuff of the U.S. warfare state is going to reach a tipping point. Given the trajectory, I'd say we will arrive there sometime during Clintontime Pt. 2.
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